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The Ramen noodle soups. Since I’m on dialysis and that sodium is incredibly high and it causes me to retain water I throw the packets away. As a result, I add my own ingredients to the soup. They are very inexpensive to buy in bulk (such as is available at the A to Z online market place). In prison, we were limited to the type of Ramen soup flavors that were available to us. I usually throw in some sweet peas and throw in some unsalted crackers. Every now and again, I’ll throw in some peanut butter followed with my phosphate blockers. LOL. Never know when the labs will be taken during my dialysis sessions. LOL. Ramen noodles can be a base food item for a remarkable and tasty main dish wrapped up in soft tortillas or served with eggs (cooked in any variety of ways).See! ?? Whoda thunk of that one? ;).

In seventh grade I took the math class “Advanced Pre-Algebra” (APA). This put me one year ahead of most of my classmates, who were taking Pre Algebra.In APA I fell in love with algebra. I would spend hours at home with my textbook, reading and trying to engrain every concept. It was so intuitive, and I loved the way it gave me actual tools do DO things.The next year I took the class “Algebra 1”. The first couple weeks were just practicing basic math; PEMDAS, negatives and positives… basically everything we’d learned in grades 1–7. I was eager to find out what new concepts we’d learn this year!Well… as it turns out, Algebra 1 is almost identical to APA. We began learning exactly what we’d been taught before. Again.Now, to be fair, it did go into slightly more detail than APA, and there were a COUPLE completely new concepts, but remember, I had been obsessively reading my textbook the year before, and any time I felt the textbook was too vague I used online tools to learn more. my understanding of the subject was solid.I pointed out to my classmates that we’d already learned y = ax + b, just one year before! We’d been taught what a parabola was already! Exponential growth wasn’t anything new! It was crysal clear in my mind, but.. they didn’t remember any of it.I’m not trying to brag—I wasn’t necessarily better at math than any of my classmates, I just remembered the concepts better, which is not surprising because, again, I was obsessed and would often hyperfocus on studying APA.Anyways, one afternoon I was curious as to just how much of this course was a repeat of the previous year. So I sat in my bed and began to skim the book.I found a few minor things that I didn’t completely understand, but there was only one thing I found that I was completely unfamiliar with: polynomials.It occured to me then that, because I loved math so much and wanted so badly to learn more, it would make sense to be in a harder math class where I could learn something new.I told my parents and my teacher about my idea, and they were supportive; all I had to do was take the final test for my algebra 1 class, and if my teacher thought I understood it well enough, I could start Geometry.Over the next week I spent hours every single day reading the book; I wasn’t skimming, as I didn't want to miss a single concept. I used a fresh notebook to practice, and once again I was in love.I filled page after page of my notebook practicing, taking notes, and sketching different examples of parabolas and linear equations.My brain was kicking into overdrive trying to process everything, and my poor writing hand couldn't keep up. My 7's began to look like 1's, my 2's began to look like z’s, and my handwriting in general looked like shit, even when I wasn't doing math.What did I do?I remade my handwriting. I sat down at a whiteboard and spent hours designing a new way for me to write each and every letter. And, yeah, that included a slash through my 7's, my Z's, and my 0's, to differentiate them from 1's, S's, and O's.I also somehow got 100% on my algebra final. I literally cried when my teacher told me, right in the middle of class; I was so happy.[Holy shit that was a long answer for such a simple question. Sorry! It just felt wrong to say why people do it when for me, personally, it was a decision I made due to a part of my life that was really important to me. “why do you do that” is not the same as “what purpose does it serve”, y'know?]

I started my radio show to provide an introduction to a general audience of cybersecurity concepts. Each show features a general cyber topic and an expert interview. So certainly that is a starting point I recommend.The best technical grounding I am aware of today is one of the online CISSP (Certified Information System Security Professional) preparation courses. They’re not free, but they give a good survey of what is really now a sprawling field: authentication techniques, personnel and physical security, policy issues, and system administration, just to name a few topics.There’s info on CISSP courses at ISC2.org (the source of the certification) and many, many other places online.