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Thursday, August 4th 2022 - An Opportunity
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Today's the day. I'm out of excuses. I have all of my notes back
and my lab environment restored so I can go back to studying
today. No matter what happens I need to start making forward
progress again.

That being said, I had an interesting offer come my way that's
going to be taking up some of my studying time. We have a
friend who is an Ukranian-born US citizen that is currently doing
correspondence work in Ukraine. One of his angles is exposing
falsely-attributed quotes in Russian media, so he's asked me to 
scrape a couple of Russian-owned news sites for quotes and 
attributed names so he can work the angle more efficiently.

I've never done web scraping before. I know a lot of people end
up writing scrapers early on in their coding careers because its
a useful project that is relatively trivial to accomplish. So,
with that in mind I've looked at some of the tools out there and
I think I'm going to be working with Scrapy, which is a python 
library for writing targetted spiders and scrapers 
(https://scrapy.org/).

This project interests me, partly because scraping *is* is valid
attack vector in penetration testing, but mostly because it gives
me an opportunity to contribute to the war effort. Yes, he's
paying me, so it's not entirely altruistic. But the humanitiarian
aspect definitely makes this more attractive to me than it 
might be otherwise.

Part of the problem with working with technology for 25 years is
the clinical feel your work and endeavors start to take on. It's
difficult to find something in the industry that's truly
beneficial to the human condition in more than just a monetary
way.

I am very grateful for this opportunity.

 - diviniti