6 months later - about to write the GCIH cert exam

It's been an interesting six months since the last post.

I'm sitting in a new chair – one that seems to have healed the chronic pain I've carried on my right side for fifteen years. I've tried a lot of chairs. There's a modern fairy tale in there somewhere.

In front of me is a stack of GIAC books. It's almost exam time, and I'm reviewing labs and refining my index. This will be my third certification since I started pursuing my bachelor's in cybersecurity through SANS.edu back in November. They had to be done in order: GFACT (scored 100%), then GSEC (99%), and now GCIH, which I'll sit for early next week. I took this one slower on purpose. Even though I'm through the coursework, I want to run through every lab again, take my time with the CTF, and really let the material breathe. There's no rush when you're genuinely enjoying the learning.

It's April. Spring is here, which means more van life and more metal detecting. Oh right, I picked up metal detecting a few months ago. Forgot to mention that.

My yoga flow app, Seed Yoga, is getting traffic but no usage. No paid accounts, and nobody's actually joining the flow except me. I only noticed because I swapped the underlying APIs from OpenAI to Claude and checked the analytics. Turns out there are visitors. Just no one actually trying the live flow, even though it's free. Interesting.

The Claude migration was a good move, though. It's shockingly better at both live flow generation and instruction generation. More expensive, but still relatively cheap, and I was able to cut an entire step out of the pipeline. It used to be three stages: sequence generation, instruction generation, then audio generation. Now it's two. I couldn't get OpenAI to reliably handle generating the sequence of transitions and the spoken instructions and the woven-in intention and manifestation guidance all at once. Claude was basically, "here, hold my beer." Anyway, that's live now.