Work yesterday was not good.
I can't talk about most of it yet for opsec, maybe later. It actually started out okay, then all went to pot right at the end. Afterwards I went to finance to invest in the SDP, but they were closed until 1400L for some kind of luncheon. They're closed on Sundays too, at a deployed location! As the Japanese say, a bad day is bad to the end.
5 comments:
Sorry to hear (or, more accurately, NOT hear) about your bad day.
On an unrelated note, added to the list of people who it would be awesome to hang out with for a while: Paul Van Riper. Um, so, next time we play Risk, he can be on my team, mmkay??
umm, Paul Van Riper the retired USMC general? Why does he get to be on your team? It would be cool to hang out with him.
Yes, that Paul Van Riper. I was reading about his role in the 2002 Millennium Challenge war game and did some additional reading on him and decided that he's pretty awesome.
Here is how I imagine playing Risk with him would go (and why I want him on my team):
Other Player: Okay, Anne and Paul, I'm attacking your troops in the Northwest Territories.
Anne: [sigh] Okay.
Paul Van Riper: [pulls out two twenty-sided D&D dice.] Okay.
Other player: You can't use those!
Paul Van Riper: I'm simply using alternate technology that has long been in use in other areas.
Other player: But... it's against the rules!
Paul Van Riper: Learn some military theory! The nature of war is that it's fundamentally uncertain! No rules! [places a ferret on the game board]
Have you read Blink? That's where I first heard about him by name. I had heard of his protests over MC02 without ever actually hearing his name. (I didn't do further research at the time because I was busy and rigging/deliberate misinterpretation of military exercises is, sadly, all too common.)
He is awesome, isn't he? I love your fictional story describing the outside-the-box thinking that is essential to vibrant military ops & planning. So succinct yet so accurate. Where else did you read about him?
Also, sorry about the delay on my replies to your comments, it is hard for me to easily note new comments, so I just noticed yours today.
Links for interested parties:
Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2080814/
And the ubiquitous Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
I have read Blink; that's where I first heard of him, as well. By "additional reading," I mean, I Googled him and then read the first fifteen or so things that came up. NOVA interviewed him, which was excellent. In that interview, he recommends Carl von Clausewitz's On War, which I just got and am reading.
Blink was a pretty crappy book, I realized in retrospect. No, that's inaccurate. It served my purpose entirely, which was to have something to read on the plane, but I also read Us Weekly on the plane and look forward to new issues of SkyMall, so I guess the bar isn't really set that high. But I wound up mentally filing away in the same cabinet as Freakonomics: enjoyable, anecdotal psuedo-science. I guess there's worse things it would be.
re: moving to Dubai: I said I'd be open to it, but I don't think that means a whole lot in terms of how likely I am to go because I think they asked a lot of young, unmarried people with the thought that we'd be more likely to say yes. If that wound up happening, it would be for probably around 2 years.
re: taking a long time to respond to replies: No worries. I know it's hard for you of the older generation to get used to all the technological wizardry of the world wide web. Way to get with the times and have a "blog"! I have follow-up comments e-mailed to be, but then, I AM a young'un who grew up with computers.
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