I finally found my old articles!  Everything back to 2002 when the site started is back online.  Well, almost everything. About 9 months that are lost for good due to a hard drive crash (October 2002, May 17, 2007).  One of the advantages of this is that all the comments are preserved.  The re-posts of select articles I did back when I re-launched don’t have all the comments with them, so the discussion around different articles and their context in time was lost.

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I am asleep in bed.  The dog begins barking wildly.  My eyes shoot open and I see a dark, hooded figure dart from the end of the bed followed by a flash of white light.  At the same instant I hear my daughter let out a blood curdling scream.  I leap from the bed and across the room, hurdling my wife, and start down the door chasing the man determined to tackle and beat the life from him.  As I cross the threshold, I glance another man in my daughter’s room.  Dressed in khaki and dark skinned is all my eyes glimpse as I am racing down the hall. 

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Today was a great day.  It was my last duty day in this unit.  Monday I begin the clearing process, then its off to flight school and Alaska!  I’ll be going in for PT (even though I don’t have to) and to give advice if needed since my replacement won’t be in until December.  Other than that, I am on my own to clear, pack, and get ready to move.

It will be so nice to finally leave the desert and move somewhere where its green (although I am not too happy about the temperature).  I am moving on into a whole new career field with flight medicine as well.  I am really looking forward to that!  No more waiting to get blown up in my humvee on patrol, sitting in overwatch for 24 hours doing nothing but cooking in the heat, and no more foot patrols. 

So the next two months will be pretty busy, but I am a least moving onward and forward.  I hope I left a lasting impression behind me and that all those green privates learned something that will keep them alive and doing what they do best. 

Open source will rule the world!!

This seems to be a real brand of cola. There was a discussion about it in one of the forums I read. I just wonder if it is GPL compliant.

If you don't get the humor, see here.

Like most Americans, I have been thinking a lot about the War on Terror, Gas Prices, and the economy lately.  I am sure that a lot of Political Analysts, Economists, and the like have thought of this before now, but I can’t help but think that the U.S. is under attack and that the enemy has found a most efficient way of winning the war without ever firing a shot.  I am also pretty sure this is a very simplistic view of world politics.

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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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