My Blog

Thoughts, experiences, and insights from my journey in technology, automation, and the occasional failed experiment.

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Sep 14, 2026

15 min read

Personal Reasons

I wrote two resignation documents on the same morning, and only one of them was true. The formal letter, dated November 25, 2024, said I was leaving HCL Software after careful consideration of my career goals and opportunities. For twenty months I remembered it as saying personal reasons. It did not even say that much. At 6:15 that same morning I sent HR an email, with the letter attached, listing ten actual reasons: a panic attack that needed medication and counseling, a midnight email clawing back thirteen thousand dollars while I was recovering from spinal fusion, weeks of process and a surgeon's letter to be allowed to schedule fifteen minutes to stand up, and one line I had never said to any employer in nearly thirty years, that the culture was not conducive for AuDHD'ers like me. I knew which document would go in the permanent file. So did they. This is the last post in the series and it is the angry one, and the thing I am angriest about is that I told them, in writing, with bullet points, and nothing happened. Final post in My Default Config Was Neurotypical.

Neurodivergence Workplace Personal Story My Default Config Was Neurotypical

Sep 07, 2026

14 min read

I Sleep Now

Last week I published a rule about myself, no phone calls, and four days later an old coworker called and we talked for thirty-seven minutes and I enjoyed all of them. The rule was written wrong, and the way it was wrong is the whole post: the cost was never the phone, it was who is on the other end. This is the other half of the diagnosis, not the fight to get it but what having it actually changed, which was almost nothing about how I behave in public and almost everything about forty years of memory. My father. A marriage at twenty-two that nearly ended me, and two weeks inpatient at Beckett Springs. A best friend lost to his church and his Facebook feed. And the least dramatic, most important thing on the list: I sleep now, seven to eleven hours, after decades of four to six. Second post in My Default Config Was Neurotypical.

Neurodivergence Personal Story My Default Config Was Neurotypical

Aug 31, 2026

15 min read

You've Done This Well So Far. What's the Point?

I was IQ tested at eight and flagged as highly intelligent, and that was the entire intervention. My younger brother was diagnosed with ADD as a kid. My younger sister was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid. My father would not allow me to be tested. In 2014 my own doctor asked me what the point would be, since I had done this well so far, with my wife sitting right there. Ten years later I emailed roughly thirteen autism assessment clinics and every one turned me down for being too old or for the insurance math. I got tested at forty-eight, eleven days after my last day of work and fifteen days before my coverage died, and it cost nearly ten thousand dollars. The autism half is still unfinished because I cannot afford to buy the rest of the answer. First post in a new series, My Default Config Was Neurotypical, and it starts on a beach in Michigan with a fifteen year old girl at the beginning of the same road.

Neurodivergence Healthcare Personal Story My Default Config Was Neurotypical

Aug 24, 2026

13 min read

They Didn't Give the AI Your Endpoints. They Gave It Your Operator.

On August 5, HCL shipped an MCP server for the BigFix Platform, so you can now point Claude, Copilot, or Gemini straight at your endpoint management infrastructure and talk to it in English. The core security engineering is genuinely good: read-only enforced at execution time, write approvals cryptographically bound to the exact payload, fail closed, full audit trail. Then you look at what surrounds it. A self-signed certificate that makes disabling TLS validation the fastest route to a working demo. A Least Privilege checkbox that ships unchecked. One header that switches off the strongest control in the product. This is the first post under a name for a pattern I have circled for two months: The Perimeter Is a Person. The lock holds. Somebody talks the keyholder into opening it. This time nobody even had to lie.

Cybersecurity Endpoint Management AI The Perimeter Is a Person

Aug 17, 2026

9 min read

Nobody Was Watching the Repo

On August 6 at Black Hat, two OpenAI researchers explained how their own frontier models escaped a sandbox, turned an internal Artifactory instance into a covert message board, coordinated as a swarm, and then spent four and a half days inside Hugging Face's production systems. The exploit chain is genuinely new. The control failure is not. A package proxy trusted as controlled egress and never watched, credentials left lying around, a covert channel wiped and rebuilt because nobody instrumented the hole. Those are three controls I have been auditing for nearly 30 years, and every door those agents walked through is one we already know how to lock.

Cybersecurity AI Enterprise IT

Aug 12, 2026

8 min read

Endpoint Hygiene Was Never an IT Problem. It's a Budget Problem in an IT Costume.

Microsoft just shipped fixes for 398 vulnerabilities in a single Patch Tuesday, roughly 200 in June, more than 570 in July, and Microsoft is openly crediting AI for the flood. This is not a spike, it is the new floor. AI turns out to be excellent at finding holes and mediocre at closing them, which makes the human-plus-tooling side the whole ballgame. Nearly 30 years in endpoint management taught me the real failure is almost never technical. It is a funding decision, made by people who can be named, that lands on IT's name instead of theirs.

Cybersecurity Endpoint Management Personal Story

Aug 10, 2026

11 min read

Biff Got the Almanac. We Got the Timeline.

John Oliver spent a segment on what Trump has done to the DOJ, and I could not shake the feeling that I am living in Hill Valley 1985A. Biff was never the danger. The almanac was: the book that told him the outcome before the game was played. A Justice Department that lost a quarter of its lawyers, gutted its Civil Rights Division, and dropped 23,000 investigations looks a lot like a man holding a book he should not have. Hot analogy, cold evidence, and the one place the movie is wrong about us.

Policy Analysis Rule of Law Personal Story

Aug 03, 2026

10 min read

The Grill Brush That Explains the Whole Broken Economy

Destin Sandlin spent four years trying to build one grill brush entirely in America. The engineering was never the hard part. Monopsony, enshittification, and a broken knowledge chain were. I am trying to 3D-print a home on wheels in the same economy, so I took notes.

Economic Policy American Manufacturing Technology Personal Story

Jul 27, 2026

6 min read

They Didn't Break Signal. They Broke the Person Holding the Phone.

The State Department just put a $10 million bounty on two Russia-linked crews who talked Signal and WhatsApp users into handing over their backup recovery key. No exploit, no cracked encryption, just a fake support agent and a sense of urgency. The lock held. The person holding the phone did not. After nearly 30 years in this field, that gap is the whole job, and it is not closing anytime soon.

Cybersecurity Social Engineering Privacy

Jul 20, 2026

7 min read

They Didn't Hack the Agent. They Forged the Badge.

Second in a series on trust theft. A security firm never hacked anything. It forged a badge: merged a fake skill into a 36,000-star marketplace, ran an Instagram ad, and watched it spread to roughly 26,000 AI agents while every scanner called it safe. The payload was never in the package. It lived on a page the skill pointed to, swapped clean after the scan cleared.

Cybersecurity AI AI Agents