Top 3 Ways to Keep Up with Cyber Security

Hardware

Keeping hardware up-to-date on any device is usually updated automatically by default. In the last several years, Apple, Android, Windows, Linux, and peripheral devices have wireless capabilities and software available online.

It’s good to restart your devices at least once a week according to the NSA. 

Currently, we are in a code red for surveillance of Americans by Russia and China on the orders of the Pentagon’s Chief Pete Hegseth. Trump is strong-arming the GOP. Vance is looking forward to Trump’s death to move forward with a theocracy-techno state.

Meanwhile, the richest man in the world Elon Musk, is illegally destroying institutional structure keeping America Running like a liberal democracy. 

Firmware

Firmware is what a device like a cell phone, smart TV, printer, network router, etc uses as its operating software. For a printer to print the firmware needs to give the commands to move the paper and when and where to spray dots of ink.

Imagine a giant nuclear power plant and the firmware in the valve system has a flaw that can be exploited by a rogue agent to stop water from flowing to the cooling reactors. Then we have a nuclear meltdown because someone didn’t upgrade a valve firmware. Or in a simpler case your phone gets its contact list raided and taken over along with all your secure account information tied to it.

Software and Apps

Software includes all code-based instructions for running the machines we use including the applications or Apps. Operating Systems like Windows and Mac are software that run software applications. MS Word is a word processing software. There’s even software for giving remote administrative access for people to work together over a network. This is critical software to keep up-to-date and usually is included in your computer or device updates.

Again the problem here is Cyber Command just kicked the door wide open for any bad actor to come along and take over a computer. A lot of times it’s just a user error like opening up a phishing e-mail or going to a nefarious website that installs malware. User behavior goes a long way in staying safe on the web.

In the end, there really is no way to stay 100% secure in this world cyber security or terra firma. But you can create hurdles to make it harder by keeping your technology up-to-date.

I had a friend in town for a conference that I had met playing Fallout 76. We got to talking and found out we both have a passion for photography and he would be visiting in March for a conference. Fortunately for him there are some super blooms of poppies and lupine going on around the central to southern part of Arizona. In my head I’m thinking Saturday afternoon is perfect. We planned on meeting on the way to Horsheshoe Dam Rd. near Bartlett Lake. Phoenix was showing cloudy weather and even on zoom.earth an hour before arriving they looked like cirrus cloud cover, those are the ones that look like brush strokes.

Here’s a couple flowers to look at.

Well that didn’t last for long. I don’t know if it was the mountains, but it was probably the mountains that created some rain clouds directly over our route. Mountains kind of act like a wall where wind is forced up combining with cold moist air and creating (condensing into) thicker clouds that rained on our short road trip to find poppies. There was even a little thunder and lighting. My friend was a bit nervous about me driving a low clearance vehicle on a dirt road and talking about how flash flooding made all the deep cuts of erosion we were avoiding on the road and shoulders.

My friend got over any apprehensions pretty quick as we found our first field of poppies. The poppies also answered his question, “Do you think the flowers will be closed up?” They sure were in a state of nyctinasty. The petals that usually bare all to the shining sun were in fact rolled up tight. They did however still provided brilliant colors in a dramatic environment as we cleared the storm cell.

The mountain ranges were contrasting each other as the sun shone through breaks in the sky and sharp shadows covered other areas in the distance. Almost like a spotlight made to direct attention to the beauty of the green valleys full of old Saguaros standing tall like soldiers with sporadic patches of yellow poppies. Ah the Super Bloom!

We stopped a few times until we reached a point I wasn’t so sure my Hyundai Sonata could pass. A small stream was crossing the road with some soft sand and an ankle deep pool with some good sized rocks. Although I did ask the people near by how much they would pay me to try. A beer and help getting unstuck was the final offer. Well look at the time! We gotta get back to the top of the hills if we want to catch the sunset.

