• Goals for this coming year, part 1: Learn x86 Assembly #
• Goals for this 2010, part 2: Setup a hack lab and improve pentesting skills #
• Goals for 2010 part 3: Attend two Security cons and compete in their Hacking competitions. #
• Goals for 2010 part 4: Get involved in an OSS project. #
• Goals for 2010 part 5: Take my wife out on more dates. #
• Happy 10th Birthday Y2K! #
• Goals for 2010 part 6: Take the kids out more often #
• Goals for 2010 part 7: Create #
• Ok that's it, I refuse 2 go back 2 work this year #
• Goals for 2010 part 8: Don't be evil #
• Hey East Coast, it's bamed from the past. How's #2010? Are there flying cars yet? #
• Goals for 2010 part 9: Buy a minivan, or an SUV that'll seat 6 comfortably. #
• Goals for 2010 part 10: Um… well… come up with more goals. #
• Hey West Coast, it's bamed from the future. It's #2010, and still no flying cars #
• Taking Grant to se Avatar 3D #
• Anyone know of any good used book stores in Carthage? #
• Goals for 2010: the Finale – The same thing we do every year, Pinky, try to take over the world! #

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OK, so I asked my family, “What are some more goals I can set for myself for next year?”  And Josef, my oldest son, said, “Come up with more goals.”  So, that’s pretty much it.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you’ve already seen all these, but I thought I’d take some time to define these goals a bit more.  This way, you, my faithful follower (Hi, Mom & Dad!) might understand what I mean, plus writing it down gives them more meaning to myself as well, especially come December 2010 when I look back and think, “What the heck did I mean by that?”

Ok, once again a simple goal.  Basically, our family grew from 5 to 6 this year and we need better transportation seat us all comfortably.  We’ve currently got two cars, one only seat 5, the other seats 6 but nor comfortably.  So, I want a vehicle we can all comfortable fit in.

Um… ya, that’s pretty much it.

I you don’t already know, this is the informal company motto of Google, and I think is a pretty good goal for anyone both personally and professionally.  It’s simple and too the point.

This goal can be interpreted in plenty of ways and won’t be easy to quantify.  The basic philosophy behind this goal is to take some time each week to create something original.  This goal could be satisfied by contributing to an OSS.  There may be a few lines of code I contribute that I have created.  But I want to find some other ways to expand my horizons and explore my own creativity.  One way I have been doing this lately is by writing.  I have actually been working on a few science fiction short stories.  I don’t plan on becoming a famous author, but I’ve found that I rather enjoy writing and it’s a good way for me to exercise my mind in areas that typically lie dormant when I’m configuring servers, troubleshooting users, or writing some code.

I should mention that in school I’m writing 4-6 original papers per week, so I suppose that would meet the criteria for this goal, but unless I find one of these to be exceptional I would like to keep the creative juices flowing in some other way.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with this goal, and several of the others, is time.  With school and work and the family, when will I have time to be creative?  I believe my youngest son, Grant, has come up with a solution to this problem.  Each week at the local Books-A-Million a large group of kids get together to play Yu-Gi-Oh! and he wants to go there as often as he can.  So my current plan is to take my laptop with me to BAM each Saturday afternoon and while he plays, I’ll create.  I’ve done this a couple of times so far and it’s worked great.  The local BAM does NOT have Wi-Fi available, so there’s no distractions, and the environment seems to be conducive to pumping those creative juices around my grey matter.  So we’ll see how this goes the rest of the year.  If I come up with something I like well enough, you may find it here at bamed.org.

Obviously, this is also another one of those personal goals.  My daughter loves it when I take her out on a “Date.”  She’ll talk about it for weeks afterwards.  And of course, my boys are pretty fun to hang out with too!

This obviously is a more personal goal, rather than a professional one and should be pretty self-explanatory.

For those who don’t know, OSS = Open Source Software.

I need to find a good OSS project that I care about that I think I can make some kind of contribution to.  I’m most likely looking for something security-focused.  I also need to continue to improve my programming skills before I can get too involved.  I am getting ready to take and Advanced programming class and I’m hoping along with my self-study in Assembly I will actually be able to make some kind of meaningful contribution to something.

This goal goes back to the whole get involved in the community thing.  OSS isn’t just about the code after all, but is also about the community.

One of the things I regret about living in Joplin, is that there isn’t a thriving IT community.  There are plenty of IT people, as there are in any decent size town, but all attempts that I am aware of to form a community out of these people have failed.  There is currently a group that formed on Facebook and meets occasionally, but I wouldn’t really call it a thriving community.  And, it is significant to point out that this is just a general IT group, not specifically geared towards security.  When I went to Louisville earlier this year and saw hundreds of people there who are specifically IT Security Pros it really made me long to live in or at least near a larger city.

Anyway, I should also point out that even those I hang out with regularly have little interest in IT Security.  The InfoSec world is not made up of a bunch of lone geeks hacking away in their mom’s basement as Hollywood might have us think, it is actually a thriving community of geeks who love to get together and share information ( and party!).  If I really hope to make it in the IT Security career I need to get involved and network with the community.  Since there’s no local group for me, I won’t get any real face time with people except at some of the national cons that are spread out across the globe throughout the year.  Of course, I can make plenty of connection on teh internets, and I suppose I’ll include that as a sort of sub-goal to this one.

As far as competing goes, it’s another opportunity to test and improve my skills, plus if I do well it’s something I can point out on a resume.

In case you haven’t already caught on, I’m working on fine-tuning my skills and planning for a future career in IT Security.  One of the skills I need to continue to improve is penetration testing.  For those laymen out there, you would probably use the term “hacking.”  Of course, I intend only to use my 1337 h4X0r sk1llz ( that would be read, leet [as in elite] haxor [or hacker] skillz) for good, not for evil.

So, rather than driving down to the local bank and cracking their wireless encryption then gaining access to their servers and looking at people’s personal information, it would be far easier (and way more legal) to setup a hack lab at home with servers and such I can hack away at.  So I’ve got a server already that I took to work with me to fill in for awhile, but now that we’ve upgraded our hardware there it is no longer needed and I can use the hardware I bough myself for my own purposes.  There are several ways to put together a hack lab, but for simplicity sake I’m starting out by using the resources at http://www.de-ice.net/.  De-Ice offers several live linux CD’s with pre-configured hacking challenges on them.  So I simply pop the CD into my server, boot it up, and let the leetness begin.  Once I’ve obtained my goal, I can move on to the next challenge.

Once I’ve completed all the De-Ice challenges I’ll have to look around for other similar services, if there are any.  And if there aren’t, I’ll just have to come up with some of my own scenarios.  Meanwhile, there are various online challenges, such as Mod-X I can also conquer.

I hope later in the year to have the time to compete in NetWars and score some points.