Mr. Robot

I find myself at Starbucks this morning again before 6AM. It's nice to be able to knock out half a standard workday before 10AM. I'm still trying to lock down the routine with the new job. I've got two alarms set per day: one to get up at 5 AM and one to remind me to get ready for bed at 9 PM. I still haven't figured out how to fit running in quite right yet. And it's getting hot. Yesterday was almost 80 degrees out! But I've got a desk set up at home and the kids have been pretty good about the closed door policy.

Tipped off by the StackOverflow blog this week the fam started watching Mr. Robot. It's been fun laughing alongside Maxwell while Cara & Zara are somewhat unawares what's happening. Maxwell's really taken to the CS world like a duck to water. The main character, Eliot, is written very well. He's a bit socially anxious. He spends his free time at his computer as well. He takes a dark view of the world and everyone around him. But they go a bit Hollywood as well - he's also a morphine addict who has intimate history with the Enron/Microsoft hybrid that is the fictional "Evil Corp". And taking a private jet to a datacenter to fix a DDoS attack is pure hokum as is Evil Corp's kidnapping of Eliot to offer him a job. The writer's err on the side of drama rather than realizing that an acquihire makes more business sense for a small vendor that's become a critical part of a major corporation's infrastructure. Not to mention Christian Slater's evil mastermind character. The point of the real Anonymous is that it's an amorphous group lead only by common ideals and methods to achieve their goals, which can be both high and petty. At least they got the petty part right.

I'm hoping the show doesn't get lost in silly intrigue. We're only 2 episodes into the first season. I also was inspired to pick up Maxwell a book on penetration testing. We'll see how much he gets out of it. It's one of those things one does as a parent to challenge their kids and open the world up to them. It's way beyond his current abilities, but hopefully it will inspire him to learn more. Even if he only reads through the chapter titles he'll have a basic framework for the organization of the field.

The fact that Cara's focus is elsewhere is understandable. Last night she turned in the final draft of her dissertation. She's coming down that home stretch to the finish. If everything goes according to plan in a few short weeks she'll be Dr. Cara Wogsland. She's also been spending more than a few hours every day worrying about and trying to help her sister Colleen, who is going through a rough patch after her release from a program in California. Nearly her whole graduate career Cara's been worried about and trying to help some member of her childhood family. First it was her mother who's cancer came back and eventually killed her, despite Cara getting her into special experimental treatments at Vanderbilt when it looked like there was no hope. Then we took in Ray for several stretches of time when we lived in the Lakeview house, while he coped with retirement, being a widower, and falling out with his other daughter, Colleen. It's amazing that Cara has managed to get to the end of her degree while expending so much energy on others outside of her nuclear family as well as dealing with the 5 of us!

I wonder what all these old guys at Starbucks think I'm doing as they sit here reading newspapers. That was an interesting world.