I drove carefully back through the storm that seemed to park itself over the worst parts of the road. We passed by an unfortunate family stuck in an area that was not meant for passenger cars. Luckily everyone one was friendly in trucks and jeeps and a couple decided to stop. Well almost everyone was cool. We had a red-orange Tacoma go flying by with in a foot of my parked car earlier. I’m surprised they didn’t throw their empty beer cans at us.

We arrived back on the paved road to an area with a decent view of the horizon. I had pointed the section out early as our fall back position if things didn’t go well. As my friend put it. It turned out to be an Epic Sunset. The view east had some of the most vivid colors at the start of the golden hour with clouds just barely light enough to hover over the mountain peaks.

Then to the west as the sun sunk behind the mountains, the light created a lustrous yellow glow that slowly turned into orange, pinks and purples with the last perceivable light before complete darkness passed the blue hour.

We may not have seen the Super Bloom in it’s full glory. Hell, it was even a little chilly and questionable if I made the right choice. As you can see sometimes plans go sideways, but if you persevere and stay malleable, plans can turn out better than expected. I’m glad my friend trusted me and nature delivered on the goods.

If you have insomnia or sleep pattern issues, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I read an article not to long ago about Puscifer bandmates different creative processes. Where one could create on demand and for another it takes some inspiration. I’m a little all over the place, especially once being in the sign industry. Making signs is more about creating readable signage than mind blowing art. Also writing and visual art works tend to shift for me in periods.

These periods tend to coincide with things going on in my life and what I like to call my personality. I think the DSM has a bunch of labels for my personality. Fuck the DSM if you’ve ever had a label hung around your neck. Embrace it, feel it, and move the fuck on with life the best you can. I’ve seen a lot of people in my days who can not do that. So with my insomnia driven by stress and loss I have learned to adapt to it and embrace I don’t operate 9 to 5 all the time. Furthermore these periods churn up the creative visions and inspirations that drive me as an artist and writer.

Now a little bit about this series of photos. I was up late night, early morning, stuck in a routine of driving and getting by and just sucking up the suck of life. I have been working on breaking through an anxious fear of driving late nights to roll with the punches of insomnia. The insomnia driven by stress in paying the bills and the anxiety driven by PTSD and CPTSD. I’m in deep debt, Photography is not cheap and I have yet to find patrons to help support the effort like the Medicis of the renaissance period. Oh yeah that tid bit of history, this blog post, this website, design and photo editing also cost $50k in education I’ve yet to pay for. Buy my stuff please!

Anyway moving on. Then a little reminder I set for myself alerted me to the Full Moon at 3 AM. The night had sporadic storms cast from Hurricane Kay off Baja California, so it was questionable if I could get a picture of the moon. By Sunrise I decided to charge up the batteries for my camera and set out with the intention of getting a full moon setting behind the cityscape of Phoenix.

Well I jumped in my car setting off for a position east of the city on McDowell Road at Papago Park. The way life goes, it went with a detour at my planned exit on 52nd Street. I thought maybe I could accomplish the photo from the Mill Avenue bridge in Tempe just like in my Harvest Moon photos from last year. But looking at the position of the moon I was off a good 20 degrees. I was losing time as the moon setting was growing larger. I made a U-Turn on Priest heading up to McDowell to my spot by the old stairs in Papago Park.

The moon quickly was obscured behind the distant clouds on the horizon. I still had some photos to take despite what life was throwing my way. It was a chance to get some clear shots after the rain cleared the sky of the usually hazy atmosphere. Then the sun started to rise kissing the cityscape from the tips of the sky scrappers and slowly working its way down their facades.

I knew I only had a few minutes to turn around for sunrise. It was better than imagined. The moisture with the sun created a dramatic warm glow through the cool clouds and fog pushing through the canyons between mountain ranges. These stair cases were made with the intention of communing with God, the Creator, the spirit of the universe, nature on Sundays.

I set up for panoramas knowing the best way to capture it might require a different lens, but also knew I could take several frames stacking them to bring out the best dynamic range and stitching them together for the epic view. It was a race against the sun rising and a large group of runners gathering at the base of the stairs. My intention was to create two halves with a top pano being the horizon and the bottom half featuring the stairs.

