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Incite 2/7/2012: The Couch

Mike Rothman February 8, 2012 No Comments

Do you ever stumble upon a show from the old days, perhaps on Boomerang or TVLand, where the doting wife meets the hubby as he comes home from work? It’s just like my deal. I come home from that tough day writing at Starbucks and the Boss is waiting with my smoking jacket, pipe, and slippers, and the trusty glass of brandy to take the edge off a tough day. And then I wake up. What about those scenes where the entire family sits down to dinner and discusses current events? We don’t either. When I come home has more to do with which kid needs to be shuttled to which activity. The Boss has to ride herd on play dates, homework, and all those other balls she keeps in the air every day. We have sit down dinners a few times a month, usually when we go out to dinner as a family. But most of the time we don’t have time to breathe until the kids are in bed, numbing the pain with some inane show on TV. For years we had a great couch we bought from Crate and Barrel. It wasn’t cheap, but it lasted for 10 years. Maybe more. It held up well, but it wasn’t new and we didn’t worry about eating on it. So we’d park on the couch, eat our dinner, talk, and wind down from the day. I know she wanted a new couch, but the old one was fine, so I was pretty resistant to dropping a bunch of coin for something I didn’t think we really needed. But then my overly generous in-laws decided they can’t take it with them, so they gave us a new couch. It was a floor model, and we got a great deal on it. I’m not one to be ungrateful so I said thank you and moved on. Of course, the Boss was very happy, so it was all good. Until I got home. At that point I was suddenly transported back into the 50’s, when we had a virtual sheet of plastic wrap on the couch. Not literally a cover like your grandparents had on their couches, but it might as well have been. I mean, we couldn’t get close to the couch. I was kind of scared to sit on it unless I had just jumped out of the shower. The kids had to change their clothes if they were outside and wanted to sit down. Eating on the new couch? No chance. So we set up some other chairs in front of the couch, so we could still eat in the family room, but the priority was protecting the sanctity of our virginal couch. But we still had to deal with the elephant in the (family) room. That was our annual Super Bowl party. We host about 100 folks on my favorite day of the year. They eat pizza and wings and buffalo chicken dip and all sorts of other things that don’t look very good when spilled on your couch. It was quite a problem, and the Boss even threatened to cancel the party. But as my stepfather says, if it’s a problem that can be solved with money it’s not really a problem. So we went over to the store and bought about 8 huge cushy throw blankets and wrapped the couch from top to bottom. OK, it’s not plastic wrap, but it worked. No spills on the couch. The Giants won, and a good time was had by all, especially me. But Lord knows I wasn’t drinking my Guinness on the new couch. I was willing to take the chance of someone spilling something, so long as it wasn’t me. -Mike Photo credits: “frakkin’ plastic!” originally uploaded by wotthe7734 Heavy Research After a bit of a hiatus from blogging we are back at it. The Heavy Research feed is hopping, and here are a couple links of our latest stuff. So check them out and (as always) let us know what you think via comments. Implementing and Managing a Data Loss (DLP) Solution: Index of Posts. Rich will be updating this post with the latest in his ongoing series on DLP. Here are the posts so far: Implementing and Managing a DLP Solution Implementing DLP: Getting Started Implementing DLP: Picking Priorities and a Deployment Process Implementing DLP: Final Deployment Preparations Implementing DLP: Integration, Part 1 Implementing DLP: Integration Priorities and Components Implementing DLP: Starting Your Integration Understanding and Selecting a Database Security Platform: Defining DSP Bridging the Mobile Security Gap: Operational Consistency: Malware Analysis Quant: Take the Survey (and win fancy prizes!) We need your help to understand what you do (and what you don’t) for malware analysis. And you can win some nice gift cards from Amazon for your trouble. You can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can access all our content in its unabridged glory. Incite 4 U Yamatough lost the negotiating handbook… I won’t say the T word but the rules are the same. Did Symantec really think it would end well when they tried to buy back the source code to Norton and pcAnywhere? They really didn’t think the emails would end up on Pastebin? That email thread is actually quite entertaining – the funniest part is Symantec’s condition that yamatough lie about the hack of the source code. And then SYMC wants to put them on a payment plan. Totally ridiculous. I get they wanted to protect customers – code for minimizing a PR fiasco. But they should have come clean immediately, fixed whatever the issue was, and moved on. I don’t think these folks follow the Negotiating 101 handbook. – MR Security Bowl: Last Sunday’s Super Bowl was a heck of a good game. I’m just sad I had to turn the TV off after the first quarter, record it on the TiVo, and then watch it later mostly in fast forward mode thanks to both kids melting down. Many years ago I had the chance to go work physical security

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