coming home 4

I have two keys on my keychain for my apartment complex. One is for my front door, the other is for the amenities (gym, pool). The amenities key has a diamond shaped head, just like my room key while deployed, so I keep trying to use that to open my apartment.

More that I miss from the desert:
One of the greatest perks that You often don't hear about is the embroidery shops there. With all the uniforms we have, and all the different badges and ranks, a tailor/embroidery shop is pretty important. A shop like this is often two to five folks working sewing machines, with someone working the counter. They usually do their work by hand, so if you can draw it, they
can make it. (Unlike in thje U.S., where everyone is now tied to computerized embroidery machines; you need a digital image file or they can't make it.) It's pretty cheap, and usually faster than here (a couple of days at the most).

Oil

About oil. A lot people say a lot of things, so I'll keep this brief. Robert Heinlein wrote this, probably at least four decades ago.

Ultimately, oil and dependence on it are a self solving problem. It's being consumed faster than it is being created, which means that eventually the imbalances in the world economy and ecology due to oil consumption will end. (Of course, if we prepared for this event we could make the transition to an oil free future a lot less painful than it is going to be, but conscientiously preparing for the future as a group just isn't done by the human race.)

The ten o'clock phone call.

I have a local phone number here. It costs me about 10 bucks a month, has no long distance and I don't use it much, but I keep it in case I lose my mobile phone, so that I have a way to contact work.

I am slowly moving to night shift here, so I am now sleeping late into the day. Almost every day, my phone rings at about 10 AM, and when it does, I know it is phone spam. I guess the latest wrinkle on sales calls is to automate them, so that I can't even tell them to add me to their do-not-call list. "This is your second notice that the factory warranty on your vehicle is expiring..."
(No need to specify the make or model of the vehicle since this is spam...the warranty on my current vehicle, which I got used, expired a long time ago.)

Interesting addendum to this story. I was walking through the airport recently on my last trip home. I walk past a bank of pay phones, and one of them is ringing. I'm not in a hurry, so I figure what-the-hey, and answer. "...to renew the factory warranty on your vehicle, please act now..." Wow. How desperate are phone spammers that they are now calling random pay phones? Probably it was a wrong number. I am not yet so paranoid as to believe the same spammers are now tracking my location and ringing any phone near me (seen the move The Game?). I bet Hollywood would love to make that into a movie though.

Interesting addendum to the addendum: I am flying back on the same trip, and same scenario,
I stop to answer a ringing pay phone. It would have been amazing if it was the factory warranty people again, and certainly would have fueled my paranoia, but it wasn't. It was just some guy, trying to get in touch with some other guy. I told him I didn't know guy 2, and that this was a airport pay phone. He said he must have a wrong number, and thanks. Now I wish I could remember the names, it would have made this story much more interesting.

coming home 3

It's also nice to not have to shred or burn anything with my name or address on it.

Something I miss: free postage on letters.

I still tap my right leg in gym shorts. The only pocket in the USAF PT gear was a small velcro thing on the lower hem of the right leg, it's where I would keep my keys.

waterboarding and sleep deprivation

I am planning on being in the 4th of July parade when I go home for leave next month. This is an attempt on my part to reach out to the civilian world and teach them something (anything!) about what the military does, to try and bridge the growing military-civilian gap.

I was talking with Colleen yesterday (and Christine before that), and said that what I would really like to do is set up a tent next to the Revolutionary War reenactor's camp that my town sometimes has for the 4th of July and demonstrate waterboarding. She asked me, "What's waterboarding?"

Waterboarding is an interrogation technique where the target is strapped down to something hard (the board) so they can't move their arms and legs and water is poured on their face to simulate the sensation of drowning. (Water+board=waterboarding) Needless to say, if the local police station did this to get a confession out of someone, I would hope large numbers people would protest this and demand the release of the alleged criminal. As well, any confession obtained in such a way would be unusable in a U.S. court, which is part of the reason the government is currently having so many problems prosecuting the few people in Gitmo that have been charged. We (the U.S.) has used waterboarding extensively since 9/11, and I would guess we are still using it now.

We have also used sleep deprivation, which I mentioned to Colleen as well. She asked what you do to keep someone awake when they are really tired. One method I have heard is that you get them to stand on something wobbly (a collection of beer bottles with a trash can lid on top, for example) and then use wires to tie their thumbs to the ceiling so if they fall off it hurts. Then they stand there all night trying to balance. If the thumbs don't provide them enough incentive, use the testicles. I've also heard of simply using a periodic electric shock to keep people awake.

I'm am not certain if these particular sleep deprivation techniques have been used, but some method of sleep deprivation has been used, and would likewise be unusable in a U.S. court.