I was able to get a couple perspectives of the horizon, but capturing the stairs in the bottom half was thwarted by the local population exerting their right to be there too. Despite this nuisance to my creative process I soaked up the sun warmly illuminating the deep layers of the mountain ranges through the clouds and fog.

I included closer cropped images to show the details in the main panoramic photo. These images are meant for large walls for people to spend time finding all the little subtle nuances in the larger picture. Much like life, if you focus too much on the bigger picture you miss the tiny things that bring it all together. And if you focus too much on one tiny detail in life like the flaw of a human figure stretched and distorted you miss the whole point of communing with things greater than our understanding.

Muse Dream

There you are in a dream

The subconscious love affair

Your rejection didn’t seem real 

Until deep in sleep

How does anyone continue? 

A traitorous fantasy

Paralyzed in a vulnerable juxtapose

My own mind betrays me 

Or something like that. So what that means is I am replacing the woo commerce plug-in for a shop hosted by Fine Art America. The cool part of this is you can order prints of various sizes on canvas and different substrates. How would you like to cuddle with a Gila Monster at night in a duvet cover?

I think for longevity going with a larger website will help with visibility and maybe even start the revenue stream I’ve been striving for to replace my day job with full-time photography. How cool would that be?

It’s going to be a slow process getting the images up, but eventually I will be posting the best of my most recent work.

Appreciate you stopping by to click through them!

A Sky Island is a unique feature in the desert where a mountain and it’s elevation creates a separate environment from the surrounding areas. The Pinaleños and Mount Graham were originally called Dził Nchaa Si’an by the Apache and is considered one of their holiest places. It was also part of the San Carlos Reservation until a presidential executive order in 1873 took it back and is now controlled by the U.S. government and the University of Arizona.

I do appreciate being able to visit these marvels. Personally I believe this mountain still belongs to the Apache people and our government should consider giving back the national parks to natives across both continents. Please consider donating to the NDN Collective

Here's a related article to read in the Atlantic on the Land Back movement. RETURN THE NATIONAL PARKS TO THE TRIBES

Dził Nchaa Si’an is one unique Sky Island in the middle of the Sonoran desert of Arizona. My girlfriend Karla and I decided to get out of the record breaking heat in Phoenix to the mild ponderosa pine covered alpines. It was our first visit and took us about four hours to drive, most of which was just getting to the base of Mt. Graham.

As we climbed out of the scorching desert heat along the switchbacks of Arizona Route 366, we watched the dashboard thermostat drop rapidly and the elevation markers increase at the same rate. 100 degrees at 3000 feet, 90 degrees at 6000, 80 degrees at 7000, 70 degrees at 9000. All along the scenery changing from mesquites, cholla, and blooming yuccas to ponderosa, lush ferns, and aspen.

A friend of Karla’s mentioned staying at Shannon Campground as a kid, so we set our Google Maps destination to check it out. It’s a cul-de-sac essentially of about 10 camping spots in a valley surrounded with pines, wildflowers, abundant berry bushes and a small creek. At the end of the cul-de-sac is the heliograph trailhead.

Shannon campground has several spots in a narrow valley with a couple streams, one of which is dry. Our campground host introduced himself and warned us of a black bear he saw earlier in the day even showing me the video of the black bear retreating down a rocky slope into the valley. Our first evening he was kind enough to walk with us a few hundred meters down the Heliograph trail to a point where the black bear was in the morning. We talked a little bit about the berries, trees, and some of the settlers version of the history before heading back to our campsite. He made a point to mention it was the settlers history.

I took the initiative to look further into some of the Apache history and importance of the mountain range. One of the things in my early education that was missing was the nexus of settlers and natives other than the white washed version of Lewis and Clark. Arizona was first explored by Conquistadors and was apart of Mexico before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 where manifest destiny was actualized.

