joeware - never stop exploring... :)

A while back I said, hey got a new job, will be spending more time posting stuff and learning news things and sharing that new learning. It started going in that direction but then my time started getting eaten up more and more with work and issues with people, issues with tech, issues with direction, issues with technical debt, and issues of just not enough time in the day to get everything done that I wanted and needed to get done.

It isn’t that I haven’t been able to work on stuff outside of work, it is just that it is sometimes tough to get more than an hour here or there[1] because I have to often spend SOOOO much time on work depending on what is going on. And then when I am not working I have to spend SOOO much time trying to catch up to what I was supposed to be doing on the personal side. And then after all work and personal responsibilities comes my joeware stuff which in the end, really is for joy, fun and stress/creativity release until such a time that I can find a way to turn this into something that makes me real money.

One big problem of reaching that place where what I do for fun pays for my life is that I really like to help people AND I am not a business man. If I were starving perhaps I would be more of a business man and see the angles to make the money and properly monetize my creativity and intellectual property and capability. That being said we are talking about someone who wrote an article to submit to Windows IT Pro magazine ages ago to make the $50 or whatever it was for a basic how-to and plus to get it out out there in front of so many Windows Server Admins (at that time Windows IT Pro Mag was the go to for Windows Server Admins) and then they turned around and published it in a special security newsletter that they had that cost even more money and had a very limited audience which absolutely pissed me off because then I knew it wasn’t going to help all of the people that it was intended to help. I don’t even recall what that specific thing was about but it absolutely ended my days of writing for magazines. It was entirely my fault of course, I didn’t fully understand their control over my content and I believed (or perhaps wanted to believe) that they were just as interested in enlightening the Windows Admins of the world to Security as I was to make the industry overall better. They kind of did, but they also were business people who were looking to make money and knew that what I wrote was something that aligned with the type of content that people who had and were willing to spend more money on Security were paying more money on for in the first place. Exactly the kind of thing I am not good at. If I owned a drug company I would probably end up selling the drugs below cost if not actually giving them away and then getting a second job to pay for it all. Just like my “real job” pays for all of the stuff I do and have done for the Windows community for the last 20 years.

All that to say that I have done a horrible job with joeware stuff in any public manner lately but I do have some posts coming that have been slowly getting pieced together over the last number of months. Hopefully it will have been worth the wait.

Also I am still working on updates to AdMod which will really beef up its power some more but I have to be VERY careful with that code because it is so incredibly dangerous. Unlike AdFind where I can quickly toss things into the code AdMod actually makes changes and I try very hard to make sure that the changes it makes are actually the changes that were intended.

Aside from that I have an easy 150 bugs and DCRs to put into AdFind now from things that I have found in my “new”[2] full time job. Also I have a couple of friends who I work with who send me enhancement suggestions as well. One in particular I have to point out because he told me when I first met him that he knew I didn’t like PowerShell and he would have me converted by the end of the first year of working with him… I was like ok dude, others have tried and failed but ok cool. He now uses AdFind daily and uses AdMod more and more. I didn’t try to convert him. It is what it is.

joe

P.S. Do people read blogs anymore? Or is it all supposed to be Insta, Tweets, podcasts, and snapshats now a days?

[1] An hour here or there is a lot of time joe, wtf is your issue? Well it is and it isn’t. The quality I try to put into what I share with others usually takes a lot more than an hour to produce as I try to look at it from a variety of angles. That is why so much of what I have done has been so flexible and so far reaching. Anyone can just blather on, we all have seen it, I try not to be one of those people. We all have very limited time and I like to think that when you spend your valuable time to read something I have written, it ends up being worth the investment.

[2] Two years the first week of December wow. It simultaneously feels like it was 90 days and 90 years at once.