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 […]

Damaged Gorge

We had a pretty crazy rainstorm last week. Some places in Nova Scotia reported over 160mm of rain, all within one day. One of our favourite places to ride, The Gorge, was hit hard. This is the trail system where the recent Canada Cup race was held. Sarah and I went out to check out […]