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Writing a CV?

So, you are writing a CV?

.. and you want it to look good, be easily readable and well-received?

As someone who has read many CV’s, I know what I would like to see and what I really don’t like, and I believe this is commonly shared with many recruiters and hiring managers.
For example, the EuroPass CV format is frowned upon by almost anyone recruiting, so please stay away from these, as it is long, often unsrtuctured CV’s where you have to read multiple pages to get an idea of the skills of the person, their experience and history. Also, unless you are a graphics designer, don’t go overboard with being creative – keep it clean and easily readable, but be free to stick a personal design touch to the header or the side of the page, but keep the reading area clean.

The readability is really important, giving the recipient an easy way to assess the important information quickly, and it is also very important that the information is grouped and organized well.
This, as the recruiters has limited time to look at your CV, and you have one chance to make it through that first screening. The very job of your CV, is to get you past that first hurdle – landing you that interview.
The CV, is your personal representative in this first stage, and it has to be just as neat, clean and well-dressed as you would have to be when going for the interview.

Also, please do remember to keep your CV updated at regular intervals!

This gets us to the base rules of a good CV:

Page 1 – About half a page, which is the cover letter, containing a short summary of your strengths, highlights, character and visions.
Please note that this cover letter is not always required, and if not, exclude it from the CV. Just keep it ready and up to date for if/when it’s needed. It also serves as an example of your ability to express yoruself in free text.

Page 2 – A single page containing your contact details and personal info, skills and a summary work history and other summary details.

Page 3 and forward, is the extended work history, starting with most recent. Here, you get to explain the highlights, work and responsibilities in more detail for each job. Let the title be the work period (y-m to y-m), position and company. 

  • Always spellcheck the CV.
  • Keep your social media work timelines correct and in line with the CV – They will likely be crosschecked.

What about using AI like ChatGPT, Gemini and others in CV’s?

A few words of caution is in place here.
If you DO use AI, please rewrite what was suggested in your own words, as overly hyped and polished resume language instead of naturally flowing language can be seen as a red flag.

Employers’ perspectives on using ChatGPT to assist with your resume may vary; some may appreciate that you’re embracing new technology, while others might wonder if you lack the basic skills needed to do the job, and you relying on the AI to be able to do it?

Do companies check your resume for AI?

Yes, many companies do check resumes for AI-generated content. They use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to scan for specific keywords and flag generic language while hiring managers look for inconsistencies and overly polished phrases. It’s essential to review and customize your AI-assisted resume to ensure it accurately reflects your experience and skills.

Avoid the “buzzword bingo!”

While it is perfectly expected and even wanted that you name relevant skills, technologies and similar things by their proper names, please do avoid making it a  “buzzword bingo” by overly including cliche’s such as: “team player” , “organizational skills”, “detail oriented”, “hard-working”, “passion for”, “results-focused”, “fast-paced movement/environment”, “quick learner” and so on.
Keep the language as factual as you can, keep it short, but do express what you did, and what you have achieved.

Buzzword cramming a CV is a good way to get it rejected, as the cv stops making sense and it all just becomes a pile of words/phrases stacked upon each other.

Having said this, the occasional use, where it is warranted and proper, is absolutely fine, especially if you can show a sample of that quick learning of a new skill that solved the issue.

Download the free [ CV-Template ] (docx format)

Feel free to use / modify as you wish!
Good luck in your job hunt!

 

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AI use and security

Thoughts on AI, Security and practical day to day use.

As mentioned before, I am involved in R&D on a similar branch with “AI Hardware“, and this brings me to the AI and it’s more general use.

These days there is almost a competition going on out there about the use of AI wherever possible, regardless of  whether it’s needed, practically usable, it actually serves a purpose or not, and it’s quite understandable because it’s quite hard to sell a product and be competitive without having the word AI crammed in somewhere in the sales pitch these days.

So let’s have a little bit of a pragmatic look at it.

So what is an AI?

