Chris' Updates

My time has been battling on four fronts for the past week; school, work, family, and PT. School has been busy as ever, and more so because finals are fast approaching. It's been a struggle to keep up, even after cutting slack and quitting calculus. I'm not doing as well as I thought in Components; my partner and I have done solid A's on our homework and projects, but I had forgotten how much weight the midterms carried. I always count on computer-related classes to be an easy A, but this class and its tests have really challenged me. Work has been keeping me busy. A lot of the other drivers have effectively started to refuse runs because they need time to study, and so I've been asked to take on more and more. I'm such a nice guy that I'll take almost anything from Ava, and I certainly don't mind the money. It just keeps me a lot more busy than I like. If that weren't enough, there's a PT test at the next drill. When they mentioned it at drill last ...

Friday morning was a bright, early start for me. I drove down to Fitzsimons, ready to rock the firing range! The morning was the usual drawing of weapons and gear, then the bus ride down. We had a little bit of a hold once we were set up in the billets, since the ranges were behind schedule to go hot. The first sergeant offered to take several people to the Military Clothing Store, and I decided to go with him and buy more boot laces. (Al has developed a fascination with mine.) When we got back, we were late for the move to the range, so SPC Faith and I rode down in the back of a HMMWV with CPT Robinson. Once at the zero range, I tried to quickly verify my M16's zero was still good, then headed back. Friday evening, SFC Zimmerman cooked up some commo training for SPC Dupio and myself, and we refreshed ourselves on SINCGARS radios and learned how to operate a field telephone switchboard. I really needed the radio refresher, and the switchboard training was completely new. We are goi...

Not a lot of interesting developments here. I've been plugging away at schoolwork, and taking more bus trips. I've had more WillVille of course, plus two charters to Chautauqua and one to the Boulder Reservoir. I'm really enjoying this work so far, it's probably one of the better student jobs I could think of. Last Sunday we cleaned the garage, in preparation for the Broomfield City Spring Cleanup. On one day out of the year they'll take just about anything that people need to get rid of, so I'm going to get my computer junkyard cleared out. I probably have 15 or so computer towers that are basically useless, and I need to be able to get them out the door. With Ashley's and Jackie's help, we cleaned out all of the cardboard boxes and the strewn-about recycled bottles, and we were rewarded with a walkable path through the garage. We still have the old corner couch and a few other things to deal with, but Ashley and Jackie are planning a garage sale soon f...

Well, the first week back from break wasn't too bad. I started driving more bus runs, and I've done several WillVille shifts plus a geology run to Chautauqua. Hanging out under the flatirons was very relaxing, so I think I'll be taking more of those runs! Wednesday evening Ashley gave me a couple more gray hairs by calling me and telling me she had backed her car into a ditch. I didn't ask questions, I just grabbed Jackie and started driving over. It turns out she was trying to get to a house in east Boulder for her poop-scooping job and missed a turn, so she attempted to turn around in a rural area, and backed one wheel into a small drainage ditch. She had called a tow truck and was towed out by the time I arrived. I wasn't very happy about it, but I knew that she just needed me to help at that moment. She got the grumpy treatment for the rest of the night. I wasn't angry, just grumpy my relaxing evening was upset. But Saturday night was a real treat. It was th...

A few readers may know that the Pentagon publishes US military casualty data on a web page , and that every death from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom is cataloged and available for download on an Excel spreadsheet. (It's debatable whether every death is cataloged, but speculation is not the purpose of this post.) I have been attempting to mine data  on this Excel sheet for some time, but it's not nearly as convenient as having it in a real database. So after some thought and a little tinkering, I've developed a rough solution that will automatically download the latest spreadsheet, do some conversion, and import the data into a MySQL database. It's accomplished through a Linux shell script and a Perl script, so if you're on a Windows machine, you'll have to search for a different solution. This is the shell script, I call it oifdata.sh: #!/bin/sh filename=casdata printf "Grabbing xls from DoD..." wget -qNr http://siadapp.dior.w...

Ah, glorious spring break! A break from the norm. The first couple of days I spent relaxing, mostly computer gaming. Tuesday I set off for New Mexico to see the family. On the way down I listened to Ashley's Eragon book-on-CD, and quickly got hooked into that. I had just seen the movie on rental, and Ashley was right, the book was much better. Incidentally, I do agree with the sentiment that it's really a Harry Potter / Lord of the Rings ripoff, but it's entertaining and compelling all the same. I spent the next few days relaxing and hanging out with my family. They weren't on spring break, so I was alone for the midday most of the time. Wednesday I got down to Santa Fe with my mom, and we shopped around and visited Blue Corn , one of my favorites. We also started experimenting with her new scanner and scanning photos and negatives. She was interested in a program for organizing photos by tagging, so I did a little bit of research there. I found a wonderful little fre...