Thanks, Aahz!

Sig, I have felt that if the Russians couldn't help out that region, we're not likely to have any better luck at it, either. It doesn't come as any surprise to me at all that the situation there is somewhat hopeless. Everything will eventually play out as they will play out there, and we can't really do much about it, at least not with this approach.

I suspect a radically different approach might work where this one fails, but I'm unsure of the form it would take. Possibly something that doesn't involve fighting at all, since this is something they understand.

Thanks, Ladyhawke.

Looks to be a challanging job. Should be fun.

Wow, Fleeb, congratulations!! I'm so happy for you

Thanks, Shazam.

I hope to know within the next few weeks or so. If I'm going to OEF, I'm not going to grad school this year; I'd just as soon save my application fees.
Also, while our total mobilization time has gone down to just 12 months start to finish (meaning about 10ish months in theater), we have to do a lot of extra training in the year leading up to the trip, so the sooner I know, the sooner I can start doing that. Not excited about the extra work--the deploying unit has already gone to 3-day weekends and has 2 annual trainings on the books, plus additional training trips as necessary--but if it's going to happen I want to get started.

If it's not, I want to know that, too, so I can kill the remaining hope and go back to planning my long-term escape into civilian life.

(the road to hell) is to (good intentions) as (endless monitoring alerts rendering your inbox unusable) is to (the quest for uptime)

May be going to Afghanistan again in the fall.

Ugh. Do you have teh internets there?

If not, you should bring some buckets of it with you, like we had to do when I was young. We didn't have internet streaming into the house back then. We had to go out once a week with buckets and buy it from the guy who'd come around selling it, and we had buy enough to last the whole family for the week, and carry it all the way home without spilling it.

barefoot.. in the snow.. uphill, both ways.

Ah yes, the old sneakernet trick. I suggest using punch cards for that purpose.
By the time you get there your arms will hurt so much that you will Hollerith at whoever came up with the idea.

ouch...

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Tip your keypunch operators.

Fun fact: I actually fell into Citadel when researching options for low-bandwidth high latency communications and collaboration tools in anticipation of my last Afghanistan deployment in 2005. I set up a Dell PowerEdge server to act a as a local caching web proxy, web gallery, Citadel, and a bunch of other little services with the notion that we could have a local infrastructure in our hovels even if the internet sucked (as it would turn out to do). I thought myself very clever.

The damned thing took up half of my shipping box, but it would be worth it.
Except that by the time it arrived, it wouldn't boot up, and I couldn't find an external monitor anywhere on base to plug in and figure out why. The beep codes were a little cryptic.

So we took it to the range. The PowerEdge case will stop most 9mm, but 5.56mm NATO goes right through. We finished it off with grenade simulators in the hard drive bays.

Also, I'm a few steps closer. My battalion commander gave the OK for me to transfer to the mobilizing unit. I should know within a week or two.

Wow, Sig, I've fantasized about shooting up comoputers that were giving me agravation over the years, that must have been very gratifying. I mean, it's a shame it didn't work after all that, but once you got to the point of giving up on it, that must have been fun.

I still have the hard drives. If only I had an ultra wide/2 SCSI controller.

I AM SO DANG TIRED OF BEING ON THE PHONE..


That and I'm losing my voice today with several calls left.

Hmm... use a megaphone/telephone combination to compensate for an ailing voice (or provide unnecessary amplification, whichever you need).