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Hahahahahahahaha.... Can't believe I didn't find this earlier. There's another choice for President, and he really has ideas!  I'm a PC and I'm a Republicrat. 

Republicrats – Official Political Party of Sean Masterson

Awww... cute story. America’s ‘Lost Monarchy’: The Man Who Would Be King | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com. Coming from a Commonwealth nativeland, its not unusual for me to feel a little love for anything naturally dynastic. I wonder what all might have been different historically, had George decided to accept coronation. We wouldn't have the constitutional battles we have today (or the Nick Cage movies where he finds our founding fathers' artifacts.) We might have had an interesting approach to immigration and possibly a resultant more heterogeneous society. Would the ideas of Ford and Edison have been suppressed early on? Would casual wear have ever been invented? Would the Couch Potato have never emerged?  Possibly we'd all not be living like Kings as I think we do, something we probably need to reflect on, in comparison with the real have-nots in this world. Maybe we'd have still made it to the kind of technology we have reached today, but maybe not. I guess this leads to me thinking about who else might have been, or might be a cool King of America. All issues of dynasty and DNA aside, from just a personality and accomplishment perspective, Would Lincoln have been made King? Would Kennedy have ever even had a shot at it? What about someone else, someone like Larry King or Carole King or Martin Luther King Jr.? Would Bill Gates or Jack Welch, or even Warren Buffett have been a good American King?

And of course this brings me back to the topic of campaigning. When the leader is not ordained by God, it seems to be complex trying to figure out how to choose one. I don't get it.

Thanks to Reality TV, we have some great new business models for an improved election process, and a more intimate view of candidates as well. Placing them in the same home with tight shared quarters and crazy contests with weird food, random "sports" and emotional battles, it would make for a real understanding of who might make a better president for our great and sometimes neurotic nation. Hmmm... what about the model that American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and Top Chef offer? We could have them complete various levels of challenges - maybe in an inner city school one day, handling a fire in big city another day, speak in a Huge stadium another day, and don't forget the lightning veto rounds, where they can quickly consider and veto bills that sit in a pile for them. And our judges would give them feedback, but ultimately, its our text messaging that would decide the victor. Imagine Obama and McCain each behind their text-to-vote numbers (as Jenn imagined so vividly) with their silly Vote 4 Me smiles and gestures. That would be a hoot! Ok maybe Reality TV and game shows aren't really the answer. Maybe there's another, greater model to leverage here for our amazing American dream.

I was telling Jenn and Gayathri yesterday, how is it that we struggle every 4 years over a new leader, with bi-partisan mudslinging, etc., while as a world we citizens have found an intelligent way to choose a Miss Universe? And she gets a crown, too! What might work here, may not be monarchy, but maybe we can tear a page from the beauty pagaent industry's  best practices, since the debates are starting to sound like beauty pagaent Q & A segments anyway. Perhaps we have contestants from everywhere (and call them candidates if we really want to, but it means the same thing) do their thing (talent, Q & A, obviously their best runway, a la Obama's rolled up sleeves casual look with Michelle's throwback to the Jackie days). Then, we get down to a contestant from each party -- all this should sound familiar, no changes yet -- and then they don't choose running mates. Instead, America (supplemented by a panel of illustrious judges) chooses 1 winner. The other's party's rep becomes 1st runner up, which is an important role, since in the case that the newly chosen Mr. President cannot continue his role, the 1st runner up must conduct himself with dignity as the next Mr. President and take the responsibilities and duties of the winner. Why not? The worst that could happen is a ripped suit in the dressing room, but a little fabric tape could fix that. And let's not forget about the prizes! The winner always gets a great advertising contract to promote a cause of their choice and a terrific scholarship for advanced education. After Brokaw's posing of the "what don't you know?" question, this prize offers just the solution.

I suppose in the face of potential global economic meltdown, a little entertaining thought of McCain in an authentic Mikimoto pearl & diamond crown with the gorgeous Cindy in her velvet and lace best plus those Sex & the City high heels close by his side, ain't a bad day in my Imagi-Nation.