Most of the Ai’s today are LLM’s (Large Language Models) based on software that emulates neurons and uses large masses of data for training material (internet).
There are basically three models and how you train the AI’s, but most importantly no AI’s are trained on the fly because that would effectively destroy the neural network setup while in flight as is now.
We are simply not there with dynamic AI LLM’s, just yet..

You would only retrain the models based on existing data plus any additional data gathered during training sessions, as the training is very taxing on computational and financial resources.
this in turn means that live leakage has a very low risk but the risk for future leakage is still there due to the incorporation of training material that may be gathered from questions and other supplied data.

  • The basic training model is the AI gets a set of data and trains itself on it without supervision.
    Obviously this is not a very good way to train a model and the outcome is rarely what you wanted to be, but all starts with this one.
  • The second model is supervised training where you give it hints as to what is correct or not, sometimes rules that must be met, encouraging the model to make the right decisions, or tweak its output to match. This model is the one typically used in large language model training, where more expressive solutions and reasoning is required based on the input, as this model offers a greater deal of freedom compared to other third model. It also allows foor evaluation of incorporated 3rd party data as part of the input to create a reasonably balanced, but not always correct output.
    You can quite easily force the model to provided an incorrect answer by forcing it to accept incorrect source data by saying that you can’t deviate from this.
  • The third model is the most restrictive, where you have “punishment” involved, essentially killing the models that gives the wrong answer against the set of fixed rules during the training, letting only the ones that provides the most correct answer live for further refinement. This model is typically used in image recognition and similar tasks, and is the one typically applied in machine learning where you have a fixed output that you need to match against and the AI is set to recognise with either a correct result or not a correct result as an output, or where you need to identify an object.

As always, there are of course variations to the above, but it gives you a rough insight as to what it is and how it works.

A little bit of history from a developer’s perspective.

In the past when there were only books and manuals, the developers had to relate to these, and often know them by heart to actually use it. The amount of information was quite limited and it was fairly easy. Essentially everything was written from scratch.

As we know, history happened, and Internet came to be, and with it, things like Google. Open source solutions exploded, and then came the help sites to go with it and anything development.
Sites like stackexchange and many others came to be and code samples were shared between the users. Because of the perceived security risks, many developers were banned by the companies to use Internet to search for solutions, even for common problems because of the “risks” involved, as you could get “hacked” by a copy/paste, or you could leak information about your ip or other precious items.
This even in cases where it was generic information such as an error code and what caused it in regards of a specific product. Eventually, “internet” was generally accepted, and came to be part of everyday business life.

The primary risk of this was/is , as always, related to anyone who uncritically made a true full copy/paste after providing enough specific enough information for a possible hacker to write a malicious piece of response that would work in the specific environment and solution, and the user subsequently, without any consideration or review, and there being no peer review on commits, implemented this in the production code.

The exact same can be used and said for any AI, whether it’s in app, typically a developer IDE, or external like ChatGPT’s website, and many infosec teams seems to ignore the fact that you can search and look up search terms on Google to see what’s being searched, providing the exact same purported leakage mechanism, near, if not real-time, whereas this actually and typically does not apply to AI’s. Never mind questions on a website like stack exchange that it will be forever in fulltext, where the AI question will be ephemeral and not be reused as a verbatim ready made answer, despite it possibly becoming part of the training material at some point down the line, as numerical weights, and not actual full-text.

In short – an AI will not be able to recall or reproduce a specific question from another user because that’s simply not how the AI and LLM’s works. The sessions work in isolation, but the data may later be used as training, as numerical “weights” for a specific item, never as plaintext data. 

Why the AI instead of “Google”? 

As Google and others are mainly about static content, the AI is highly dynamic and can actually understand what you want, and quickly narrow down the answer to what you need, without all the “fluff” and having to wade through endless amounts of text and sites to get what you were looking for, and they can do this by incorporating third-party sources or doing searches on your behalf to gather the information, and this is exactly what makes the AI so useful – speed and the output limited to what you actually asked for, and this is why the AI is quickly becoming the “Google” replacement.