I have also read that we have tried to justify torturing a terror suspects children in order to get a confession or further information. Don't know if this has every been done though.

It appalls me that the American people have no idea the things we do on their behalf.

coming home 2

My body still doesn't quite know what time it is...I fell asleep at about 2000 last night and just woke up (0200).

Yesterday I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 0430 and couldn't get back to sleep.

Coming home

More things to get used to to:

Being able to drink out of the faucet.

Being able to drive faster than 15 miles per hour (It still looks like everyone is speeding, everywhere, all the time.)

Hearing the sounds of children. Seeing children, and old people, out in public.

Seeing grass. I spent a night on the east coast before coming back to Vegas, and the grass and trees were so green there, it hurt my eyes.

Fast internet. I have the middle speed available from Cox, and it is so much faster than every connection available it the desert, it is like regaining a sixth sense.

Testing out posting...

Testing out posting by Jott. After(?) all this month(?), Britney(?) driving home from date, where I just move my weapon from the armory and turned it in and did my post appointment blood sample. That's it. listen

Powered by Jott

digital life: pandora; tags

A site that illustrates the movement of life to the internet.

Pandora.com, where you can listen to free music all day. To generate a personalized play list, enter a song or artist you like, and they will find other music like it. An offshoot of the Music Genome project, which involves categorizing all music according to the the included elements (a truly monumental project.) Anne and I have discussed this (she's the one who actually put me onto the site in the first place) and neither of us can think of a way to do this other than to listen to all the music involved and enter it in a database/tag it in some way. Pretty time consuming, and I am grateful to be the beneficiary of the work.

Also a note on labels/tags: I've been meaning to try and define them to make it easier to sort entries. I'm not really going to go back and work on them all, but I will work on it as I go along.

Tags:
geek: things of a nerdy nature, video games, internet applications, math jokes, etc.
blogger: posts dealing with the mechanics of actually using blogger.
tags: a post that includes the definition of a tag
links: a post containing links to some other site or some other post
people: mentions someone other than me

timestamp

Okay, this is annoying.

I just changed my timezone back to pacific (Zulu-8) from Iraq (Zulu+3), and this changes the timestamps on ALL entries, including the ones when I was in Iraq.

traveling with a weapon

The Air Force has declared that everyone going to the desert will carry a weapon. This is a stupid policy that makes all of our travel slower and less secure.

While carrying a weapon, I am only allowed to use a GOV to travel when I am not on a military base, and I have to maintain physical control of the weapon at all times. So, for example, yesterday when I checked in for my flight at an airport on the east coast three hours before I could check baggage, I had to find a place to stow my luggage, and wandered around the airport with an M-9 pistol in my backpack. I wonder how everyone around would have felt had they known. (Granted, it was unloaded (and I never had ammunition for it) and inside a case secured with two locks, but nevertheless, it is a gun in an airport.) Interestingly, the people at the check in counter rarely bat an eye when you tell them this, I believe in large part due to the war, which has a lot of military folks both in an out of uniform traveling with weapons these days.

To travel with a weapon, all you need to do is claim that the weapon is unloaded and being transported in a locked case (which is of course a checked bag, not a carry on). They give you a blaze orange tag with confirms this and you sign it and put in inside the case.

When I got off the plane in Vegas, my bags didn't, since they didn't make the connecting flight that I did. I could have just taken a cab or gotten a ride home from a friend and had them deliver the bags, but instead I did the prescribed thing and waited there for the bags to arrive on a later flight while calling trans from the base to come and get me. They carried me to the base armory where I left the weapon and then a friend picked me up.

So every person going to the middle east has to carry a weapon and it means an extra 1-4 hours at each commercial stop you make, and you have a whole bunch of guns floating around out in the system. Or you could fly a single military cargo plane to the desert and set up an armory there. The Air Force chose the former.

Rote complete

I hereby declare the spring '08 rote complete. 12 Feb - 21 Jun 08

I am firmly back in the U.S. and it feels good.

Everything has a familiar and yet exotic feel...even sitting down at a desk to surf the internet free of restrictions or letting myself go three days without shaving. I got home late last night and started turning my regular life back on. I took down the drop cloths and began locating all the important things I left in stay-behind locations, like my datebook.

More to come.

Yahoo

My Yahoo and Blogger pages used to route through Britain, but a few days ago they started showing up in German.

Folks from UPT

Been busy, am busy, will be busy, so this will be brief.

