Meetings

My previous week: Thinking through different and underused game formats: board games that support simultaneous or asynchronous movement, where a wall-mounted magnetic board would make “Play By Video” easy, and so on. A great chat with someone looking to use me as a cyber security associate, who asked all the right questions… such as “what are you interested in?” rather than “what do you have five years’ experience in?”. Other useful conversations about forthcoming projects and events, or working on existing ideas. Some “cyber security strategy” work, just helping someone think through their security roadmap and highlighting what they might have missed, or giving them a chance to explain their choices out loud to me before they face their stakeholders. And as always, I’m finding it useful to write up these weeknotes. I just wanted a free pixabay graphic about studying or thinking... but now I have to know why she's studying on a roof...

Last week I attended two days of the profesional wargaming conference Connections UK. This was well done, very interactive, with the team figuring out online problems as they went. More engaging than I expected, with some useful and interesting contacts made to take forward. I attended the Fourth Annual Managed Security Services Forum London MSS London. An interesting event to dip in and out of, especially with the reoccuring theme of building relationships and trust between all the parties involved. Also, as cliched as it might be, that the evolution of Managed Security Services is a journey in developing those “soft skills”, rather tnan focussing on technical ability. I also spoke at MSS London, that panel might be online in future. But if you’re in Cyber Security and have limited time, I have to suggest you check out Megan Gooch’s presentation instead, she made many excellent points based on her experience in counter-terrorism. Me looking thoughtful at MSS London I enjoyed watching the second week of the NFL season, although my team managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. After falling down a “gas lift” hole last week, this week I spent far too much time trying to find a piece of hardware that will support quad displays for VGA over DB15 on a single monitor, more to follow…

Last week Enjoyed watching the first week of the NFL season, my team had a relatively calm beginning. Helped a friend think through their new PC options, details here. Lots of moving around cables and computers, to basically try and fit more objects in the same amount of physical space. Reasonably successful, so depending on the state of the world I should update talk on my home setup at some point. More work than usual coming up, so some time spent on getting up to speed on the project, and planning on the best way to deal with it. Having to learn far too much about the different types of gas lifts available for office chairs, after an organisation I bought a new chair from was a little “optimistic” about seat height. This and this were useful.

Last week Did my fantasy football draft for the year. I have less time than I’d like for following the NFL, so I find fantasy football a good way to stay in touch with the league as a whole James Bore’s open office on Thursday morning was interesting and useful. If you want to keep an eye on future meetings the best way is to follow James on LinkedIn I attended a meeting about a thing that is bad. That’ll go public this week. What do you call an APT that’s more A, more P, and more T than all the other APTs? Took part in a regular informal meeting that’s kind of a podcast, but with only hosts and no listeners I got over-excited at a potential customer, but I’m less worried about leaning into that these days. As I said at that “podcast with no audience”, if you want 20 ideas I can give you 20, if you want 3, I’ll also give you 20. It’s probably inadvisable commercially, but also “standard issue” consultancy appears to be devoid of any enthusiasm or joy, so my attitude is a market differentiator too Attended a hybrid ( online and remote ) meeting of the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group. It went reasonably well, but I think the benefits and the issues around hybrid meetings are still being explored; and the participants’ enthusiasm and familiarity with each other made a huge difference. I was reminded once again of all the benefits of the format, especially the remote side :- being able to chat afterwards with two contacts, who had to be several hundred and several thousand miles away on the day. Thanks to Andrew Hadley for this picture he took on the day at the location; but due to some of the kit being used our remote impression wasn’t far off this level of clarity: The Normans besiege Winchester and London after the Battle of Hastings This week Probably stop doing weeknotes with a “this week” header, they’re increasingly optimistic On that, this article by Oliver Burkeman is worth your time. I particularly liked: ...