An example:
Compared to Google et al, If you’re stuck in a problem, you can describe the type of problem you have and get the reasoned argument with explanations specific to the problem on how to solve it, without you actually assembling and parsing the information yourself, something that can be very tedious.

AI:

(This passes my sanity inspection as a proposal for a solution…)

…. versus Google:

What about Information Security then?

A couple of ground rules when it comes to dealing with AI’s:

  • You should be careful with what you share – keep it “anonymous”.
  • Don’t share more than you absolutely need to.
  • NEVER share credentials or personal  data.
  • NEVER assume it that the answer is correct – only use it as a guideline or example.

Again, always be the second opinion – never just copy/paste – actually look at what was presented and make your own informed decision of – does this make sense, and never assumed that the answer is 100 percent correct.
This is what any responsible developer would do, and if there was malicious intent it would be far easier to do it themselves, right there, rather than go to the AI to get it done, as the developerwould not need to explain to the AI what the environment looks like and how the specific exploit should be implemented. That would be information you already have.

The goal of the Infosec team here is to rather than just ban the users from using it, embrace it, but educate the staff about how to use it safely!

Prescribe the pragmatic safer ways on how you can interact with the AI’s, because in the end they are incredibly useful tools that will not go away, just like Internet didn’t go away and eventually was forced to be accepted despite the security teams kickings and screamings.

Trust me, it will be used no matter what anyone say, because it is just too useful not to use, and the likelihood of this happening is even higher in time and resource pressured teams, where a lot of tedious work can be simplified and done very quickly compared to the alternatives, and it is far better to have a mutual understanding of good practices, do’s and don’ts, rather than a skunkworks divisions.

Additionally, keep in mind that it is an indisputable fact that the absolute majority of security tools today use AI, be that code monitoring and validation, security tools like antivirus, api scanners and many others, inspecting code, classified document files etc regardless of security markings, on pretty much any hardware the company owns or maintains. It’s already there, and if there was a leak you would likely not know about it until way too late (specifically looking at you, MS Copilot), and such an event would be a much bigger possible threat than the occasional use of AI for a specific purposes with properly trained staff.

All these modern security tools are entirely based on AI or AI input / processing, and all will suffer the same issue of possible data leakage, one way or the other.

Let’s be very clear about something here:
Any tool that claims it will not be using the customer data, is simply marketing hype and lies, because if they did not, they would soon find themselves out of business as they would not be able to follow the evolvement of code and security threats, compared to their competitors. All the talk about “secure models” etc, is marketing fluff. Where do you think their current training material actually comes from?
Hint: They didn’t invent it…

If you deploy any of these AI security tools for wholesale scanning of the company IP, it makes absolutely no sense to at the same time unconditionally ban the use of AI’s for the developers or other creative staff, because as mentioned before, staff training on proper use is the absolute key here, and a kneejerk ban because you’re afraid of possible unknowns, is absolutely NOT the answer, as all you will achieve is to create an unsafe skunkworks project. Like it or not. It’s reality…

Takehomes for the security team:

  • This is something that is here,
  • You can’t ignore it,
  • You can’t make it go away,
  • It’s here to stay.
  • Accept the fact.

Deal with it!

The only reasonable thing you can do at this point, is to accept “defeat”, just as you eventually had to with the emergence of the internet, and train your staff in the reasonable use, protecting the company ip and personal data, making sure that security is covered by providing working guidelines of do’s and don’ts, allowing an agreed controlled use rather than the chaotic underground skunkworks model that otherwise will emerge regardless of what you say, and over which you will have absolutely no control. 
Never mind the fact that you will effectively “outlaw” most, if not all modern developer IDE’s, which… is commonly based on AI support, in part or full using their code models, relegating them back to notepad or similar “development” tools. 

Trying to ban the use of AI, will be as effective as the 1920’s prohibition was… (NOT!). 

Then what?
You should consider specific services (and I am not plugging anyone here) like ChatGPT’s enterprise model, where you can actually get the benefits and control security/privacy, yet, prevent any leakage and reuse for training. 

