Tag: cybersecurity

The Beastwood Files: January(ish) 2026

A makeshift computer my son made using a box from a Costco delivery.
~ iambeastwood ~ 1 Comment

The beginning of the year was, um, well, it was something, wasn’t it? I found it hard to be productive at times between the state of our nation, the pile of snow outside, the hole that has opened up in my schedule now that a retainer agreement is up, and the post-nasal drip that comes every winter but is still a heck of a lot better than the flu or COVID. (And this is despite my “assistant” building himself a “computer” to “do work” – complete with a “power source” he has the good sense to “unplug” when he’s all done, likely making the IT help desk veterans in my audience swoon.)

Stuff I Wrote

Things I Did

  • Succeeded in only having one coffee per day – and only occasionally hurting the tum-tum with too much black tea in the afternoon
  • Rediscovered salad kits as a good option for Busy Parents on the Go or Otherwise Unable to Locate Vegetables in the Refrigerator They Aren’t Already Sick of Eating
  • Failed miserably to put out a newsletter – though let’s be honest, 90% of it would have been the AI stories you already read
  • Learn what is a fatberg thanks to a children’s book about urban infrastructure
  • Read a book about Groundhog Day roughly eight times in the span of a week

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • During last month’s snow day – certainly justified, as we got close to two feet of snow – I found myself uttering the phrase, “If you want to interrupt Mommy’s meeting, she said it’s OK, but you need to put pants on.”
  • Also during said snow day, during my third trip outside to shovel, my son decided that we should have one big pile of snow next to our front walkway instead of two smaller piles. As a result, I dutifully spent an hour moving shovels full of snow approximately two feet to make Snow Mountain, which my son ascended and descended many times before it got too dark to keep playing.
  • We have discovered the Winters Olympics. Our favorite events so far are ski jump, ski and snowboard cross (with multiple simultaneous competitors), and biathlon (especially odd because we’ve never bene on skis and have never seen a rifle). We’ve also regaled our son with tales of how hard it was to watch Back In Our Day, when you were beholden to whatever NBC was willing to show you. This further reinforces my son’s proclamation at his self-determined conclusion of soccer (that is, not even halfway through the season): “I like watching sports more than playing sports.”

Happy rest of February. In case you’re wondering, People Who Prefer Summer: Yes, even though it’s very cold, I still prefer this to 85 degrees and humid, because in this weather I can bend over and tie my shoes without breaking into a sweat.

The Beastwood Files: December 2025

Mug that says "Brian Eastwood Writes" and has a cool logo that my wife designed for me
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Are you back to work? Do you know what day it is? Does time even exist as a concept? I’m hitting the ground running in January, bearing in mind that most of my running is actually at an easy, conversational pace and followed by a nice snack and maybe some hot tea.

Stuff I Wrote

Things I Did, Christmas Edition

  • Left a trail of pine needles from the living room down the stairs and to the curb after failing to learn for like the 12th consecutive year that a Christmas tree acquired in late November is effectively dead well before New Year’s
  • Assembled lots of LEGO ay my son’s behest
  • Drank tea from a swanky mug with a logo my wife designed (she also made business cards and a T-shirt, which I’ll show off when it’s not so damn cold)
  • Gave my wife a nice stapler, which prompted her to say, “Go look for the gold gift bag,” which contained … a nice stapler that she’d gotten for me (Kids, getting old is so much fun, isn’t it?)
  • Signed up, once again, for the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington over Memorial Day weekend

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • I had a Proud Dad moment when, amid one of approximately 1,234 random conversations over the holiday break, my son described how turning off a toy and then turning it back on is a good way to get it to start working again. Kid, you now know how to solve 75% of IT Help Desk issues!
  • Amid a few of the approximately 1,234 random conversations, I introduced a topic called Real Talk With Daddy, which is when I address important issues in our lives. One was having sweaty feet. Another was the pros and cons of Diet Coke and coffee as sources of caffeine, especially relative to short-term impact on the digestive tract. A third was the quality of English food. Open to suggestions for further discussion points.
  • Like many parents, we spent a good chunk of the holiday break answering the question “What are we doing next?” on days we’d made it clear we had no interest in actually leaving the house. In jest, I repeatedly suggested that we alphabetize our socks. On New Year’s Day, my son called my bluff and said it was time to go upstairs and do it. (In case you’re wondering: You organize my color, then put the colors in alphabetical order.) We did NOT do this with Daddy’s socks, as they are either boring black and boring white, with maybe a couple navy blue for good measure.

Happy January. I’ve resolved to drink less coffee, use my downtime more thoughtfully, better focus on cross training, publish two eBooks (one being the patient engagement one I really should’ve finished last year), be more thoughtful about one-off projects, and continue to get rid of stuff I don’t need. Nothing is earth-shattering, but collectively I hope they will make for a better year. Well, that and more tea.

The Beastwood Files: August 2025

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Summer vacation is officially over. The Beastwoods have returned from a week in Portland, Maine and Acadia National Park, which came just a few days after our inaugural camping trip that wasn’t in Granny and Papa’s backyard. Both trips were indeed a success. Kiddo’s back in school and Mom and Dad are back to work. The cat, meanwhile, celebrated her 17th birthday with quite possibly the best gift we could have given her: A quiet, empty house.

