Rick Gouin

New WordPress Theme

· Rick Gouin
Logo for the Polar Wave wordpress theme

Its been almost 3 years since I updated the theme on this website.  You can see the article about that here.  At the time, I didn’t want to spend any time on it at all, so I just found the quickest and easiest theme to implement with minimal changes.  I never really liked the theme, it lacked some features I wanted, and had a lot of wasted space. Even though I am VERY MUCH a back-end sort of developer, I decided to create my own theme from scratch, which is what you are looking at now!  I call it “Polar […]

OutOfTheLoopAI Release

· Rick Gouin

Everyone who has used an AI chatbot knows that it can be a very iterative process.  One approach to integrating AI into workflows is called “Human In The Loop”, which describes an approach that uses a human as part of the process to achieve better outcomes.  What if we could take the human out of the loop?  Why not replace the human in the loop with another AI? To test out this theory, OutOfTheLoopAI was born. What does it do? OutOfTheLoopAI is a PHP script that creates a standalone webpage where you can setup conversations between different AI systems.  You […]

AI Writing Style Detector Release

· Rick Gouin

AI has a certain style of writing.  We can’t always put our fingers on it, but we can often spot the influence of AI in written communication. I recently had a discussion with a friend who is an engineering professor, and I can see their concern as it relates to AI.  On the one hand, you want students to develop certain skills.  On the other hand, you don’t want to create another “You’ll never have a calculator in your pocket” scenario that everyone will call up as a failure of your course for years to come. How to find the […]

CCSP Exam Thoughts

· Rick Gouin

I took the Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) exam from ISC2 a while back and wanted to share a few thoughts.  As you may be aware, both the CISSP and CCSP exams are managed by the same organization: ISC2.  After getting my CISSP in June of 2022, I started looking for another certification to tackle over the winter.  At that time, I had some AWS certifications that were expiring, and I was annoyed that AWS didn’t provide any way to maintain them other than to just re-take the same exam again.  I can see re-taking an exam when there are […]

CISSP Exam Thoughts

· Rick Gouin

I took the CISSP exam a while back and wanted to share a few thoughts.  I’ve long been a security practitioner, going back to my teenage years attending local 2600 meetings.  I got my Security+ back in 2004.  Yikes!  With the current ransomware driven technology climate, it seemed like high time to put some effort into that part of my background.  I’d say my primary interest was to validate my credibility when speaking at events or directly helping organizations deal with present day security challenges. About The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) is an advanced security related certification managed […]