My Chess Studying System

I started playing chess when I was pretty young. My dad taught me, and I used to play with him a lot, along with my friend Patrick. I stopped playing so much around high school age, but about a year and a half ago I picked it back up. I’ve been really enjoying studying and […]

Round 1 Game Analysis – Remembrance Day Open 2022

This year I played the Remembrance Day Open in Halifax, NS. It was a fun tournament, albeit humbling. My round 1 opponent was rated just under 1400 CFC. My rating is currently 1473, but it’s provisional and, I suspect, a bit too high (and will likely decrease after this tournament). So I was ready for […]

TIL – My Tunnel Vision in Chess

Today I played the second day of a chess tournament, and I spent a little bit of time analyzing my games. I lost both of my games today, unfortunately, and I’ll write up a more full analysis of them when I get to it. But something I learned quite poignantly, is that I seem to […]

Book Review: Start with Why

I had heard of Simon Sinek’s Start With Why for some time, and had seen his TED talk. But I hadn’t actually read the book until recently. I found it pretty inspiring, and wanted to outline some of the ideas that I found helpful. The Golden Circle The key illustration of the book is the […]

Tenable CTF Writeup

This past weekend, Sarah and I took part in the first CTF competition hosted by the cybersecurity company Tenable. The competition ran from Thursday to Monday, and had a lot of really great challenges. We had a lot of fun with it, and managed to place 56th out of over 1700 teams on the scoreboard. […]

Metasploit Community CTF – December 2020

Sarah and I enjoyed taking part in this year’s Metasploit Community CTF; a hacking competition put on by the folks at Rapid 7. It was a great weekend-long competition with a total of 20 flags and 874 teams. We did the same competition about a year ago; it was quite challenging, and we only got […]

Book Review: Deep Work

A couple years ago, I read a great book by Cal Newport called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, which I really enjoyed. I had heard that he wrote another book that was about focus and productivity, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to read it until recently. I just finished it, and loved it. […]

How to Not Get Hacked – Part 1

Recently I was digging into my online security setup to make sure it’s still working and keeping my online accounts secure. There have been some pretty high-profile hacks in the last 20 years or so, and no website is exempt from the possibility of a breach. If you’ve ever had a friend whose email, Facebook, […]

I Voted Green. Here’s Why.

First, a disclaimer: I am not a politician. I do not have a background in political science, and comparatively speaking, I haven’t spent a great deal of time thinking about the things I’m writing about here. However, I am a voter. As a Canadian citizen, I have a right to vote for the political party […]

Fall Keji Trip

We went out for one last visit to Kejimkujik National Park for the Fall. We went camping for a few nights earlier in the season, but wanted to get out for a day trip. Keji was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Dorian a few weeks ago. There were a lot of trees blown down, damage […]