It’s hard to believe, but my family and I have been in Atlanta almost 9 years. The twins were babies; now they are people. Well, kind of. I grew up in the Northeast and spent many days shoveling our driveway during big snowstorms. Our 15 years in Northern Virginia provided a bit less shoveling time, but not much. But the ATL is a different animal. It snows maybe once a year, and the dusting is usually gone within a few hours. I can recall one time, over the past 8 winters, when we got enough snow to actually make a snowman. We are usually pummeled by one good ice storm a year, which wreaks havoc because no one in the South knows how to drive in bad weather, and I think there are a total of 3 snow plows in the entire state. Now that it’s starting to warm up a bit I look forward to breaking out my flipflops and summer work attire, which consists of shorts and T-shirts. Unless I have a meeting – then I wear a polo shirt. But that’s still probably 6 weeks away for me. Having grown up with the cold, I hate it now. I just don’t like to be cold. I get my Paul Bunyan on with a heavy lumberjacket (one of those flannel Thinsulate coats) to take the kids out to the bus in the AM. Even if it’s in the 40s. I have been known to wear my hat and gloves until May. Whatever it takes for me to feel toasty warm, regardless of how ridiculous I look. The Boy has a different opinion. It’s like he’s an Eskimo or something. Every morning (without fail) we have an argument about whether he can wear shorts. Around freezing? No problem, shorts work for him. Homey just doesn’t care. He’ll wear shorts at any time, literally. There was one morning earlier this year where I called his bluff. I said “fine, wear your shorts.” It was about 35 degrees. He did, and he didn’t complain at all about being cold. I even made him walk the two blocks to the bus and stand outside (while I sat in the warm car). He didn’t bat an eyelash. But the Boss did. I took a pounding when he came off the bus in shorts that afternoon. I tried to prove a point, but he took my point and fed it back to me, reverse alimentary style. No matter the temperature, a hoody sweatshirt and shorts are good for him. His behavior reminds me of returning to NYC after a college spring break in Acapulco many moons ago. Most of us were bundled up, but one of my buddies decided to leave his Jose Cuervo shorts on, while wearing his winter jacket. It was about 20 degrees, and after a week of chips and guacamole and Corona and 4am Devil Dogs (and the associated Montezuma’s revenge), we just absolutely positively needed White Castle. Don’t judge me, I was young. My friend proceeded to get abused by everyone in the restaurant. They asked if he was going to the beach or skiing. It was totally hilarious, even 25 years later. I can totally see the Boy being that guy wearing shorts in the dead of winter. But part of being a parent is saving the kids from making poor decisions. The Boss is exceptional at that. She proclaimed the Boy cannot wear shorts if it will be below 50 degrees at any time during the day. There were no negotiations. It was written on a stone tablet and the Boy had no choice but to accept the dictum. Now he dutifully checks the weather every night and morning, hoping to get the high sign so he can wear his beloved shorts. Who knows, maybe he’ll become a meteorologist or something. Unless they tell him he can’t wear shorts on air – then he’ll need to find something else to do. –Mike Photo credits: Taking a jog in shorts after Winter Storm Nemo originally uploaded by Andrew Dallos Upcoming Cloud Security Training Interested in Cloud Security? Are you in EMEA (or do you have a ton of frequent flyer miles)? Mike will be teaching the CCSK Training in Reading, UK April 8-10. Sign up now. Heavy Research We’re back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can get all our content in its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Email-based Threat Intelligence Quick Wins Analyzing the Phishing Food Chain Industrial Phishing Tactics Understanding Identity Management for Cloud Services Buyers Guide Architecture and Design Integration Newly Published Papers Network-based Threat Intelligence: Searching for the Smoking Gun Understanding and Selecting a Key Management Solution Building an Early Warning System Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks Incite 4 U Everything increases risk if firewall management sucks: In this week’s mastery of the obvious piece, we hear that Segmentation Can Increase Risks If Firewalls Aren’t Managed Well. The article provides a bully pulpit the firewall management vendors to tell us how important their stuff is. Normally I’d lampoon this kind of piece, but operating a large number of firewalls really is hard. Optimizing their use is even harder. Do it wrong, and you create a hole big enough to drive a truck through. So after years of maturing, these tools are finally usable for large environments, which means we will be doing a series within the next month or so. Stay tuned… – MR Preparation: I loved the idea of Netflix’s Chaos Monkey when I heard of it. An application that looks for inefficient deployments and deliberately causes them to fail. Very much in the Big Data design philosophy, where you assume failure occurs regularly – which both makes Netflix service better and continually verifies system resiliency. So when I read Threatpost’s How Facebook Prepared to Be Hacked I thought it would be
