We are experiencing our second heatwave of the summer here in the UK and to be honest, I’m sick of it. Our new home, despite being a recent new build house, seems to get much hotter than the external-wall-insulated house we used to have in Manchester. We have had to install fans in most rooms, and 2 (!) portable aircon units in the south facing upper rooms to attempt to deal with the heat. ...

The problem with arguing on the internet is that you usually automatically assume that the other person is as cognitively capable as you of understanding the argument you’re trying to put across, and also, are interested in the argument at all. Often people cannot understand something - perhaps they are lacking critical thinking skills or literacy, or perhaps they are genuinely mentally ill - or maybe they simply don’t WANT to, and are using the argument as just a way of letting out the frustration of their day. ...

The Christies have decided that they only need to see me once per year now. The current chance of the cancer returning is less than 5% over my entire lifetime now - also, out of the participants on the clinical trial I was on who made it past stem cell transplant.. 3 years on.. NONE of them have relapsed currently. So that’s good news. I still need to worry about the second cancer risk but as long as I stay healthy and fit, I should be fine for a good few decades yet. ...

We have been incredibly busy with the house move, and I did not get as much time as I wanted to, to put into studying for my latest Royal Holloway Cyber Security module, “Applied Crytopgrahy”. So, when the results came out, I was expecting to have to resit it. Imagine my surprise when I found out that I had passed, not only just barely, but with 71%, which is a distinction!! ...

I found this diagram very interesting and useful for explaining multiple levels of privilege in society, and also explaining how some people can be very privileged in some areas and very unprivileged in others. There are a lot of minority and oppressed groups that actively fight against each other and condemn each others ‘weaknesses’ - and this should show that this is really NOT a good idea, and that we should all understand that even though we might be actively disabled or unprivileged in some areas, we all are more privileged in some areas compared to others. ...

The University of London Cyber Security Society team I was a part of made it to the regional qualifiers of the Cybersecurity Leaders Challenge! This was a competitive achievement, and we received good feedback including a lot of positive feedback, for our presentation, that we will look to take on board when we enter the competition next year!

We absolutely LOVE where we have moved to, very near Chorley, in the Lancashire countryside. The problem is, we are not like our neighbours. I regularly wear light-adaptive designer glasses, and a huge elaborate leather ‘cyberpunk style’ jacket. My wife regularly wears K-pop hoodies, wears sunglasses when she goes out as she has light sensitivity, is German, and has a lot of piercings. We are in our 40s. ...

I have a lot of problems personally with ‘doomscrolling ’ habits, and getting suckered into arguing on social media sites. I honestly believe that the internet is actively BAD for our wellbeing, UNLESS we use it properly. Most people do not know how to use it properly. Remove Advertising As much as possible, I remove advertising from my internet view. I do this mainly through using NextDNS.io and UBlock Origin on my browser configuration. ...

I’m keeping going with my AI/ML cert from Imperial College London, I’m not taking any UOLWW Cyber Security masters modules this presentation (next 3 months).. instead I’m focusing on the AI/ML cert and other commitments. Instead of focusing on researcher roles, which was my former idea, I hope to position myself as a devops expert with knowledge and qualifications in security (DevSecOps) and ML (MLOps). This positioning will build on my existing experience to allow the shortest path to get to where I want to be. For this, I am targetting finishing this masters course (eventually), the Imperial College ML cert, AWS Associate Architect cert, and a Kubernates Cert. This will tie in with my career experience thus far (20 years of mostly software and devops) the hobby homelab stuff I’ve been doing (lots of docker, docker compose, Linux, Mikrotik, networking), and the qualifications I’m studying.