Themes for 2023

In a recent Discord chat, someone told me that they hated new year’s resolutions, and greatly preferred new year’s themes. I thought about it for a minute, and agreed that was a much better approach. Instead of a goal like “lose thirty pounds”, an overall theme of becoming a healthier person. That is one of my biggest themes for 2023 but another of the things I want to focus on this year is producing content. 

I wrote a blog post last which normally isn’t a big deal, but that was my first blog post since... (checks notes) … May of 2020. I could blame it on Covid or some other excuses but the fact is I was just burnt out. I was working a fifty hour a week job with the federal government and spending my vacation time teaching SANS classes. These are all good things and I’m not complaining, I just didn’t really have much energy left for producing much content outside of the occasional conference talk. 

Early in 2022 I received the opportunity to write an OSINT class for SANS which I knew would be a heavy lift in addition to my day job, but years ago a friend told me that if life presents you with an amazing opportunity, but you’re not sure if you can do it, say yes and figure out how after. I said yes and started cranking out content in the evenings and weekends for most of 2022. Fast forward to 2023 and a lot has changed. In late 2022 I retired from my job with the federal government after over 21 years and I have more time to focus on my consulting practice, Argelius Labs. I’m still busy, but I feel like I have a lot more control over what’s on my plate. 

With this control, I promised myself that in 2023 I would get back to producing more content. A blog post every day seems far-fetched, but one a week seems very doable. 

I have a few things (both 100% free) coming up soon including a Flashpoint webinar on getting started using APIs for OSINT on February 15th you can sign up for here. I'm looking forward to this and have been playing with ChatGPT a bit which I'll talk about here too.

I’ll also be hosting a workshop with SANS where we talk about metadata! Metadata is useful far more often than many people realize and we’ll cover some edge cases that have been useful in real world problem solving. You can register for the “Metadata Madness” workshop here.

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