Serenity is almost to her second anniversary of having Leukemia. The doctors are currently telling us that she'll be 'cured' and be able to go off treatment in July. Being cured means that she has successfully gone through the treatment protocols and if she doesn't relapse for 5 years she'll be considered medically cured. Relapse is the big scary monster, it's really bad. She'll likely die as a result of either Leukemia, a second cancer or from the 'cure' – but hopefully not for a long time. She should have died 2 years ago, we're extremely grateful for having the last 2 years and anything more we get is purely a gift!
In 2008 & 2009 I was working for a 3PL company called Lanelinks. In November of last year the company succomed to the economy and went under. We thought that we could make the company work so some of us continued working without pay for a couple months. Eventually we gave in and I was 'unemployed'. We had burned through a lot of our reserves but the big eye opener for me was realizing that I didn't have anything set up that would bring me residual income or provide a buffer. I realized that I had spent my whole career helping companies set up their internet systems to make money but had failed to do so for myself. I vowed to change that and make sure that I always had revenue coming in from the internet that I could step to anytime I needed to. I spent the next two months analyzing several possibilities and building out a business plan that I believed would be successful, be interesting and be something I could step away from once it was established without it dying.
For the following several months I worked on my plan with a couple partners, doing some contracting work along the way. After working on things since November of last year, here are some of the things that we've accomplished. We've established and built up a preparedness community (forum), established and refined a preparedness store, have several other stores in the works and nearly ready to launch and built the beginings of an online Survival Training Center. There are still some other things that are included in the plan that we're working on. The main point of all these sites is to build a turn-key system for providing preparedness/survival information, supplies and training via the internet in a way that hasn't been done before. By the time we're done it will be pretty cool – and not require much work at all.
Over the last couple years I've become really interested in physical security, primarily in lock picking and other work. I've become enough of an expert at it that on a recent trip to New Jersey, we were hanging out with Deviant (from Toool/DefCon) and Dr. Tran – both recognized lock experts – and devised a way to pick handcuffs they had deemed un-pickable. When they pulled them out I jumped at the challenge and went to work, it took me about 20 minutes to devise a method to successfully pick them, with paperclips. Deviant posted this video about it:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCy3kppR_rk[/youtube]
