Imagine you’re a System Administrator tasked with setting up a new environment. Traditionally, this involves a long checklist: log into the console, click through menus to create a VPC, spin up three VMs, configure storage, attach security groups, and set up a load balancer. If you need a second environment for testing, you have to do Read More …
Our Mr. Stacky Vertical Garden Experiment
One of my core philosophies here is to try a new thing every season. It keeps us learning, keeps the garden adaptable, and, most importantly, keeps us one step ahead of our five feathered garden “inspectors.” This year, we’re taking our planting to new heights, literally, with a 5-piece Mr. Stacky vertical unit. Here is Read More …
Prelude to an Afternoon of A Chicken
Claude was a very famous composer who lived in a house filled with velvet shadows and heavy silence. Everyone expected him to write grand music about the crashing sea or the drifting clouds. But on this morning, Claude sat at his piano with a heavy sigh. His music felt stuck, like a rainy day that Read More …
Fine-Tuning an AI
We’ve talked about grounding (giving an AI a textbook to look at) and prompting (giving an AI clear instructions). But sometimes, you don’t just want the AI to look at a book; you want the AI to become an expert in its bones. This is called Fine-Tuning. Generalist vs. Specialist Think of a standard AI Read More …
The Weaponization of Christianity
How Charlie Kirk used Christianity to divide America In the landscape of American political discourse, few figures embody the marriage of Christian identity and partisan warfare quite like Charlie Kirk. The founder of Turning Point USA has become a fixture in Republican circles, his influence extending from college campuses to the highest levels of GOP Read More …
The Vanilla Fugue
In the heart of a town called Leipzig, there lived a man named Papa Bach. His house was never quiet. It hummed with the sound of “clink-clank-clunk” from the kitchen and “do-re-mi” from the parlor. Papa Bach was a man of music, and his head was always full of golden notes and silver rhythms. But Read More …
The Golden Calf in the Radio Box
I was once told by a man of the cloth, one of the old-fashioned kind who still believed the Red Letters were more than just a stylistic choice by the printer, that the quickest way to lose your soul is to find a way to sell it at a profit. Now, I’ve seen many a Read More …
IaC – Infrastructure as Code
The Recipe for Modern IT In the traditional world of IT, setting up a server was a craft. A sysadmin would log in, click through menus, install packages, and tweak settings until everything worked. I know, I did this job for much of my early career. But much like a chef cooking a complex signature Read More …
OIDC – OpenID Connect
Adding Identity to the Authorization Layer In the journey through information security, you will frequently encounter OAuth 2.0. While OAuth is excellent at authorization, it was never actually designed for authentication. To solve this, OIDC, or OpenID Connect, was created. Think of it this way: OAuth 2.0 is the key to a hotel room, while OIDC Read More …