If you can save an hour a day per dev, increaseing the productivity of them, this will be an easy expenditure for you to qualify the benefit of, where you gain control over what is done, how it’s done, who does it, on what basis they do it. It’s a dual win-win that will gain acceptance. 

If you can’t beat them, be pragmatic and join them, making sure it’s done responsibly… 

 

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Auto-update your Go?

So you want to keep your golang up to date at all times?

Add this to  /bin/go-update, and stick it in your crontab as a daily job, and you will always be up to date.
Rework as needed for your favourite Linux/os distro..

#!/bin/bash
cd /tmp
CVERSION="$(curl -s https://go.dev/VERSION?m=text | grep -o 'go[0-9.]*')"
wget "https://go.dev/dl/${CVERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz"
rm -rf /usr/local/go
tar -C /usr/local -xzf "${CVERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz"
rm "${CVERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz"
go version

Njoy!!

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Crontab cheat sheet

For all the Linux admins out there – Add this to the header of all your crontabs.
… and it becomes a lot clearer to anyone reading them…

# *   *   *   *   *      command_to_be_executed
# -   -   -   -   -
# |   |   |   |   |
# |   |   |   |   +----- day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
# |   |   |   +--------- month (1 - 12)
# |   |   +------------- day of the month (1 - 31)
# |   +----------------- hour (0 - 23)
# +--------------------- min (0 - 59)
#
# Asterisk    (*)  any value
# Comma       (,)  value list separator (0,20,30,45)
# Dash        (-)  range of values (8-17)
# Slash       (/)  steps values (*/20)
#
# @reboot     Run once, at startup
# @yearly     Run once a year,       "0 0 1 1 *"
# @annually   Same as @yearly
# @monthly    Run once a month,      "0 0 1 * *"
# @weekly     Run once a week,       "0 0 * * 0"
# @daily      Run once a day,        "0 0 * * *"
# @hourly     Run once an hour,      "0 * * * *"

Njoy!

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Cloudflare Domain Proxy with port targets?

Scenario(s): 

You have one or more of the following problems to solve;

  • You are an iGaming provider, that needs quickly interchangeable domains in countries like Indonesia to work.
  • You need an additional domain to hit your existing HTTPS target, but can’t run multiple SSL certs.
  • You need to map a call to a direct port on the target, yet, still use CF functionality without the need for custom ports?
  • You want cheaper SSL termination for a whole host of endpoint domains leading to a single target?
  • any other similar case or need.

You need:

  • An easily configurable Cloudflare worker domain proxy.
  • A worker path setup on the domain.

Here is the step by step solution to the problem:

1) Create the CF worker and name it. 

addEventListener('fetch', event => {
    event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})

async function handleRequest(request) {
    // Define the subdomain to port and domain mapping
    const subdomainPorts = {
        'script-name':   { port: '443',  domain: 'realtarget.com' },
        'subdomain1':    { port: '443',  domain: 'realtarget.com' },
        'subdomain2':    { port: '1201', domain: 'realtarget.com' },
         ...
        'subdomain9':   { port: '1209', domain: 'realtarget.com' },
    };

    // Get the URL of the incoming request
    const url = new URL(request.url);
    url.protocol = 'https:' ; // Ensure HTTPS on target.
    url.port = '443'; // Default to standard HTTPS port if not found

    // Break the hostname into parts
    const hostnameParts = url.hostname.split('.');

    // Assume the first part of the hostname is the first subdomain
    let firstSubdomain = hostnameParts[0];

    // Check if the first subdomain is in the subdomainPorts mapping
    if (firstSubdomain in subdomainPorts) {
        // Construct new hostname using the first subdomain and target domain
        url.hostname = `${firstSubdomain}.${subdomainPorts[firstSubdomain].domain}`;
        url.port = subdomainPorts[firstSubdomain].port;
    } else {
        // Handle cases where subdomain is not defined in the mapping - default domain or handle as needed
        url.hostname = firstSubdomain + '.realtarget.com'; // Default domain if subdomain is not found
    }

