Sunday, July 22, 2007

My new job

It's been a long time since I've loved my job. I didn't realize it but for many years I haven't liked what I did. I stayed busy and that's important to me. I felt like I was doing something productive and that's equally as important but I never truly loved it because there was little challenge in it. Let's face it, the year of PKI never arrived.

Now I'm challenged.

I'm enjoying my new position with VMware as a product manager focusing on the security of their ESX platform. It's exciting, challenging and the great part (and I know this sounds trite) but we're changing the world. Literally. The way people use our platform changes everything about how they manage their IT networks. It's more efficient, it's faster, more reliable, more available, less disaster-prone, and more flexible. All those good things that people wish from their IT networks.

I see what this can do for security inside an organization too. Think about this term "agile security". Bring security to the places where you want it. Make it more fluid and use your resources more efficiently. Putting out a new promotion or service on your web site? Move your firewalls and IDS so you can monitor more closely; put up more IPSes so you can quickly inspect more deeply inline; snapshot your servers so that you can recover from bad OS patches, exploited vulnerabilities, or misbehaving apps.

The possibilities are immense and as much as virtualization changes an organization's datacenter, it can even more profoundly change how they view their security posture. Imagine your being able to manage your risk as quickly as you can put up a new app.

At the same time, none of this is well-defined yet. This is where the challenge comes in. Are there new risks? sure. Have we found them all yet? No. Are we going to? Absolutely. Can we make this more secure than before? I think we can. There's opportunity for organization's to decrease their risky exposure and change their risk profile at a moment's notice (Threat level on SANS goes to red, increase your available resources to prevention and attack counter-measures...at gree, you can move those resources to event monitoring and correlation).

what else do you think we can do with this transformational platform?

The Food obsession

We've become obsessed with food...now more so than ever.

My wife and I always liked good food, we would try new dishes at home and we'd hit new restaurants just to get a sample of new dishes that we could try. However, it's now that we have a child that we've become even more in tune with our eating habits and our diet.

My daughter is now eating solids as of April, 2007. It's been great! She eats whatever we eat (puree'ed mostly) and she has a reaction to all new kinds of tastes. Mostly, she's happy to eat though as she'll take in broccolli, peas, sweet potatoes, fruit, chicken soup, salsa, etc.

Here's the rub though: now that we're so busy feeding her we don't really get to enjoy our own dinner. Getting food in her becomes somewhat of a battle between making sure she likes it to trying feed her in between her hands swinging around as she display her happiness or plays with her blocks. The food ends up everywhere: on her, on me, on the floor, on the carpet, on the sofa. It's a blast but quite the mess.

My wife has even written an essay as we thought about the good parontha's that her mom would make (and still does that we pack and take home with us). Here's the article.

In short, life has become about eating...less time to do it but more fanfare around it.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Journey By Inner Light

Some of you may know that my wife is a writer. It's a very up and down process...for months at a time she works on a story and through many edits, she'll keep revising. Eventually, an opportunity pops up to publish it. Well, finally such an opportunity arose. Strangely my wife didn't feel the need to scream this from the rooftops. Luckily I did...

Here's a synopsis from an email my wife sent out:
"Journey By Inner Light", Homelands: Women's Journeys Across, Race, Place, and Time
The essay is a mini memoir about my life journey to date about my hair which is spiritually known as kesh. Since you have been a tremendous supporter of my path as a writer, I'd like you to hear the piece! And if you are moved to do so, please buy the book. These essays are rapturing stories about the search for a woman's identity in today's world. Here's a review of my essay.

For those interested in purchasing the anthology, it's available on Amazon.com and in some local Berkeley, CA bookstores.
I was lucky enough to edit the piece in its infancy and then read the final draft. I think it's one of the most powerful pieces she's written. And more importantly, for young Sikh girls this piece should give them an idea of why faith can be so important in one's life. The ability to lift one's self out of the most dire consequences can be an incredible boon to anyone.

I'd encourage the Sikh audience out there (especially young girls and women) to pick up the book and read her essay. I hope you will find it as inspiring as I did. I hope my daughter will read in a few years and find it equally as inspiring.