- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
"To know, read; to learn, write; and to master, teach." An old Hindi proverb.
And so the journey begins….. My life hasn’t always taken a traditional circuitous route. The one thing I can tell you about myself is that I’ve learned to live by the U.S. Marine motto “Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome”.
You see, I’ve been put in the unique situation of being born with a common birth defect known as Spina Bifida (I, for instance, have Myelomeningocele). Although it has come with more than a few frustrations and challenges, it has also forced me to hone my ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome. Let’s add to that fact that I have this “little thing” called “Executive Functioning Disorder” and it’s not all sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns.
The reason I decided to build this website was for a few reasons: An insatiable want and need to learn and teach, a way to hold myself accountable, and the ability to help others learn through my pitfalls and successes.
Everyone should have hobbies in their life. It can give a person a sense of purpose and something to focus on. Not only should you have a hobby or two, but one should strive to achieve mastery in said hobbies to the best of their abilities. I, myself, have a few hobbies that I will be using as mediums in this blog: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, ethical hacking, and chess.
Growing up, I always remember being involved in one sport or another. I was a very active child, especially for someone with Spina Bifida. I have early memories of T-Ball followed by “Wheelchair Sport’s Camp”. Wheelchair Sport’s Camp was a yearly event held at the beginning of June. It introduced young individuals with various disabilities to modified versions of various sports and activities. These sports included: wheelchair basketball, wheelchair tennis, wheelchair archery, swimming, wheelchair rugby,wheelchair table tennis, and wheelchair track & field. I spent a lot of my focus on wheelchair basketball (they called me “Chair Jordan” which conveniently matched my initials CJ). I also spent a good amount of my focus on another yearly event known as the Junior Wheelchair Nationals. The Junior Wheelchair Nationals took place in a different city each year in the United States. There I competed in various sports events such as: track (wheelchair racing in which I used a special racing chair for racing) & field (shotput, discus, and javelin), swimming, table tennis (Some uncouth barbarians might recognize it under its other name, “ping pong”), and the obstacle course (a true unholy nightmare for individuals with executive functioning disorder). Yes, I won more than a few medals at the nationals and some participation awards, but we don’t talk about those. I also had a love/hate relationship with wheelchair tennis. I might have had better luck at tennis if I had better spatial awareness and didn’t hit the ball every single time like it had personally affronted me and my family. Said ball mostly went into the net.
Fast forward to 2018…. I started on a new journey in my life, and in doing so, I discovered I had an insatiable want and need to learn. I decided to start training in the martial art known as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at the age of 40 even realizing that I had limited mobility in my legs and lower back issues. From the start, I could tell that this was something I would be passionate about. As you can imagine, it had a steep learning curve with my disability, but it also encompassed that motto of “Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome”. Everything I was learning was like a puzzle to be solved with my disability. Shortly after that, I discovered something else about myself. I not only enjoyed the physical,social and mental benefits it had on me, but I also really enjoyed teaching others. Now Jiu-Jitsu isn’t my only interest or hobby. Before BJJ and chess, my passion was computers.
In 1985 my mom and dad bought me my first computer. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The computer in question was a brand spanking new Apple IIe. At the time as a child of only 7 or 8, one of the only things I was interested in was what games could I play on this wondrous machine? Forget the fact that my parents bought this machine for me to help me in school with my fine motor issues. For the next few years of my life games like Karateka, Choplifter, World Games, Hardball, and Oregon Trail took over my life. (Oregon Trail was brutal btw.Today’s generation of gamers would curl up in the fetal position rocking back and forth while crying if they took a run at that game.) The next few years would lead me into exploring various BBS’s (Bulletin Board Services) and various chat rooms that I probably had no business even being in at that age.
It wasn’t until my mid to late teens that I would discover one of my passions in life, computer hacking & computer security. I’d be lying if I didn’t partially attribute this to the movies running in theaters in 1995. These included movies like The Net, and the cult classic Hackers.
Through the following years I delved a bit in and I devoured any material I could get my hands on the subject of hacking computers and computer systems. I started to learn how to write programs on the computer and make it do things that seemed magical to those who weren’t knowledgeable with how computers worked. Basically, a computer is an overpriced paperweight without some sort of a program loaded onto it. I’ll go more into detail on that later, but an example would be the Windows operating system.
In 2006, I discovered computer hacking/security meetups. A place where like minded individuals like myself could teach,learn, and discuss anything and everything about computer hacking and computer security. This was also my introduction to the phenomenon known as “Imposter Syndrome ”. For those of you that aren’t familiar with imposter syndrome, imposter syndrome is a psychological phenomenon characterized by persistent feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, and a fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evidence of one's achievements..
I learned not all hackers were criminals or bad guys (known as black hats) out to cause chaos,mischief, and mayhem. There were hackers out there that would help companies by testing their company’s security looking for vulnerabilities then responsibly disclosing their findings to the company so that they could fix the vulnerabilities before they were found by the bad guys and exploited. These hackers were known as “white Hats” or “ethical hackers”. That’s when I decided to start building a home security lab for study and practice. I’ve also started to learn about different scams and frauds so I can inform the public on how they work and what they can do to protect themselves.
I’ve been playing chess since I was in my early teens. It started out as a way to bond with my dad. This bonding ended up turning into an ass kicking usually as I failed to grasp the deep strategical and tactical elements of the game. Basically as a beginner, my strategy was to capture as many pieces of his that I could. Lack of resources for your opponent should make for an easy win,right? Not always.
It wasn’t until high school that I started to get more serious about chess. After school was done for the day, a relatively large group of fellow students and I would play chess (one of the teachers ran this little unorganized get together). It wasn’t officially a club, just a group of students who would play chess. The teacher mentioned above would run tournaments ever so often. There was one guy who was better than the rest of us that seemed like a prodigy at chess. The thing is…. that I ended up being the only one that could beat the guy in random games, but as soon as it became a game in the tournament format, I couldn’t beat the guy. It usually came down to the two of us in the finals, but sometimes the tournament pressure got to me early in the tournament. I’d find myself all up in my head against an opponent that I knew I was better than. Then I’d make one blunder and it would turn into a downward spiral from there. It wasn’t until I started Jiu Jitsu, that I picked the game back up. I started to see a correlation between Jiu Jitsu and chess.
So join me on this journey. My hope is that you’ll learn not only from my successes but also from my failures. In trying to educate you, the reader, I will be forced to be held accountable for studying and researching in order to present content to you in an accurate,consistent, and expedient manner. I will be adding a monthly newsletter that you can sign up for with updates and tips. I will also be answering any of your questions. I plan to add a “book club” section where I will be including all books I’ve read. From that list, I will recommend books for the readers. I’ll eventually be adding a YouTube channel so I can post tutorials, footage, and additional content from the three mediums that I have chosen: BJJ, Ethical Hacking, and Chess.
Not only do I hope to make content that will help those readers who have the same interests as me, but also tips and shortcuts that can be easily transferable to other skills you, the reader, may want to excel in.
Welcome to Chasing Perfection