    // Disable the line if you don't want logging. 
    console.log(JSON.stringify(url)) ;

    // Create a new request by cloning the original request to preserve all headers, method, body, etc.
    const newRequest = new Request(url, request);
    // Fetch the response from the new URL
    const response = await fetch(newRequest);
    // Return the response to the client
    return response;
}

2) On the domain DNS settings:

  • Make sure the domain (realtarget.com) itself has a A record going somewhere.
  • Add a CNAME for each of the subdomains, pointing to the domain target.
    Ie:  subdomain1 IN CNAME realtarget.com

3) Caching for targets:

Under “Caching” –> “Configuration”,  Set the caching level to “Standard”.

4) Setting up the worker path:

Under “Workers Routes”, click create “Add route”
and enter *.<newdomain.com>/* as the capture path, and select your worker to handle it.

Done!

What will happen next when you use your new shiny domain “foo.com”, is:

The client types in the new shiny domain https://subdomain1.foo.com/path?args…

  1. The script will strip off everything after the first subdomain (subdomain1).
  2. It will replace the domain with realtarget.com, and map the port to 1201, effectively making
    https://subdomain1.foo.com/path?args… appear as:
    https://subdomain1.realtarget.com:1201/path?args… keeping all the headers, body, arguments and whatnot as is, making both client and the final target happy,
    and you only need a single certificate for the target host, that can even be a long-life self-signed certificate,
    using the CF as the certificate front.

 

or, in a picture (a drawio diagram).

Enjoy!

 

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UDM Pro and SSL

So you have a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro (UDM pro) box, and you want to install SSL certificates?

This goes for the OS Version 3.2+

This is quite straightforward in a few single steps.

  1. Enable SSH login in the machine.
  2. Connect by SSH using “admin” and your password to the machine.
  3. do a
    cd /data/unifi-core/config
  4. In there, do a backup:
    tar zcvf backup.tgz *
    and download this file (sftp / scp).
    scp [email protected]:/data/unifi-core/config/backup.tgz .
  5. in there, you should find the following files: 
    unifi-core-direct.crt
    unifi-core-direct.key
    unifi-core.crt
    unifi-core.key
  6. Make a copy of your SSL key, and rename it as unifi-core.key and unifi-core-direct.key
  7. Create a new file called unifi-core.crt, and in this file, you copy in your certificate
    followed by the root CA bundle from your certificate issuer, such as :
    <certificate_file>
    <bundle_file>
    and save it, then copy the file unifi-core.crt to unifi-core-direct.crt 

    Here’s the command line steps to create the files for all above:
    cat cert.key > unifi-core.key
    cat cert.key > unifi-core-direct.key
    cat cert.pem > unifi-core.crt
    echo "" >> unifi-core.crt
    cat cert.ca-bundle.pem >> unifi-core.crt
    cp unifi-core.crt unifi-core-direct.crt

  8. Upload the files (sftp/scp) to the folder /data/unifi-core/config
    scp unifi-core-* [email protected]:/data/unifi-core/config/
  9. On your UDM pro, issue the command:
    systemctl restart unifi-core
    You should now be able to connect to the machine using the https and certificate.
    Note that you may need to point out the address in your DNS, or add the IP in your lmhosts/hosts file,
    such as 192.168.0.1 gw.<domain.tld>

That should be it, and you should have a working SSL certificate on the box.
Note that updates of the OS, may reset the files, so keep them handy.

Good luck!

 

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Some thoughts on the future concept of soft hardware..

Imaginary Concept image illustrating a concept of reconfigurable computing using current and future concepts.

I have been considering hardware solutions for many years, since around the late 80’s, designing some of them, playing around with even more.

