Archive for July, 2009

Taken at 6pm. The clock is shaded most of the day by an overhang. 

I wasn’t in Alaska a lot, but I followed her on the campaign and just liked the way she did business.  She seemed to be a pretty straight shooter and a real person, not a puppet in a suit. Even this whole quitting thing hasn’t really changed my opinion of her personally too much.  I don’t now how I feel about her professionally anymore, but time will see where all this latest controversy is headed.

Anyway, she gave her farewell speech and in true Palin fashion, she left quite a few good quotes for the media. For instance:

Our new governor has a very nice family, too. So leave his kids alone!

This weeks 140 character messages from Iraq.

Most units receive a couple of Non-Tactical Vehicles when they arrive in theater.  This is usually handled through KBR and consists of such vehicles as gators, F-150’s, Pick-ups, and in our case a Trailblazer.

A little something for all the Dustoffers out there that might be reading care of www.army.mil:

Soldiers unpack a new UH-72A Lakota at Cairns Army Airfield on Fort Rucker, Ala., July 8. “Flatiron,” Fort Rucker’s Air Ambulance Detachment, aids not only the post but also local communities during emergency medical situations. This Lakota is the first of three to arrive here.
Photo credit Emily Brainard

Personally after working on BO-105s for a short period, I am no fan of rear loading clamshells.  However, the Lakota seems to be a bit bigger than the BO-105.  From the article I gathered these will be used only for the MAST mission at Ft. Rucker and not for deployments.  The rest of us are still stuck in the the old standby UH-60 variants or, if you are CONUS only and not lucky enough to be at the U.S. Army Aviation Center, even older UH-1 variants.

The remainder of the article is here.

Another week in Iraq down..

I have been in emergency medicine a long time.  I have seen a lot of things that would give most second thoughts about humanity as a whole.  However, the patients that have bothered me most over they years have always been the children. I have witnessed some horrible things done to children in my tenure, including using them as shields.

This weeks meanderings from my existence in Iraq.

So this morning I went into our food locker for my daily bowl of Apple Jacks or Frosted Flakes, but all that was left was Special K (ugh!).  I was actually pretty hungry as breakfast has become the defacto start to my day lately.  Next to the cereal was the unadorned brown and green plastic boxes that are known military wide as mermites, and despised just as widely. 

For those who don’t know mermites are big insulated plastic boxes that hold food either warm or or cold.  They make eggs turn green and hard, toast go soft, and for some reason one always contains gravy, no matter what the meal is.  Anyway, this mornings mermites included french toast, eggs, bacon and sausage, and gravy.  I grabbed a plate and helped myself to some french toast and bacon.

So I did a lot of “work” the last couple of weeks on the back end of this site.  I was having some issues with duplicate entries in search engines, being flagged in Google and the like.  It all had to do with leaving old templates in place so there wouldn’t be dead links.  Without getting into it too deep, I fixed my .htaccess to redirect properly, setup some SEO optimizations, and hopefully fixed the issues.  Its actually done a lot of good – check the results. Thats not what I wanted to talk about though, but its a good lead in.  After fixing all the SEO stuff, running my analytics and watching my stats get cleaned up, I noticed something.  I only get about 20 -30 IPs a day that aren’t search engines, spiders, etc, and its dropping off slowly.  I know a good third of these IPs are me as well.