JerryGamblin.com.

I live in the middle of Missouri, I grew up in St.Louis.  When I was 8 I thought the Ozzie Smith backflip was the coolest thing in the world (Ok, it is still pretty cool).  I love to listen to Mike Shannon do play by play on the radio.  My Cardinal street cred is about as high as you can get.  

Now I also work in Network Security.   So my general disposition trends pretty hard pessimistic.  I am trained to quickly see the worst possible outcome and try to mitigate it as quickly and painlessly as possible.  ( I swear I am not as bad as that last sentence makes me out to be, I promise.)

My professional life makes it hard for me to be a good sports fan.   With “good” meaning you always think that there is a chance for them to win no matter the odds or situation.  

I didn’t think that the Cardinals had any chance to make the playoffs in August.  

I really didn’t think that they were going to beat the Phillies.

My brain tells me they will have a hard time with the Rangers.                     

So talking to most people they wouldn’t consider me a good Cardinals fan.   I try to be though. I am looking forward to the day I can sneak Landon out of school for an afternoon game at Busch 4.  The nights I can turn on the radio in his room and he can listen to the game as he drifts off to sleep.  I want to pass on my love for the cardinals to him.

So from now on I am going to try to be a good sports fan.

I predict that the Cardinals beat the Rangers in the World Series 4-2. 

No rally squirrel needed.  

Sadly this is how much most people know about cyberbullying.

This morning I was asked by Chris Kellogg to come to KFRU and talk about internet security since it is cyber security awareness month.

The 45 minutes I was on the air flew by and we didnt get to everything we wanted but we hit the following points:

• Have a different password for every website. 
• Check your credit score at annualcreditreport.com
• Using a separate credit card for all internet purchases.
• Call your bank to verify if they ask for information via email or txt message.

I had a blast and hope to be able to do it again in the future.

Now we know what the sales meetings for the Blackberry Playbook looked like at RIM.

About a month ago I was interviewed for the COMO Collective tech interview section.

Here it is. One day I will give an adult interview.

For the first day of fall: Pumpkin pie ala bazookie!

My son (kid on the right in the white polo) and his two year old Sunday school class sung a couple of songs today before church as part of their graduation to the “bigger kids” class.

Facebook has a new security feature called “Profile Review” so whenever you are tagged in a photo or a post, you’ll have to approve it before it appears in your news feed or your wall (Unapproved tagged posts and photos will appear in your profile wall in a new section called “Pending posts.”).  Of course this is an opt-in feature because security for everyone would be silly.

Here’s how to activate Profile Review:

1. Go to Account> Privacy Settings.
2. Next to “How Tags Work” click “Edit Settings”.
3. In the “How Tags Work” pop-up, click “Edit” next to “Profile Review”.
4. In the next pop-up, click “Turn on Profile Review”.

This will stop those embarrassing pictures of you at the game showing up for everyone to see until you have time to approve them yourself.

I spent $15 on amazon and picked up two of my favorite Charlie Brown cartoons to start indoctrinating teaching my son what some of the best cartoons ever are.

Having a 2 year old is a great way to get to watch your favorite cartoons from when you were growing up.

The Relativity of Wrong… in the security industry.

Randy Raw, my professional mentor (not that I pay him, but I look to him for guidance in my profession… although he probably deserves to be paid for putting up with me) sent me a link to an article by Isaac Asimov on the relativity of wrong.

Reading it got me thinking about how security people see the security industry and Asimov hits it out of the park with this quote:

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

We do this all time.  If someone doesn’t have perfect security they have no security.  Next time a major company is breached watch the articles and tweets flow about how lax their security is.  No matter how they were attacked someone will put out the boiler plate article about how their security sucked.

Asimov closes with a line that I think is awesome:

What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.

I love a paraphrase to this quote and need to get it on a shirt…. 

Security is not so much wrong as it is incomplete.

In security we are always gradually refining all of our security theories and policies. If you look back at your companies security policies 2 years ago they weren’t wrong they were just incomplete.