Our camp host told us the Albert squirrel was introduced for hunting purposes which had an adverse effect on the native red squirrel, which found refuge in the peaks of the mountain range until fires destroyed their habitat. Our host told us that hired assassins are removing the Albert squirrel. As you can see in the picture this little guy is quite diabolical with their plans to destroy the red squirrel and dominate Dził Nchaa Si’an. Sounds like a familiar narrative… They are pretty cool looking squirrels and I can see how they might make a nice little kabob. This was just one of many natural conservation errors made in America though.

One of the reasons I like to go into the mountains is to find peace from this world. As interconnected as we are in the city of Phoenix it’s nice to get away from the chaos. I set the hammock up for Karla and spent sometime meditating and watching a different kind of world. A world that was created without our help and will continue to exist many years after we are gone. Aspens shimmering leaves in the sunlight. Strange bird calls echoing in the canyons. Bears anxiously foraging for berries still blossoming and being pollenated by the bees. Listening to the wind squeezed through the arrangement of trees as if trying to speak to the visitors who have come from below.

The evening was peaceful and the temperatures cooled as we laid in bed trying to get a glimpse of the stars. We left the rainfly off the tent to look at the stars, but clouds and the moonlight kept the stars from shining at their brightest. Karla went to sleep as I laid there thinking about the bear and listening to something up hill breaking twigs and making strange noises.

The next morning we woke up and decided to travel further on Rt. 366 towards Riggs Flat Lake. The paved road turns to a grated dirt mountain road with steep cliffs shortly after Shannon Campground. The view is surreal of the desert below from the interior of the Sky Island. The road is lined with ferns and saplings where fire had burned the old growth. There is great relief looking down on a desert with searing heat from a mountain road with a gentle cool wind as if standing on a top of a towering monsoon cloud.

The road seems to wind along into an infinite forest. Along the way we pass some roads leading to the observatories blocked off from the public. It’s kind of a disappointment they are not open to the public, but they are also home to the Mt. Graham Red Squirrel, which are a protected species now.

There are a few monuments to the settlers along the road, one of which is Peter’s Flat. The Scotsman worked with loggers and grew potatoes covering them with ferns.

Across the dirt road was a nice primitive campsite too with a short walk to a beautiful western view. I wouldn’t mind camping there as I carry an E-tool (foldable shovel) to do my business, but Karla would prefer at the least on outhouse to do her business. We did get by on baby wipes for showers!

We continued our journey to Riggs Flat Lake a small lake created for watering cattle and damned in 1957 by Arizona Game and Fish for recreational fishing. The pines were clouding the air with pollen as you can see how it collects and washes ashore like uranium yellow cake.

We walked around the lake which is about a mile or so. Families were fishing and picnicking along the shore. Some even brought a boat with electric trolling motors. I think our next visit we will stay there to try and get some Milky Way pictures mirrored off the lake. Maybe even try a little trout fishing.

The most impressive display of beauty are the Arizona State butterfly the Two Tailed Swallows Butterfly floating around the entire preserve. I even happened to catch the trio below sunbathing on Riggs Flat lake shore line. What was even a little more special was seeing so many Sand Dune Wallflowers. I just found a few of them for the first time on Four Peaks. Dził Nchaa Si’an has abundant mountain flowers, but these tended to literally stand above the rest. Finding them with the Two Tailed Swallow Butterfly was about as picturesque as it gets.

I didn’t plan on writing so much about the trip, because I feel like there is so much more to learn about Dził Nchaa Si’an. It’s one thing to enjoy the nature naively and another to have a better understanding of what is there now, where it came from, and perhaps have some influence on preserving it’s future for others to enjoy and find the same peace.

It looks like the effort to submit photos to the Maricopa County Fair Resulted in some big wins. If you read the blog previous to this one, you would know I was feeling mentally challenged on how the photography business is going. I took a risk and put some money into a printer and used the Maricopa County Fair as a good excuse. It’s the first exhibit I’ve been in since…I guess 15 years when I was still painting. And with all the photos I had hanging up it seemed like a quaint show featuring my work. Not to spend too much time bragging about it, here’s a slideshow featuring the winners.