I have worked on, and advised on research in reconfigurable computing to other research project in the same and similar areas, played simulated scenarios on virtual self-generated parallel processing units (PPU’s) that are in a way similar to cpu’s, but differ in the way that while they have a risc-like basic set of instructions, they are self-generated to transfer complex and heavy tasks into discrete hardware, as well as able to have a on the fly reconfigurable and extendable instruction set, accelerating the speed of computing from clocked sequential solutions to discrete clocked or free-flowing deterministic logic, yielding speed improvements over traditional processing, often by multiple magnitudes.

Couple this with the modern like of and demand for parallelism and multithreading, and think, what if we had a simpler PPU, where we could throw our application at something, where we could create arbitrary complex instructions, that would be automatically translated into hardware, and we hade access to thousands of [discrete hardware] threads, hundreds or even thousands of them, all running on PPU’s, that could even offer true cycle by cycle parallel processing without the penalty of the context switching in a traditional cpu?

There is a lot of talk about modern varieties of things like CPU vs GPU vs DPU vs TPU’s today, but just what if, we had a merger, where we had a RCU that would incorporate components of all of them, allowing for massively, scalable, parallel translation of software into discrete hardware solutions, by itself, on demand?

Imagine a scenario where writing a software no longer means executing static code as in the classic primary form of a set of sequential steps, but transformed into a combination of classic code and discrete deterministic logic, composing of all of the above technologies (and new upcoming ones) in combination, and to top it off, have the machine itself analyze the performance of the solution, both software and hardware, to find better and more efficient ways of doing the job, coming up with a faster solution by itself, generating new code and reconfiguring itself to be more efficient?
Welcome to the concept of the RCU. (no, not that classic Read-Copy-Update concept…)

For the future, I see a merger of all these aforementioned components into the “RCU” – a Reconfigurable Compute Unit, which is no longer sets of distinct types of computing solutions, but where different kinds of compute solutions are merged into a single unit, and elements of the different technologies are called upon and utilized by the technology itself, and it’s own behavioral and performance analysis which could in itself very well be driven by generative AI solutions, will find new ways to make it more efficient, continuously.

After all, turning software into hardware, is nothing new, and it’s not rocket science – it’s very well understood and commonly utilized concepts, but what is new, is making the hardware build itself to it’s needs to gain the performance, incrementally, by analyzing itself, not only by way of discrete logic, but new, smarter instructions, created on the fly, based on the need of the software?

Such tasks and problems, are commonly not massively compute-heavy tasks, but relatively simple tasks, just like most everyday computational tasks, ones that can be served by relatively simple and low powered solutions. What makes most task go fast, is either massive parallelism, or, where not suitable, clever solutions where you don’t have to rely on steps, but solution flows.

In the scenario of the RCU, You, as a developer, could focus on simply getting a functional solution to the problem, and let the machine take care of the solution analysis and optimization. This, could also be coupled with adaptive descriptive problem to solution generation, as we are entering the era of where this is now both technically and practically feasible.

This has been a research journey in both thought and action since around 1990, and it is still ongoing at EmberLabs.

Are you ready for it and what is coming?
Are you ready to bite?

If you want to know more and possibly collaborate, we can talk.

Posted on by

GPS Location?

Need a routine to determine if a lat/long is inside or outside a specific area?

Here’s a Golang routine for this, that can be easily adopted to any other language.

/*
 * Free to use as you see fit. 
 */

package GPS

type polygon [][]float64

// Enter the lat,long coordinates (min 3)
// poly := [][]float64{ { 1,1 }, { 1,2 }, { 2,2 }, { 2,1 } ... {1,1}}
// Make sure the polygon coordinates are specified in the correct order,
// typically in a counter-clockwise direction, and that the last vertex is
// the same as the first one to close the polygon.
// in := inside(1.5, 1.5, poly) --> True
// in := inside(2.5, 1.5, poly) --> False

// Test if a GPS coordinate is inside the bounding box
func Inside(latitude float64, longitude float64, boundary polygon) bool {
    inside := false

    j := len(boundary) - 1
    for i := 0; i < len(boundary); i++ {

       xi := boundary[i][0]
       yi := boundary[i][1]

       xj := boundary[j][0]
       yj := boundary[j][1]

       // Crossing the border of the polygon?
       intersect := ((yi > latitude) != (yj > latitude)) && 
                    (longitude < (xj-xi)*(latitude-yi)/(yj-yi)+xi)

       if intersect {
          inside = !inside
       }
       j = i
    }

    return inside
}

 

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Pink October Talk @ Glitnor Group

Chris Sprucefield
Pink October talk at Glitnor Group.

