Back on the Horse

My last blog post was in mid-November, as you can see it is early May, so I have been silent blog-wise for 5 months.

Well, a not so funny thing happened ... in November I was doing yard work and pushing a large compost bin, and I slipped, and the bin fell on my right forearm. Luckily the arm (and the bin) was not broken, but I ended up with a badly bruised forearm and a twisted elbow which later had me diagnosed as having both tennis and golfer's elbow (even though I have not done either in years). And a big ol' bone spur in the elbow. So I wore various arm and elbow braces for a few months. The whole arm and elbow discomfort thing de-motivated me from spending time researching and typing up blog posts.

Bruised but not broken

Then Covid happened, so focus shifted to family and health, and I pushed blogging further in the back of mind.

But now after a few weeks of sheltering-in-place, and being able to type without discomfort, I think I am motivated (or bored, one or both of the two) to resume my blogging. But before I did, I wanted to go back to school on these topics — obviously online schooling like my 3 kids are currently doing — so have been taking a bunch of MOOCs in cybersecurity and privacy and GDPR etc.

So over the last 3-4 weeks I have taken 9 online courses (and gotten 9 corresponding certifications), which hopefully will translate into more insightful blogging. My two favorite MOOCs so far have been Privacy Law and Data Protection and Understanding the GDPR. [Note: someone really needs to create one for the California Consumer Privacy Act aka CCPA ... maybe I should to that ??]. It dawned on me this morning that I think getting the certificates has become like an addicative video game to me, so I will cool off a bit on the MOOCing and start blogging. First up will be my continued exploration on GDPR and then pivoting to CCPA.

Speaking of exploration, in the coming months I will probably also try to write some pithy opinion pieces and post them on Medium, while this blog will continue to be more multi-part explorations.