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Timestamp: Friday 14th October 2016 at 13:01. Wow, so it has been two weeks since I started on this journey of self-revitalization. That’s two weeks without launching a video game, two weeks of refocusing on who I am and what it means to be who I am and where I am today…and two weeks of rising to be better than I was. It’s tempting as hell to sit back and rest on my laurels today.

Welp, massively overslept again today (even for me it was bad…), but I was able to deconstruct the root cause of it or so I think, hopefully tomorrow will be better. On a completely unrelated note, are 20 foot lightning cables a thing? I might need to get one… As I mentioned yesterday, I did manage to get back into the technical swing of things today even despite the setback. After who even knows how many months, I finally have my VCSA set up again.

Today was quiet in terms of personal development.  I had a (thankfully much easier) Cyber Law midterm tonight and enough to do at work that I was more or less busy throughout the entire day.  No time for programming, the VCSA still needs to be set up again (hope to tackle that in the morning when I can have several hours to really lock it down), and no progress on my next novel.  Well, okay…I wrote a synopsis for the NaNoWriMo site today, but it’s not exactly progress on the novel itself.  Maybe I’ll copy and paste it into another post following this one.

That said, this post… tonight’s writing… is something different than I have been writing about so far.  It’s funny, my blog about cybersecurity stuff and coding projects has taken on a life of its own as a chronicle of my journey through this weird thing we call life.  To those of you who come here expecting to see the chronicles of a budding hacker instead, I’m sorry.  If it helps, I may put up something about the whole Diffie-Helman trapdoor thing that came out earlier.  Just my uneducated thoughts on it, of course - it’s safe to say I’m the opposite of a crypto expert.  If all goes well with the VCSA setup I might get around to cracking and doing a writeup of a Vulnhub VM by this weekend.  Lord knows I’m overdue for making one of those.  For my non-technical friends, it’s basically a puzzle designed to get me to practice hacking in a safe but semi-realistic way.

If you’re good with something that’s honestly been a bit tough to write this evening, join me on the other side of the jump.

Life is full of weird coincidences, to put it lightly. One such coincidence this evening was when my classical music stream decided to play Nearer, My God, to Thee - the very hymn that was allegedly played as the Titanic was sinking - this evening, as I was getting past the fact that my Digital Forensics midterm was a lot harder than anyone could’ve predicted. It’s just one exam, just 15% of the grade in a class that’s ultimately an elective for me, but it’s a shock to say the least.

It’s a funny thing, motivation. I spent at least a decade of my life (absolute number of hours almost undoubtedly, never mind real time) chasing completely arbitrary and ultimately meaningless goals in search of that next hit of dopamine or whatever it is. Ultimately, that stuff doesn’t even matter. I couldn’t even tell you what many of those bullshit “achievements” were for actually doing. I do remember that there were a large number of such achievements just for exploring the entirety of certain areas in World of Warcraft all those years ago.

Timestamp: Saturday 8th October 2016 at 23:56 C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER! The other post is cool, but hey, it’s been a week since I dedicated myself to this project. Here’s a real end-of-week retrospective now that I’ve gone for a run and gotten those feels out. But really, cam I go back in time, bottle that feeling up, and relive it any time I’m feeling down about something? Anyway, wow, it’s been a week already.

Timestamp: Saturday 8th October 2016 at 22:24 Day 6 as well I suppose. I’d rather not count the days one by one honestly. The streak on the badge on Reddit is awesome to look at, and highlighting milestones is awesome too; that said, taking up that title space is a drag. Maybe I’ll program a widget or something… Got home so late last night that I couldn’t post before falling asleep.

Timestamp: Thursday 6th October 2016 at 22:57 I don’t know. Had trouble sleeping last night for some reason, so it was one of those weird days where it felt like I was sleepwalking through the entire day and no amount of coffee could wake me up. Thankfully the midterm I was supposed to have today was pushed off until next week. I’m ready for it, but I’d just like to get it over with.

Timestamp: Wednesday, 5th October at 23:01 Wednesdays are my short days at work, so I have an absolute ton of free time. And yet, not enough to really do much. As soon as I get into working on a real project for class or for myself, it’s time to go to grab dinner or go to class or what have you. Guess how I’ve been filling this time up to this week…

And now for something completely different: I promised y’all yesterday that I’d talk a little about the program I’m writing to help keep myself on track as well. Accountability is your binary accountability buddy. I’m building it using Flask and Python 3. Really, it’s a small thing and Flask is probably overkill for it, but email is hard. Yes, email. Sure, it’s just SMTP and MIME under the hood, but getting it to be reliably delivered is a big problem.