On September 11th, 2023 I got my PhD. I finally did it. It took me a long time. I was admitted to the program in 2015, but I actually started classes in fall of 2014, so I was in school for 9 years. It took me longer than anticipated because in 2019 I had to…
Category: Life
Reasoning about Sequential Cyberattacks
My paper Reasoning about Sequential Cyberattacks was accepted for FOSINT-SI 2019. I had the opportunity to present the paper at the conference last month in Vancouver, where I was also awarded “Best Paper”. You can check out my paper here. I suffered a lot of heartbreak with this paper; it was either rejected for the…
Final thoughts
I need to write this down just to sort it out. Everyone says it’s not a “big deal” and that “life will go on”. I don’t know. In elections prior, I have been disappointed but I never grieved. I thought America was headed, or at least heading (however haphazardly) in a direction where we didn’t…
An alarmist future?
If Trump gets elected, I think humanity as a species has failed. Not to sound dramatic, but the choice should be obvious. It’s like you’re offered two bottles: one labeled water and the other labeled Ebola. Which one do you choose? This probably sounds stupid. But ever since I first saw Star Trek, I knew…
Sci-Fi Fever Dreams
Yesterday when I finally fell asleep, I was running a fever of 102.5 (it broke last night and I feel much better today – I think I’m over whatever I got). I then had a dream I was in a TV show – something like Stranger Things. At least that’s how it started out. Something…
Learning how to program in Oman in the 90’s
I grew up in Oman and lived there until I finished high-school in 1999. In 1991, when I was ten years old, my father bought me a 386SX for my birthday having noticed my burgeoning interest in computers. For the first few months, I mainly played games. But even that was a non-trivial endeavor in…
My data-recovery story
I was looking through wayback machine at snapshots of my website, when I came across one from 2005. It reminded me of something I had almost forgotten. At some point in 2005, the network card in my FreeBSD server started to die. I got myself a new card and set about replacing the dying one….
Comments were broken for a while
Commenting on this blog was disabled for a while… I think it was due to Akismet misbehaving or something. I’m not sure. Either way, you should be able to comment now. I will be slowly adding anti-spam stuff back in.
Sweet, handsome doggie needs a home
My wife and I found a dog that was wandering Hunt Highway between Lindsay and Val Vista. He was pretty scared and shy and after chasing him for about .5 mi we eventually caught up with him at the ranch on Val Vista and Hunt Highway. The folks at the ranch said that they have…
Remembering a great teacher
1995 was a difficult year for me. I had finished the 8th grade at Indian School Muscat. However, instead of joining the 9th grade with my friends, I had to move to an entirely new school, Indian School Al-Ghubra, which was much further away and worse, was our arch-rival. My first few weeks at the…