Its official!  The word is in and we are headed to Alaska, in the winter no less. That’s the Army for you.  Take a family used to 100+ degree weather and 8 months pregnant, then move them to -40 degree weather and have the soldier almost immediately deploy again.

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So after three days of trying, I finally obtained the latest version of openSUSE.  It is definitely worth the time to upgrade.  I ended up wiping my entire drive (say bye, bye Vista) and finally organizing it properly for a Linux install.  So when I say its worth the effort, you can bet its definitely a worthwhile upgrade.  You can go and read about all the new gee-whiz stuff, but I will let you know that if you are looking for a Linux to try or upgrade to, this is it.  I even made the move to 64 bit finally.  All the necessary codecs and programs (except Bluefish) have finally been ported to 64 bit, and the video driver works awesomely with Compiz. 

Anyway, this upgrade only took me half the time as usual, and now I am going to quit neglecting my family.  Here is a link if you want to give it a try.

So I was sitting on Staff Duty watching WarGames and being all nostalgic for the days when hacking was fun.  The days of Z80’s, phone couplers, 5” floppies, and nothing but a command line, in color if you were lucky. I remember having “fun” pushing the envelope with my XT clone and its 8mhz Turbo mode and doing things “just because I could.” My first modem was in fact a little Hayes 2400 bps deal that was considered high speed and compact because it was a full 2400 bps and only a half card slot in length!  I had been using phone couplers at 150 or 300bps before that to connect to the online world of BBSes.  I know, that dates me really well (I was, in fact a few years younger than Matthew Broderick in the movie)! 

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Did you know you can order pizza from Dominos via your *nix command line?  Well you can thanks to Pizza Party.  I would have to say my favorite function is the ability to batch order pizzas from an input file.  After all, us *nix geeks have some wild parties!

I remember the days when computer geeks around the world would connect to soda machines, washing machines, etc on campus with their terminals just to say they did it.  Then came the days of ordering your pizza via the web (I remember when Papa John’s first attempted this back in the mid-90’s).  Now, if you are too busy coding and need a pizza fix, just switch to a console (or SSH in) and order away without starting your browser. 

Anyway, ubiquitous You Tube video of Pizza Party in action after the jump.

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I was watching the final epsiode of MASH the other night and I had a sort of catharsis.  The final epsiode, besides saying goodbye to all the characters, involved Hawkeye in a hospital for what we call “Combat Stress” these days.  He had been in surgery and gone off the deep end.  He had become impatient, irritable, and angry at everything.  He had been having a recurrent dream involving his friends, wounded soldiers, and a Korean lady killing a chicken that changed into a baby as soon as it had been killed.

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Lately one of our big projects has been teaching Combat Lifesaver to as many people in the battalion as possible.  Its a priority of the Battalion’s, but they tend to think that a CLS can replace a Medic. This training could mean the difference between life and death for a soldier until a medic can arrive and they need a good high quality course that the students will take seriously. Since I don’t do half-assed training, I focus on giving a serious and intensive course, ask my medics.  So I have been running these 4 day long courses almost every week on top of all our other support requirements.  The feedback has been really excellent and I believe that my personal philosophy on CLS has been making an impact on the quality of the courses.

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Its gotten pretty busy with teaching Combat Lifesaver and First Responder, coordinating lanes training, ranges, and just the everyday “Hoo-ha” of garrison existence.  Just a couple of things worth noting.

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I received an interesting piece of mail today, the annual Army Housing Survey.  Its a little survey asking about how we like on-post housing and our experiences with customer service, service calls, and quality.  Needless to say, my cardboard project housing received very poor scores. 

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I made it home Friday night. After a couple of weeks of 12 hour days, needles, trauma lanes, and applied tourniquets, I am a little battered but the better for it.  Although ours was a shortened version of the course designed for soldiers fresh off deployment, all the good stuff was there.  I got lots of great new information on medical equipment and training, as well as lots of practice on using it.  Combat Medic training doesn’t pull punches.  Yes, we use dummies and lots of fake blood, but every IV is placed on fellow soldiers, Tourniquets are applied for real on classmates, and we play for real.  The culmination being a series of “lanes” where we have to treat patients under duress and combat simulation.  The only things we “missed out” on were classes on stuff we already knew from having used it daily in Iraq.

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So I have been in class all week and we are getting ready to move to our new class location.  Its been a rather uneventful week, at least until today.  I had gotten back from class and was down the street at a laundromat when I received a call from my wife.

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