Stuff I Wrote

Things I Read

I neglected to bring a book on vacation, assuming incorrectly I’d not have the energy to read after bedtime. As my wife likes to say, “We all make choices.” Instead, I treated myself to a few Wikipedia rabbit holes. What did I learn?

  • The northernmost point in Maine, Estcourt Station, is basically a sliver of a town in Quebec that was cut off when the international boundary was properly surveyed. The border crossing closes at 5 p.m. on Friday; after that, if you want to go to the “other” side of town before Monday morning, you apparently need to drive on hundreds of miles of gravel logging roads through the North Maine Woods. Plan accordingly.
  • Acadia is on Mount Desert Island, which is the second-largest island on the Eastern seaboard (to Long Island). It’s just a big bigger than Martha’s Vineyard, which is in Dukes County, Massachusetts. The county includes the Elizabeth Islands – most of which are owned by the Forbes family.
  • The largest park in the Lower 48 is actually a state park, Adirondack Park in upstate New York. It apparently has more than 100 villages inside it, as more than half the park is actually private owned. Most villages lack cellphone coverage. (The park’s actually held up as a good example of public-private partnership for the sake of conservation.)

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • To answer a question I posed on LinkedIn, I believe we have determined that Vermont (Ben & Jerry’s) has the best ice cream in Northern New England – or at least the most recognizable. That said, we did find a Friendly’s in South Portland. Everyone in the family enjoyed the nostalgia, though my son was a bit confused about why his sundae had a face.
  • Every once in a while, I talk to my son about Very Dad Things to Do. One is turning off all the lights before we leave the house. Another is telling a Dad Story, which is a lot like a Dad Joke in the sense that it’s not very interesting. On this vacation, the Very Dad Thing to Do to which I introduced my son was getting a giant wad of napkins from McDonald’s, putting them in the glove compartment of the car, and then forgetting all about them.
  • If you’re ever in Waterville, Maine, and it’s not Monday or Tuesday, stop by the Children’s Discovery Museum. I only learned of its existence while perusing Google Maps from the aforementioned nearby McDonald’s during our 10:15 lunch stop, and we ended up spending two and a half hours there. Highlights included the “pizza oven,” the “rooftop garden,” and the $2 globe stress ball that we may or may not have misplaced since we got home.

The Beastwood Files: Spring 2025

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I’ve had an interesting few months. I finally bit the bullet, upgrading my website and selecting a hosting provider. The former was a good idea, and long overdue, as it let me set up a store where I could get rich selling digital content. The latter turned out not to be such a good idea since 1) it somehow managed to create a second WordPress log-in for me and 2) said log-in was linked to me staging site, not my actual website.

This meant the blog posts I created on what I thought was my existing website were in fact on the new version, which is also were I happened to create the product page for my eBook (which I also happened to edit and design over the course of the spring).

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get the new blog posts – namely, the April and May roundups you’ve come to know and love, or at the very least tolerate – to appear on the page that listed all the blog posts. That seemed like kind of a big deal. There were also some quirky tweaks to my new (or maybe existing?) website that weren’t the best, and it wasn’t clear whether they were the result of the site migration or user error.

As a result, I scrapped the hosting plan and stuck with a Business version of my old WordPress site. I didn’t lose any necessary functionality, and I didn’t end up spending more. What I’d been paying for the hosting service basically now pays for a business email address, with the added bonus that it’s not Webmail, which as far as I can tell no one actually likes.

The issue – and this is where it gets interesting, folks – is that I decided to do this a few days after I launched my eBook, which meant to link to it was dead. It also meant the April and May roundups disappeared, along with my heartfelt look back at five years of full-time freelancing. I was able to repost the eBook product page (which was easy enough to rewrite) and the career retrospective (which I’d drafted in Word), and I managed to rewrite the blog post introducing the eBook to the world.

That said, I didn’t bother redoing the roundups. To be blunt, I didn’t feel like it. Plus, the list of Stuff I Read was a bit short, and my Adventures in Fatherhood were a bit repetitive, redundant, and repetitive.

So, instead, I present to you, my loving audience, a quarterly roundup. This includes links to everything published in the last three months, along with some fun tales of raising a child that I may or may not have shared with you already.

Stuff I Wrote

Dang, this list looks a lot more impressive when it covers three months instead of one, doesn’t it?

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • Over Memorial Day weekend, I ran a marathon in Burlington, Vermont. The course was two Figure-8 loops. All told, I went through downtown Burlington four times. This meant I ran up the hill on Main Street four times. My wife told my son this was a mean thing to make the runners do. She wasn’t wrong – and for the next two weeks, my son, who has entered the phase of asking so, so many questions – humored me a few times a day by asking, “Why did the marathon do a mean thing to the runners?”
  • Meanwhile, over Fourth of July weekend in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, my son was introduced to the idea that Daddy attracts mosquitos almost immediately upon going outside. (Don’t ask me why. They always have.) He then proceeded to humor us by repeatedly saying, “The bugs love Daddy.”
  • We’ve recently discovered store-bought frozen water- and fruit-based confections. This is lovely – but, as my son prefers to eat approximately three bites of things before declaring, “All done,” it also means at any given time there are at least two unfinished treats in the freezer. That also means there are often at least two child-sized bowls or plates in the freezer, which is a challenge when, say, we arbitrarily decide the Cheerios need their own bowl.

With any luck, I’ll get back to monthly posts starting in August, just in time for everyone to stop caring about work until Labor Day.