Introduction

Welcome to the site, NULLidle.com. My name is Josh and I’ve spent years working in various enterprise engineering roles. Until very recently, I’ve worked as a Security Engineer for Lumen’s CyberSecurity Incident Response Team. Since my first PC, I have always held an interest in what powers the web, this obsession started when I was ten playing Quake. Myself and a couple other people decided to form a clan, which I volunteered to handle the website aspect of it. It was then a chain reaction started, free hosting just was not doing it. I wanted to make a website better than any other clan gaming site, needed a domain. Owning a domain at this point in time was pretty uncommon, Network Solutions was charging sixy-seven USD for a .com address! The more I was able to learn, the more I wanted…

If I were ever able to recover from this technology binge, all hope was lost after discovering UNIX and Linux based operating systems. It just wasn’t enough to use a Linux server for my hosting, I had to run it as a desktop. It was roughly 1998, at this time Linux was not ideal to run as desktop operating system and hardware support was horrid. My early teen years were spent putting my parent’s hard-earned money to work, new distributions were delivered weekly by mail. Yes, I said mail. The odds of winning the lottery were better than the likelyness I could actually download a 600mb ISO file on dial-up, especially without it being corrupt.

For many years I avoided any computer related jobs as I didn’t want to destroy my hobby by making it work. I tried a few manual labor jobs, sales, and then elisted into the Army. It was when I got out of the Army that I got my first technical job working for the Help Desk of a mostly-Windows based hosting provider. We still had Linux servers, our entire mail environment was based on Zimbra. I learned a lot regarding Linux server administration in this role. The company also provided shared, dedicated (managed, and unmanaged), and eventually VPS solutions. I steadily progressed through various roles such as systems administration/engineering, devops, and eventually landed in the security realm.

Life was good and then one day I just get a random phone call asking me to jump online during the day. It was a little odd, I worked the night shift. I figured it might be some type of training event until I was brought into a meeting with my manager and our director. It was then explained to me that Lumen was laying-off 1,200 people, myself included. I have worked the night shift for almost thirteen years straight, and the position was a remote position. It seems unlikely I will find a role with these specific perks. :/

For those of you that think you can get by on experience alone, just go to school and get a degree. Whenever I have to search for a job I have to spend far more energy to actually land an interview without a degree. I can usually get the job if I am able to get an interview, but most jobs won’t bother calling unless they see the degree. I have plenty of professional experience, and I will find something. I just hope it is sooner rather than later. In today’’s job market, a degree is essential.

If you made it this far, thanks for listening to my boring life story. More to come, useful content not this… junk.