July 11, 2025

Last night was a rough one. At some point early in the evening, the dog (somehow) got attacked by a bug and end up with the inevitable "bee face" after eight years of trying to avoid it. Taking him to the emergency vet was frustrating - he always fights us whenever we go to the vet at any time - but I have to commend Veterinary Emergency Group for how fast, effective, and professional they were. A shot of diphenhydramine resolved the main issue but the steroids made the pup antsy throughout the night, leading me to have basically only 3 hours of consistent sleep. Thankfully it's now the weekend, so I can sleep in tomorrow 🥱

Recently I've started taking this year's CS50x course that Harvard offers for free since I'm finding myself stuck with my work trajectory. Knowing full-well that while I have some grasp on general concepts of cybersecurity, I'm clearly lacking knowledge about the actual fundamentals of computer science and feel like if I'm going to get anywhere, I should probably know the difference between a bit and a byte at bare minimum.

After watching the first lecture and playing around with the Scratch assignment (Scratch wasn't a thing when I was a kid, btw), I finding that this is both an enjoyable and accessible way to learn all of these concepts without feeling overwhelmed. A major hurdle during the last 20 years of being in my field was that the advice I'd receive was to either focus in on specific programming languages with narrow intents (Ruby on Rails and Java were the big ones, Python being kind of waved off as too simple) or just go for a certification like CompTIA Security+ or CISSP. Not having a background in computer science, that's like telling someone to learn how to swim for the first time by taking scuba diving lessons.

If you're interested in auditing the course, I'd recommend watching the Week 0 lecture for a good feel. YouTube now has the entire set but I'd recommend signing up for the course since it also has the detailed notes and transcripts available:

Coming back from the blogging sabbatical, I've had some time to think about why I'm doing this blog and how I want it to look going forward. Ideally, I'd like to have it on it's own domain come the new year (as a milestone birthday present to myself) and possibly converted into a website that I built out for myself. While I'm taking the CS50x as a means to better understand things for work, I'm also using this as an opportunity to learn how to work towards getting the blocks I need to work towards learning HTML/CSS and all the other essentials for web development.

If you read this blog at all, expect to see more posts about computery stuff as I keep finding out more about this field of study. Also expect me to be a little more lax on how I'm writing these posts, since I'm feeling like I'm less needing to be formal in my grammar and syntax and starting to be more comfortable with emojis, etc. I still won't do that for my main essays and stories but journal posts & findings (micro-posts, Something Interestings)? 🙃

Today's album is ADVENTURE by Momoko Kikuchi (1986) and the featured image is from Isi Parente. Weather's been bouncing between rain and hot sun. City's getting that summertime stinkiness but it's to be expected. - A.B. 7/11/25