Introducing myself and what I'll be blogging about on Steemit: Indie SciFi & Fantasy, Statistics, Information security, Crypto and Nutrition.

I've been on Steem now for a number of days, and so far I really liked it. On other social media, I have found it to be important to keep most of my interests seperated. There ar very few people who are interested in all of the subjects I like to keep up with and talk or blog about, so I kinda ended up feeling like a schizophrenic on social media. One social media account for me as an Indie published speculative fiction author. Another one for me as a nutritional hacker using my engineering and data science skills trying to beat the odds regarding my personal medical issues. A third one for me as an information security red smurf advocating the use of a mix of capabilities, crypto, and anthropology for modeling information security. And a fourth one for talking about computer, network and data forensics.
And then, if juggling these four identities is quite a struggle when there is only one social network to keep up with, it proved completely impossible doing so on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and off cause my separate blogs all at the same time and still have time to actually work on all of these subjects. My Facebook and G+ presence have become leaching presences in recent years and I ended up consolidating my security and forensics identities, juggling three blogs and three twitter accounts.

When I recently joined Steemit, I found it a really interesting platform. Blockchain technology is one of my major interests and an interest that I touch on both from my security persona as from my speculative fiction me. I absolutely love how Steemit combines blockchain technology with quite a decent social blogging platform, and after a few days on Steemit I found that this platform would offer me a platform for consolidating my different blogs on, and in the process look for a new way to make and keep my self published e-books available to the general public 100% free of charge. In this post I would now like to introduce myself to the Steemit crowd, and make use of the opportunity to ask a few questions.

While I am one person, years of keeping my interests separated in different social media and blogging persona has made it almost hard to talk about myself as a single whole person, at least on the internet, but to introduce myself as a whole person, in short I'm an easily bored and quickly distracted smart guy with many interests and a history of health problems .

Speculative fiction

One of my interest is writing speculative fiction. So far I have self published two short stories as free e-book and I am currently working on my first (also free) novel. The subjects I like to write about are somewhere halfway between fantasy, sci-fi and alternative history. Orussian Quarantine is a compact and some say rather densely written, old testament inspired sci-fi alternate-history story. While this story was scripture inspired, I haven't had any angry feedback on it. So much different for my second short story. My secons short story, Ethereal Pixie Rings Of Mercy (EPROM), was originally named differently, but I changed the name after a wave of nasty feedback from a group of US-based Christians. Interestingly the new name and cover art were sufficient to stop nasty feedback on this story about an angry atheist in a mushroom afterlife. EPROM was inspired by a short video by a guy calling himself Mushroom Jesus. I could tell you a lot more about the story, but better just go to your favorite e-book outlet and read it for yourself.

My short stories are available as e-book at no cost from Kobo, B&N, iBooks and Scribd. They are also available on Amazon, but as Amazon seems to have abandoned price-matching for free e-books, they still aren't free on Amazon. Smashwords, however, has a mobi version of my e-books available for free. A bit more work, but these should work on your Kindle.

At this moment I am working on my first novel. Ragnarok Conspiracy is to be a Norsk Mythology inspired post-Crypocalyptic sci-fi story. I've posted a few draft chapters to Steemit recently and will continue to do so regularly.

As I want to m ake all of my fiction free of charge, but do have some expenses (editing and cover art costs), I already was a big fan of blockchain technology. My author page has donate links for BitCoin, DogeCoin and ZCash, and the suitability for micro-donations combined with the recent rise in exchange rate, has already partially covered some of my upcoming editing costs for Ragnarok Conspiracy. I find Steemit a very interesting addition. Would be amazing if posting draft chapters could bring in some Steem Dolars that I could maybe even use here on Steemit to pay a Steemit member with decent editing qualifications. We'll see.

Health and nutrition

With a rather complicated health history, I sometimes have a hard time comitting my spare time to the subjects I would like to submit time to. Improving or at least maintaining my health for me are of crytical importance, and when my body allows for it, I'll spent many hours at the gym trying to improve and maintain my health and trying to lift heavy shit. Apart from the gym, I spent many hours staying read up on dietary and medical aspects of cardiovascular disease. Having a familiair predisposition to cardiovascular issues and having had my first CV event in my early twenties, I really need to know everything there is to know that could help me improve my risk profile.

While I read a lot of medical science papers and nutritional science papers, a whole lot more than any of my doctors do, I do so only as a lay person. Basically from the perspective of an engineer. That is, what Europeans refer to as an engineer. There always seems to be some confusion about the word engineer when comunicating with Americans. I'm the type of engineer who builds probabilistic simulations, control feedback theory based systems and writes software. I'm not the type of engineer that does engine maintenance, nor the type that does anything with bridges.

Apart from posting my fiction on Steemit, I like to blog about nutrition and health, and sometimes, in rare cases on CVD related medical science. Always however from my engineer's perspective. Often involving statistics, probability, and other basic math. Sometimes also touching on basic epistemology or on control feedback theory.

I´ll try to keep my post as accessible as I can though, but occasionally my inner geek gets the better of me and I'll go out on a tangent in my control feedback or statistical modeling efforts.

Information security red smurf

I'm a true information security geek. Unlike many in the field though, I don't care that much about the confidentiality or availability aspect of security. My main focus in information security is in the field of data and system integrity. I absolutely love crypto, but as far as mathematics is concerned, never managed to get to learning cryptoanalysis. It's definitely on my todo list though. I'm a real big fan of capability based security, both modern object capabilities and the now less popular usage of sparse-capabilities. Author of the MinorFS least authority file-system and I need to find time again to continue on its successor RumpelstiltskinFS. I'm strongly convinced, unlike many other security people, that the user is NOT the weakerst link in security and that antroplology and social sciences hold nuggets of ignored wisdom concerning information security. I'll ocasionaly blog on security subject. My spare time software development efforts currently don't leave much room for working on RumpelstiltskinFS, but as soon as I have a first stable release of my current computer forensics project.

Computer forensics

Hey, you are still reading, great. After having been working in the field for many years, and having worked on open source computer projects such as the Open Computer Forensics Architecture and on the zero-storage carving geared user space file-system CarvFS, last year I got myself an M.Sc in the field, and in my M.Sc dissertation found a way to combine my high integrity system design skills, user-space filesystem development experience and love for capability based security into an amazing file-system aimed towards the creation of high integrity computer forensic frameworks. I havn't blogged anything on MattockFS yet, but expect me to be posting on MattockFS and other computer forensics subject in the future.

Sumarizing
So sumarizing, I'm a 46 year old scaterbrain, speculative fiction author, nutrition geek and data nerd with information security and computer and data forensics as important fields of interest. I'll be blogging on many of these subjects on Steemit and if you blog on any of these subjects, please add a comment below; I'll gladly follow you. I'll also be posting draft chapters for my upcoming novel Ragnarok Conspiracy. I would be very interested in exploring SteemIt as a way of acquiring funding for my editing and cover art cost, and assuming some success at this, I'll be very much interested in connecting with a competent editor on SteemIt who would appreciate being paid in Steem and/or other crypto currency.