Delicious

Okay, so nerding out the other day I started a Delicious account. I read a lot of news online, and I finally got curious about the logo I kept seeing everywhere. Trying it out for now. Seems cool, lets you keep you bookmarks apart from a specific computer, a way of becoming hardware independent.

Bookmarks

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16 Dec 08:
Later post

FOD

I was out driving today and I had to pull a U turn. The road was narrow, so I had drive on the should a bit, which was dirt, not asphalt, and had some gravel on it. As I did so, I instinctively said to myself that I had left a prepared surface and would have to do a FOD check before driving further on the flightline.

(FOD=Foreign Object Damage, a term that describes rocks or any other object that gets out on a flightline that can be ingested by an aircraft engine and cause damage.)

tags:
email, deployment, 2008 rote,

edit 2 jul, line breaks, minor editing

I'm blogging this.

A friend at the squadron here said there was some good stuff at thinkgeek.com. A piece of apparel that is sure to scare the insecure male:


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original post by email:
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thinkgeek.com

I'll update this post shortly.

email, links, humor

Respectful Dissent; humor

Thank you, Mr. Gates.

In the newly established spirit of respectful dissent, a few things I think are a waste of taxpayer money.

New uniforms. In the middle of a very costly war (the most expensive ever?), all the services are changing uniforms, and in the case of the Air Force, they are inventing new ones (the PT gear). Why are new uniforms necessary? Were the old* ones not working? I won't speak for the other services, but our DCUs used to work fine, and still better than the new ABU since they don't glow in white light after one wash, and catch on fire and melt to your skin when shot, as the ABU does. Here's a cost saving idea: Scrap every new uniform you have people not fighting the war working on, and keep the old ones. Put those people to work fighting the war. Further cost saving: Don't issue us all two uniforms (green and tan). Make tans general issue since most of the AF is going to see combat in the desert, not Germany or Japan.

The F-22. Yes, a cornerstone for U.S. defense spending for the next 5 years. And to pay for this item, we have (so far) decimated about 7 years worth of officer ranks, by making fewer officers and paying others to quit. (I don't have enough firsthand knowledge of what it's done to the enlisted ranks, but I have been briefed in the past that Force Shaping was supposed to affect all ranks.) People, most definitely not the AF's most valuable resource. There was a cartoon that made this point quite well a few years ago, I will try to link to it directly if I can find it. Check out the site below. Boyd, who I will return to again, would have said of priorities: "People, ideas, hardware. In that order."

The Dodo is (was?) a paper document that circulated at USAFA for many decades. It started underground, then eventually came under the purview of the establishment and was still circulated in censored form during my time there (graduated 2000). I've heard rumors it no longer circulates in any fashion. However, in 1998 a group of grads got together a formed a private website to host the comics that wouldn't be allowed at USAFA, and it is still going strong. A lot of the humor is directed at cadets and grads, but there is still plenty there you will find funny if you don't fall into those two groups. Incidentally, it is also often my best source of tactical level information on things going on at the Academy. eDodo

[edit 30 apr 08: changed new to old.* (Am I dyslexic?)]

5 years on; swearing; Buddha

In spite of my best intentions for being in bed at this hour, here I am. But this will be short.

So I guess today is five years in Iraq for the U.S....wish I had something deep to say but I don't. I was in Kuwait for the third anniversary. I hope I'm not here for the sixth thru ninth.

Being deployed is not helping my resolution to swear less. I'm stressed out, which is the biggest cause, but there is also the factor of being away from home and in a strange place with a bunch of other people in that same boat; everyone seems to swear a lot. (It reminds me of a camping trip.) I remember when we went home off my first rote, we had to remind each other to use "non-deployment voice." (A bunch of us accidentally swore in front of children the first few days.)

[edit 20 mar 08: I forgot to mention there was a pretty long controlled detonation as i wrote this.]

I rode a C-17 on a leg of my trip into here. There is a little rivalry between the C-130 and C-17 communities. The C-17 is the newest airlifter, so it tends to get a lot of praise from the top brass,
and there is also the fact that the C-17 was designed to do some of the same things the C-130 was (assault landings). Depending on who you ask, though (me for example), C-130 crews are more experienced at this mission and thus more reliable. It is also an objective fact that we cause less damage to the runways we land on. In spite of this, the C-17 still gets way more publicity, quite unfairly sometimes. For example, on my first rote, a C-17 crew got DFCs for flying into a field that C-130s fly into on a weekly basis, and all we would get was one counter towards an air medal (that is, you need to do 19 more combat missions to get a medal ranked (much) lower than the DFC.)

A lot of the C-17s were built in the late nineties or early oughts, so you tend to think of them as new planes. But when I went up on the flight deck of the C-17 I rode, I noticed the paint on the throttle handles was worn clean and the metal underneath was shiny (a common feature of Herc throttles as well), and it reminded me that the C-17s have been hard at work as well. Their TDY rate has been higher than the Hercs in many of the last several years (approaching 270 days a year), and they too have their moments of eclipse in the press: Lebanon in '06, they were instrumental in pulling out the bulk of the Americans there.

short

Short entry today, mostly I just did some editing and tagging. I forgot my notebook and my thumbdrive at work, so I don't have my normal notes to work off of, and to boot they are kicking us off to clean. But there's this: yesterday almost sucked.

Oh, and I've decided that tags don't count as later edits.

Ender

For those familiar with the book, I had an Ender moment recently. I was walking around in the building we work in, which used to belong to the Iraqis. There was a large sign painted on the wall, in Arabic script. It reminded me of Ender's realization that he is "living in the house of his enemy." (Forgive errors in my memory.)

For those unfamiliar, I highly recommend Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.

[edit 10 mar 08: added a bit about the building belonging to the Iraqi's, added "Ender" in place of a pronoun in the last sentence.]