Sunday Paper - Cybersecurity, Writing, Molecular Coffee, NJ Transit, Fish Tube, Stop Being Positive

Jim Grey on how he can write a new blog post almost every day.

I write about whatever I want — it’s a personal blog after all. Anything is subject fodder. I write about photography and cameras a lot because it’s a lifelong interest and I’ve found my largest, most engaged audience there. Yes, I pander shamelessly to you film photographers!Jim Grey

Some people just want all the profit for themselves.

Lab engineered coffee means nothing good for the environment or humanity, least of all for the farmers upon whose livelihood the coffee trade depends. It means only more money for western tech dorks with Mike Judge Silicon Valley sounding start-up names, and less delicious product in the cup.“Molecular” Coffee Just Got A $2.6M Investment From The Impossible Burger

I commuted less into Lower Manhattan this summer, and I'm fortunate I had that option.

Last year was dubbed the “summer of hell” for NJ Transit riders due to track work in Penn Station New York.

But riders say the commute last year was almost heavenly, compared to the almost daily purgatory of canceled trains and severe overcrowding that has plagued NJ Transit this summer.Larry Higgs at nj.com

For employers, it's challenging to find qualified information security professionals, mostly because those same employers are not willing to train the next generation. Most experience professionals, including myself, have worked in the field for decades and have had to fund our training.

According to the study, 42% of respondents planning to see out their careers in cybersecurity have a bachelor’s degree and 33% a master’s degree.Most Cyber Workers Plan to See Out Their Careers in the Field

The "Fish Tube" is cooler than Elon Musk's Hyperloop.

In a video that went viral over the weekend, a man in a bright-yellow rubber suit, standing chest-deep in the Columbia River, in Washington State, grabs a hefty salmon from the water and loads the fish into a chute. The fish suddenly shoots upward, through a rubbery, translucent sleeve—the “fish tube,” as the Internet decided to call it, which is a contraption that evokes a rollercoaster and a luge, if those things were constructed out of a slippery, rubbery material, kind of like the silicon used to make nonstick cookware. You see the fish’s silhouette wagging along against a desert-mountain backdrop, as if it were still swimming—but now it’s in the sky, over the dam, barrelling back down, and then splash, back into the water. The narrative arc, in one minute flat.The Nihilistic Euphoria of the Fish Tube

Is your glass half-empty or half-full?

Things aren’t mutually exclusive, awesome or awful. Mostly they’re both, and if we poke around our thoughts and feelings, we can see multiple angles. To Hamlet, Denmark was a dungeon. But the real prison was his thinking, as he admitted.

Neutrality sets us free. It helps us see something more like the truth, what’s happening, instead of experiencing circumstances in relation to expectations and desires. This provides clarity and eliminates obstacles, making things neither awesome nor awful but cool.

It can even lead to illumination. In fact, abandoning duality is the way to enlightenment in the Taoist and Zen Buddhist traditions. Truth has no this or that. The path has no ordinary or holy, said Zen master Fu-Jung 1,000 years ago.Stop Being Positive and Just Cultivate Neutrality For Existential Cool

Commuting

My client has run out of office space in their Northern New Jersey location. They are seeking new office space. Listening to some employees speculate about where the company may relocate and whether the new location would be close to a train station is interesting. Commuting in New Jersey can be challenging.

If the company relocates further north, closer to New York City, many current employees would have a more challenging commute. Employees from the central part of the state could see car commute times as high 90 minutes. Trains time could be more than that; New Jersey Transit (NJT) lines don’t run past the state capital of Trenton. If the new location is not near a train station - the current one is a 10-minute walk from a northeast corridor (NEC) line - then all employees would be impacted.

I know that I have an upper limit of tolerance for shitty travel. I might lose my mind if I had to travel the NEC NJT line daily. It's a horrible experience.

New Jersey Transit commuter trains have hit their worst on-time and reliability records in the 18 months since Governor Phil Murphy promised to overhaul the nation’s second-biggest commuter railroad.

For the 12 months ended in March, 90% of peak trains departed or arrived on schedule. That’s the lowest average among 16 years of such data on NJ Transit’s website. Trains also broke down more frequently than ever from the July start of the fiscal year through March, records show.

Commuters face even more inconvenience. The agency through 2020 is testing federally mandated emergency braking, a project that caused unprecedented disruption last year as locomotives were sidelined for software installations. And for 12 weeks starting June 17, at least 5,000 daily Manhattan commuters will have to take a ferry or another railroad to cross the Hudson River to accommodate track work at Pennsylvania Station.NJ Transit train delays hit a record after Murphy's pledge to fix them