An attempt was made to post this a long time ago, and then I got too busy to try and fix it. But here you go....

Why bother with the CISSP? I had this goal in my Franklin Covey for like 5 years now. I am really passionate about security, but not for your average, typical reasons. Not because security professionals get paid more, or because I needed another cert for my job or career goals, or even due to any kind of professional and industry peer pressure (not to mention being in a job that is less likely to be off-shored.) I am passionate about security because I care about the young girls who are the target of evil online predators of a really bad kind, and I want to to protect the women of the future from facing this kind of abuse. I am concerned deeply for elders who click on links in their emails, only to find out that a predator of a different kind has stolen their life savings and their identities away from them. And I care about businesses working so hard to provide services to their customers, to drive to the results they need to show their stakeholders from quarter to quarter for American business to thrive and our economy to improve, but the cost of a single security incident is damaging to their reputation, resulting in loss of customers, revenues and ultimately, our nation's jobs, if that business fails. I felt I should do something... be tough on myself, learn everything I need to know and test myself, you know, prove I have the basics so I can be a superheroine. I felt that a tough exam that organizes and reviews all the areas that a security professional who really cares should be familiar with in order to interpret or act on a situation, or create strong, user-inspired, protective governance, would be something I should do for me and for my world. Just like my world records were not for my reputation or for publicity, but for my passion about Bharata Natyam.  So I put it in my planner and kicked my butt during the 1st half of this year by adding it as a personal goal in my committments at work, causing my boss and even my great grand boss to remind me over and over again to prioritize and complete the boot camp and subsequent exam.

Once fear and laziness subsided, I talked to some of my MS colleagues in Security who were already CISSPs, and they pointed me to some online prep, their own study guides and recommended as long a camp as I could get into since the failure rate is between 60 - 80%(source:http://govexec.com/mailbagDetails.cfm?aid=38380) or so. My friends Mark and Ben gave me study materials and endorsement and really helped prep me adequately for the exam.  Kat (messagelady) as well as everyone from the Hotmail engineering team who were at my unofficial going-away party (since I was moving to Redmond also at the time) did some tequila shots with me, after we started (drunkenly) talking CISSP domains like the OSI model, physical security and attack scenarios. You should have heard us at St. Stephen's Green: there's nothing like the intense creativity and passion unleashed by geeks when we get drunk and twisted, talking tech together. In all seriousness, looking back, they really gave me some good meaty scenarios to think about.

After the drinking, came the thinking:

If you go to the ISC2 site, you will see they recommend a number of sources for the exam. This is a very different experiential and scenario driven exam in that no all-in-one book is enough. So if you noticed me closely, I was traveling for about 5 months with more than 4 books at a time, switching off by content, until I had read through about 22 books and portions of 14 other books. Then there were the websites. What really helped me was working on some actual incidents, cross-team, end to end, from an online team getting notice of a vulnerability all the way through to providing the documentation needed for our legal team. It made me know the types of attacks from the subtle differences in described forensic evidence which I saw the need to understand in a lot of the questions I faced. Helping my former org get through audit cycles helped me understand compliance at a non-auditor level. And having worked on early Homeland Security identity apps helped me understand a lot of the crypto- based scenarios for some of those kinds of questions.  My choice of roles had required me to stay on top of internet trends in attacks and activity worldwide, understanding the subtleties of opening a data center on a fault line, or in a particular Asian region and all the implications there. So Dark Reading, SANS, searchsecurity.com, and a lot of other similar sites and hacker blogs helped as I got closer to exam time. We had to finish reading either the ISC2 BOK or the All-in-one by Shon Harris by boot camp start time. Some folks I met had read through both books for the third time before coming to camp.  I took the Vigilar camp with a number of folks from different companies and from the military. About 1/3 of the attendees had previously failed the CISSP the first one or two times they had taken it, so I made sure to include a couple of them in our self-organized study team. The boot camp was in Virginia and lasted one week from about 8 am to about 8 pm daily plus study sessions with our self-organized teams, practice exams and homework for the following day. So sleep was usually from 2 – 6 and that was it.  It was the most exhausting and rigorous schedule I had been on since my world record. Even physically it was exhausting.  But there were lots of chips, donuts and other munchies to keep us awake. It was totally useful… because it prepped us for the stress and recall that you need to have over 6 hours. 4 hours was the longest exam I did before this, and that was really nothing, since the brain can usually focus for that long normally. The prep helped in the way a real boot camp does, but it would never have taught any of us everything we had to know for the exam. It was just meant as a review for what we already each know about information security.  I had to use every single experience, book, magazine article and website I had encountered in most of the 250 questions. I think overall, only about 15  questions were easy glossary throw away types. Also, you can’t plan your odds in a weighted manner like you can with all other exams. The questions all have different weights, 25 will not be graded at all, and the rest they don’t tell you the worth on, but they are not equal. So you never know how you did.