Breast cancer…

There’s four dreaded words that you as a guy don’t ever want to hear, and no woman ever want to say –
“I found a lump”.

To me, us, this happened quite some time ago, end of 90’s, and I’m happily remarried since, but my story goes a long way, and it still goes to show how fast it can happen and develop like the lightning strike out of nowhere.

While the research has come quite some way, there’s still no cure, and it’s an illness that leaves no one untouched. It’s evil. It affects everyone involved, in ways you can not imagine, until it happens, and even then, you end up being stumped and lost, even as a “bystander”.

It started with a lump, she got treatment, and then it looked all good and well for some time. We moved countries, and one day, she said – I can’t hear on my left ear. Hospital, and it had returned, 4 years later, now, metastatic, and from there, it was all downhill, and she eventually passed away.

Luckily, today, this will not be the case for everyone, as treatments has gotten way better, but the treatments is not all.
There’s many more aspects to it than just treatments…

One of the worst part for us, was long time friends disappearing, because they “could not deal with cancer”, or hospitals. They just tried to find any excuse to bail out, with the exception of a very few that stuck around. If you are a true friend of someone, don’t be that person and take the bailout card – be the one that cares, even if just in the small things…

Here’s some of what you can do, even if you don’t have much time or resources, that will be gold dust to victims of cancer (in general)

  • Please, Warn the person going for the chemo, not to eat the usual things they like or love afterwards, avoid them for the time being, or you may end up not being able to eat them afterwards, as chemo can / will play tricks with your mind… nobody tells you this, and we wished someone had…
  • They got kids?
    Apart from just life – just like you, we are all busy, but they also have to deal with the effects of cancer and treatments, apart from the existential crisis they inevitably go through, and it is wearing people down. Offer their kid(s) the occasional sleepover, or just to take them off them even for a day/evening.
    They need adult time to cope, or even just peace and quiet. You have no idea what the value of such a small gesture is or may be…
  • Chemo?
    They just got back… They still need to eat and so on… Going to the shop?
    Ask them – I’m going shopping, you need any top-up stuff while i’m there?
    That top-up shop delivered, may be the difference between having to do a shop the day after the chemo, or 2 days later when you feel better and you can actually cope with it, because, we are all people, and we forget things, until we need it…
  • Getting to / from the hospital? If you can, take them there and pick up. Get a paper “flight sickness bag”, just in case. Just keep it in the car. you know why…
    Take that one worry out of their life if you can, they have enough existential stuff on their minds already, and that is gold, and they know they are safe with you…

The practical little things…

Sometimes, people being people, things can get too much for anyone, and if they cuss you out, having a particularly bad day, don’t take it personally – they are likely just exhausted and need to vent, and you just happen to be in the firing line for just being their trusted friend, because they feel comfortable and safe around you, so take it, just listen and don’t let it get to you.
Really – let it go in one ear and out the other… I know it’s hard, but you are the true friend, and for good reason.
They will be embarrassed enough afterwards about what happened, but be there the next time… the true friend you are.

Everyone has ups and downs. They just have some more of it, right now – the downs, and the feelng of world being against them.

Be the brave one for them – they need you and your strength as their guidance, and your presence as the anchor to reality.
Think about it – It’s not really hard things, it’s not big things, even small things count big time, but just being around, for a call, for a coffee etc.

It’s quality of life, the sense of normality that brings hope and future back into the picture. You just being you as usual, and most importantly, being there, counts.Now, you can do the above, and you can also donate to research to make this problem eventually become what we all want – extinct.Take care out there!

#PinkOctober #BreastCanscerSpouse #BreastCancer #BreastCancerAwareness