I heard a rumor from a friend that they are going to start sending guys straight from UPT to Preds starting late 2008. I don't know if this is a good idea (and it certainly seems a little odd since they've been paying pilots to quit the last couple of years), but they are desperate for pilots.

dust two

I was walking around the other day in the dust, and I saw some folks wearing masks. I have one too, the disposable kind you might use working on drywall or somewhere there is a lot of sawdust.

The second day I was here, there was a dust storm and I had a cough for about six weeks. I would wear a mask for the dust storms after that, but at some point I got out of the habit. Now the dust doesn't even bother me. I wonder if I will have trouble breathing the air back in the States since it isn't as thick?

dust

Dust storm rolled through here yesterday. This has the interesting side effect of making it cooler, I guess because the dust is reflecting the sunlight before it reaches the ground.

The air gets really still and quiet, it reminds me of the way foggy air feels; it's actually nice to walk around camp. The dust is so fine though, it gets in through any opening in a building and collects on every surface.

quick

Okay, one more quick entry.

A friend of mine recently confessed that despite the importance of her family in her life, she doesn't spend enough time with them, a problem I have noted more than once myself.

It's hard to turn over a new leaf in my present position, but there is some stuff I can do, like really read a FB page instead of scanning it and finding the funniest wall post.

So anyway, Liz, I just wanted to say I read your interests and I found them very entertaining and also very representative of you. I, of course, also love old book smell. I love your Venn diagram about pants, it reminded me of Homer Simpson. And that link the architecture rant...Catherine, this isn't an attack on you, but I agreed with a lot of what Choi said. (And is it true that Rem gets a lot of sleep? Why doesn't that trickle down to his organization? Having personally worked for such organizations (working for one now) and observed the poor decisions (life or death decisions) we make while sleep deprived, I would work hard to build an org that would have shorter workdays, so as to focus only on what is truly important.

excuses; good samaritan

It has been true of each of my deployments that by the end, my knowledge of the situation is at it's peak, my flying skills are good, but have fallen off from their peak (somewhere around month 3), my apathy is at a maximum and my patience is at a minimum.

All of this is a left-handed way of apologizing for the fact that haven't written many good entries lately. Yesterday was another helluva day at work; they never end. Despite my best efforts, we had a number of late takeoffs, and it is hard to care very much about that since whether I care or not, or work against them or not, they still happen and no one else cares. So yeah, apathy, because the only thing I can really change around here is whether or not I get an ulcer. I have no patience right now to write decently constructed entries about things here. It takes too much effort to write clearly, try to explain things from a non-military POV, screen it for opsec, proofread it and post it. (Not to mention the fact that I don't care to re-live my work hours during my free time.) I might do some backdated posting after I get back to the states, hopefully I will at least finish some of the 10 or so draft entries I have going right now.

So the deployment story I will spend the time to write today: I spent a few minutes face down on concrete on my way to chow before this for incoming fire.

Anyway.

Sorry for the tangent. This entry was motivated by the recent news story of the older man who was struck by a car in Hartford recently.

(I am reading back each way I have written this and there isn't at least some part of each that comes our sounding preachy, self-righteous, or insensitive. So do I post this? At risk of seeming an ass, I will...I'd rather be a bad writer than not one at all.)

I am reminded of some things I learned in the Boy Scouts. The proper thing to do would be to block off traffic, send someone to call the police and emergency services, then render first aid, but only if you think he's going to die right there. If he's breathing and not bleeding to death, you shouldn't touch him, and if he's conscious, you should tell him not to move either until trained help arrives.

A note on sending someone for help: You have look one of the on-lookers in the eyes, ask for their name, and then say, "Hello John Smith, nice to meet you. Go call 911 immediately and tell them there has been an accident at 123 Main Street and they need to send police and an ambulance." If you can do this while shaking their hand or slapping them on the shoulder, so much the better, it distracts them momentarily from the panic and confusion.

This last step is important and illustrates a common problem in urgent situations involving groups of people: no one's in charge, no one wants to be in charge, and everyone thinks someone else has all the relevant information and is doing something. The name step is important because it cuts through the herd mentality. Most people will react fairly well in a urgent situation if they are given simple instructions for tasks they've done before that make sense.

All of this is a round about way of saying that while the reaction of onlookers might have been slow, I don't think it was criminally so (the hit and run drivers are another story, and they need to be punished). Within 1 min 10 seconds, there were several people standing in the street around the victim and there was a police car on the scene. I think that's probably competitive with the response time in any city in an industrialized nation.

Thoughts? I haven't had much time to scan open source news for public impression of this incident.

Liberty City Humor

Hmm...why so much humor lately? Not sure...tired of thinking hard after all day at work I think.

Why's this one funny? Again hyperbolic violence, and the Onion's standard deadpan delivery of the completely ridiculous.

The Onion