But the hardest thing is 5 hours in a chair and trying to fill in 250 little tiny circles with a pencil. It’s hard on the eyes, I got drowsy in the middle, hallucinated that my baby nephew Vishwa was sitting on my desk, and just couldn’t focus at one point. All every one of us did after the test was 1) go and pee; 2) get a drink; 3) lie down and close our eyes; 4) catch our shuttle back to the hotel silently and crawl into bed and sleep with the a/c on. I really can’t believe I passed.

Quick break for a Vote of Thanks: Pops, Markple, BDB, SCREAM Team (everyone in Security and GSO/GSM - esp. the Davids (Steele, Raasch, Schiff,) Gayathri, Joan and Kim Howell. Oh and the Kats (Collins and Gillespie) And Leo and Bob... Bam! You guys shared so much of your knowledge in discussions, in passing and in meetings and emails... and supported me through this process. Marius, your wisdom exceeds your youth. I learned a lot from working with you and I so appreciate your partnering approach to security. And there was the overarching encouragement I received from Glennbee and Steveclo  and my former boss, Lori. And my cyber Kung Fu Guru, Larry Greenblatt!!!!! You are a brilliant superhero-level esoteric security arts master. You and Kirk and Spock (and Daler Mehndi too) made preparation fun and easier than it would have been otherwise. You are all the sharpest folks I know and I grow smarter just by knowing all of you. I am grateful to all of you and always will be.

I do think what helped at the end of the day was:

1) Having had enough varied experiences in all of the 10 domains, (especially physical security, networking, law and crypto) so one isn’t struggling to learn the basics of a whole science or law to have to instantly turn around and decipher or interpret it in the scenario-based questioning

2) Being able to basically shut out everything -- friends, family, all communication except really critical work for about a month or two in advance of the boot camp

3) Going away from anywhere near home or work (for me) so I could not be contacted or found. I chose boot camp away from Redmond, Silicon Valley and any place I had a relative or dance person I know well. Mom told me who was nearby, but I blocked it all out.

4) Reading everything current one can about every domain to stay on top of current trends. A book can’t help with a question that describes a certain type of an emerging botnet attack or court decree that the book didn’t know about but the exam writers included since its hot off the press over the past 12 months.

So that’s what I have come back with. I hope some of this helps. You really have to be completely in love with information security to put yourself through this particular exam. I hear the Security + exam or the CISM is just as useful career-wise and not as demanding as the CISSP, which has the reputation of being the toughest certification exam in the world.  Bar none. If you love everything about this field, then you should pack your family off for a while and hunker down and do it.

And all is well in the world of Microsoft. You;d like the new Windows Live Mail, if you haven't already begun using it. And hey, if you hated your Hotmail ID all this time, now is the time to go to www.live.com and try to obtain a new Live ID. No worries, there's tons to tools to integrate your mailboxes seamlessly.

This is a test posting using Windows Live Writer, and it is kind of fun and simple to use. I like that you can use it offline and then post to Spaces or a Sharepoint blog whenever you want to connect up. Plus there's lots of flexibility with the toolset. So maybe, for a few days, I may go back to blogging here and leave the Superpoking on my Facebook to other kids.

:)