Hi, I am Carmelo Walsh… and this is my personal website and one of my few blogs. I have a lot of posts regarding cybersecurity and some old news that I used to consistently blog about. Trying to combine my other blogs into this one, the code to the paths of where images are is out of whack, but I’ll eventually get them fixed up.

I’m a firm believer in that fancy thing I saw on pinterest one day. It was:

Wealth, Health, and Inner Self… Which correlate to:

  1. Pursuing my career in Information Security
  2. Running (slowly at my own pace)
  3. Playing my ukuleles (and maybe other instruments, like the guitar and keyboard… or literally anything else musical)

Pursuing my career in Information Security
While I was serving in the Marine Corps in the early 90s, I was into computers and owned two. I actually started learning programming in 1982. Anyway, I was into trying to know more than all my peers about these things. I was intrigued by the hacker life, it was so fresh and new, the movie Hackers just came out, and it confirmed my interest. It was fun that the DOS box we had in the Ordnance shop included gorilla.bas, (if you know, you know) and I would edit the file to mess with the refresh rate and speed of the bananas. Hacking! LOL

Information Security wasn’t a thing yet in the 90s, the closest thing was Information Technology, so that’s where I pursued. The Department of Corrections provided that transition from the Military, to a Paramilitary Government organization where I went from a Corrections Officer and Work Crew Supervisor with hundreds of inmates, to a Network Specialist… My boss said I was the youngest Network Specialist in the State agencies. I was 22 going on 23. I’m quite proud of that.

I’m currently much older now, having been doing this for a heck of a lot of time and I’m currently serving as the Vice President over Cybersecurity Operations at Magellan Health, I am accountable for Application Security, Cyber Security Incident Response, Cyber Security Monitoring, Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence, Vulnerability Governance, Remediation & Mitigation, Security Analytics, and Business Continuity & Insider Threat. I have an amazing team of leaders and go-getters who make it all possible.

Here’s my LinkedIn.

Running
I hated the part in the Marine Corps where I had to run, and we did that very often in the first year, but after I got to the fleet, I stuck to about 6 miles a year. Mostly because I never really knew how to run. Being young, I was fast and had great metabolism. Most of my life, I’ve been into going to the gym and getting fit. Gym Life! After the Marine Corps, I barely did cardio ever again. In 2014, I hurt my shoulder benching insane amounts of weight, over 420 lbs!! and that’s when I started to gain the wrong kind of size I wasn’t wanting! I started running in 2015, and continue to this day. 10-20 miles a week. I’m not good at it, I’m really slow now, but it keeps my size/weight stable. Or keeps me within my upper and lower bounds. It’s sometimes too hot to run here in Phoenix, so I try to make it up at the gym with some treadmill or elliptical machine, which sucks.

To make it exciting, my son and I do Spartan races, Rugged Maniacs, etc… Sometimes my friends join us. It’s pretty cool.

Playing My Ukuleles
I got introduced to the ukulele in Hawaii. I just took a liking to it and one day committed to it. When I was introduced, I was hearing Jake Shimabukuro play, he’s pretty rad. I’ve met him a few times It’s been my thing since. I play one every day. Literally, every day.
I even got into challenging myself to play some pretty advanced stuff.

My wife and I own and run the Phoenix Ukulele Group Zoom conferences. We have really good people from more than just Phoenix. Everyone is awesome. We sometimes do public shows, like at the Glendale Folk Festival, the Phoenix Art Festival, and the local libraries.

One of my personal things that I do to advance myself, is I do 100-Day challenges. I literally take something, for example, Bohemian Rhapsody, and I learn to play it over and over for 100 days. See the video below, for one of my first 100 day challenges.