Sunday, April 29, 2007

Four Fronts

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 week, it became clear that I didn't have a month to prepare, I had two weeks. Well, in the past week I've been pushing my legs hard, probably the hardest they've worked since I got home. SPC Pritchett also takes classes at CU, so he's been helping me train. He's one of the fastest guys in the unit, and I really appreciate his help. I feel hopeful about this PT test, if not confident.

Yesterday, I had a small break in the action. After I help Ashley and Jackie set up their garage sale, I drove down town to the Denver Coliseum and met up with my sister and her church youth group. They drove all the way from Los Alamos to attend the Acquire the Fire event. It was much different than any event I've ever attended. They had a lot of messages for teens, including an eye-opening perspective on "branding," or imprinting consumers with a particular archetype and getting them to buy products based on that cultural stigma. The example they really pushed was MTV's "Mook and Midriff" branding scheme. Every teenager knows that the people on MTV are cool, young, and sexy, and MTV subtley encourages teens to emulate this lifestyle in order to sell its wares. The worst part, says ATF, is that this is not overt advertising, where MTV obviously pushes these products. It's very subtle, and makes teens think that it's what they wanted in the first place. I'll let the reader do their own research and form their own opinions, but the conference made some striking points.

Today I mostly helped with the garage sale, and we made a little bit of money. Enough to buy a lawn mower and a weed whacker, maybe.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Weapons Qual

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 going to need this stuff for AT in June, so I was glad to get some section training.

Saturday morning we went strait to the qualification range. On my turn, I shot 32 out of 40, my personal best! I even moved up from a Marksman to a Sharpshooter and earned a new qualification badge for my Class A uniform. After that, we were moved over to a MOUT range. We had some Iraq vets teach us the basics of urban ops and clearing buildings. I thought it was valuable and interesting training, but I hope I never need to use it. Several of us lower enlisted, including SPC Pritchett and SPC Faith, hiked back to Tent City with CPT Scahill. With the blessing of MAJ Acree, we even stormed the Tactical Operations Center where the big wigs were hanging out.

Sunday was mostly uneventful. I had a quick bus test from MSG Scott. He's one of our unit's only bus drivers and he's retiring at the end of May, and we hope to have more than one driver for AT.

It really struck me this drill that SPC Vaughn really isn't still here in Colorado. He deployed to Iraq a few weeks ago. I just hope and pray that he gets back safely in one piece.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Chugging Along

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 for those.

Tomorrow I'm headed to Ft. Carson for my April drill. We're running weapons qualification again, so wish me luck!

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Driving and Drumline

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 the RMPA State Championship. After a bit of getting our plans confused and reorganized, Ashley, Jackie and I drove up to the Budweiser Events Center in Loveland. We met up with Kelly when we got there, and were just in time to see Broomfield and some of it's competitors' shows in the final round. After that, we went out to dinner and caught up with Kelly. She's been doing very well. We decided to drop in and visit Kelly's fiance Will and their house. It's a huge house! It seems perfect for them. After a while we drove back to the event center and waited for the score announcements. After the usual pomp and circumstance, they announced the scores for Regional Open class, and what do you know? For the first time, Broomfield won first place! We were so excited. For most of the years I participated we were always second. Always just behind. So close. I haven't been a part of the line for a long time and only just recognized a few faces, but I still feel like I have a small claim to their success this year. In an ancient history sort of way.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Script for Importing Casualty Data

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:


The Perl script reference here is a slight edit from xls2csv from the Spreadsheet-ParseExcel Perl package (which you will need to install). Instead of comma-separated values, it outputs tab-separated values. Also, it is specialized to start and end at the correct rows. I would like to generalize this in the future, but it's a lot of extra code at the moment.


Lastly, my database table is set up like so. This was generated using the mysqldump script included with MySQL. I'm considering adding this file to the main script so that the auto-incrementing key will go back to zero each time the data is refreshed.


There you have it. Now you too can have a script to fill your database with the latest casualty information from the DoD. How you use that data is up to you...

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Spring Break

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 free app, from Adobe of all people. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition is a free program that implements the tagging features my mom wanted, and extremely well. It's all drag and drop, everything is intuitive, and it even does simple photo doctoring like red eye removal and cropping. Granted, it's really a fishing hook to get people to buy Photoshop Elements, but my mom doesn't need that kind of power. This is the first program I've found that includes tagging, and it's done very well. Scanning negatives turned out to be very easy for the 35mm film that the scanner was designed to use. However, when my mom started taking out the 110 and 126 films, we had to get creative. She even has large squares of film with very old pictures, and no feed holes or registration tabs or anything. I have no idea how we'll deal with those.

I also went to Jeannie's youth group on Thursday night. I met a lot of her friends there, and we all played a game called something like "The Winking Game." It involves a circle of chairs, each chair with a person standing behind it (a guard) and another sitting in it (a sitter). One chair is empty, and only has a person standing behind (the winker). The winker must wink at the sitters. When a sitter receives a wink, they must attempt to jump out of their chair and run to empty one. The guard behind the runner must attempt to tag them before they're out of arm's reach. If the runner is tagged, they must sit back down, but if they are not tagged, then their guard becomes the new winker. There are a couple of other rules, like the sitters must sit in the back of the chair, not the edge. Also, the guards must keep their hands clasped in the small of their back unless their sitter starts to get up. After a time, both sides switch. It just so happened that we had equal numbers of males and females, so we divided the groups that way. It was very fun, and fast paced. The group had a short sermon from the pastor, and ended with a short worship. I had a lot of fun there, and I got a chance to hang out with Jeannie.

On Friday afternoon, my dad and I went out Geocaching around the edge of the mesa they live on. First we attempted to find Volcanologist Field Day. We had a wonderful and scenic hike down from the top, but when we got to the boulder field we got stumped. We're sure it was there, but there are so many small crevices and caves among the fallen rocks that it could have been anywhere. Had I been alone I might have searched longer, but I preferred to spend the time hiking with my dad. I don't get to see him nearly often enough, so I cherish the time we do get to spend. After that, we hiked back to the top and backtracked along the top of the mesa to find On The Edge. We were able to find that one, and hiked back to the car. I definitely had fun, and I pretty sure my dad did as well.

Saturday I decided to leave for home early. I could have gone to my brother's track meet, but instead I will go back down for his State Finals meet after my school is out. He's graduating at the end of May, so that will be exciting. I listened to almost the end of Eragon, but it was cut short by the time I was home. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing, quiet evening. Just myself, possibly Jackie, Cameron, Ashley, or some combination. Instead, when I got to the house, there was barely a parking spot for me, half of the corner couch was on the front lawn, and all of my friends were in the house. Ashley decided to rearrange the living room just as I was getting home. She had spent most of the day cleaning up after Cameron's 21st birthday party and his prompt move-out, and I was grateful that the house was mostly clean. However, I was pretty upset by the sudden upheaval of the entire living room. My room was full of assorted junk from around the house. I consented to let the girls use it to store stuff for Cameron's party, but I expected it to be clean when I got home. It was not. Worse yet, I had let Jackie use my spare LCD monitor to troubleshoot her laptop problems and back up files. I found it laying on the bed under a pile of junk, and the screen was scratched in several places. I spent the rest of the evening being a grump, and Ashley apologized. I don't mind if she rearranges the furniture, but I would prefer it if she at least warns me, and maybe waits for an evening when I haven't been driving long distance or doing something else that frazzles my nerves.

Anyway, not too bad of a spring break. I wish I had gotten more done to catch up in calculus, but I've got a month left to push to the end.