Chris' Updates

We've been doing well, continuing to wrap up and get ready for our replacements. I'm told they're in Kuwait already. Hopefully we'll finish up the last of the trench today, and that will be the last of our big projects. The remedial PT group has been working out diligently, but it's definitely not a hard workout. Maybe a couple days a week are really difficult, then after that we play volleyball and go to the pool. We have been running in the 5k races that are held on base. It seems there's a 5k every couple of weeks. I hadn't run in any until I was forced to do it, but they're actually kind of fun. I'm not out for any particular time, so I just run at a nice, easy pace, sweating with the people around me. I've been coming in at just over 31 minutes, so that's not bad, considering I don't enjoy running. Speaking of sweating, the temperature is definitely rising out here. According to Weather Underground , the average high last week was 10...

I've been getting back to the grind again here in Iraq. Things around the office are pretty quiet; for most offices, it seems that if any major projects are left, they're either being finished now or being handed over to our replacements. In the coming months, we'll have to focus on packing our equipment and passing the torch. As one of the last big projects for our office, I was out with the guys finishing a trench for a new run of fiber optic cable. I was pretty well sunburned after only a couple of hours. I guess it's time to try and get a tan, if I want to get one. We do have an outdoor pool on base, but I haven't visited it yet. Just before going on leave, I failed a PT test, so I've been working out every morning this week. It hasn't been horribly heavy, but I'm still sore, mostly because I'm out of practice. I thought about doing push-ups while I was home, and then I'd usually get a little comfier on the couch. I've been putting more ...

As I write, I'm sitting in Kuwait again, on my way back to Iraq. I had an excellent two weeks of leave; it was nothing short of amazing. It's not like I did anything way beyond normal. What made this visit amazing was the simple pleasures of seeing the people I love, and doing what I wanted to do, and going where I wanted to go. I had very little planned more than a day ahead of time, and that's exactly how I wanted it. On our first anniversary, Ashley and I went to Mass together, and then joined her aunt Carol and uncle Greg for the tail end of a seminar on the Shroud of Turin . Very interesting. After that, the four of us went to lunch and had a great time catching up. Ashley and I had planned on going to dinner and a movie possibly, but that plan was pushed to the wayside. I started tinkering with my computer, and Ashley curled up on the bed, and after a while I decided to join her for a short nap. When we woke up, it was 6am the next morning! So much for living up our a...

Whew! Maybe I should change the blog's title to "Almost-Monthly!" I apologize for the delay, but we've been busy bees. In the past two weeks or so, we've completed our unit's move into different buildings. And as the commo people, we've been particularly busy. When a department gets to their new office, they need their computers, network connections, phones, and printers working ASAP. That was doubly as important for the TOC (Tactical Operations Center), which is the communications hub of the unit. They had radios and e-mail in-boxes that could only be down for a couple of hours. Frankly, we worked our asses off. Things finally seem to be calming down, and we've finally moved our own commo equipment. The end of the move comes just in time for me to wish everyone a Happy Easter, and inform you all that I'll be headed home in a couple of days! I can't give you a specific time line for several reasons, not the least of which is that I don't ev...

Do I use my free time this evening to: Retool my class scheduling program to use XML input Play Rock Band Why is this even a debate? Is programming really supposed to be a fun activity? ... (Sigh) I guess I'll be social and play Rock Band.

Well, it's been just about a month since my last post, so I guess I'm a little overdue. Let's see... Probably my most exciting news is that I have a date for taking my two weeks of mid-tour leave. Of course, everything is weather-dependent and so forth, but I should be home sometime around April 17th, just in time for me and Ashley's first wedding anniversary! And I should be in good time to see Kelly's wedding as well! I'm very excited, and even though I'm trying not to, I'm counting the days. Work has been treating me well. We've been busier than usual, with many offices shifting around the base. We've been running new CAT-5 cables all over the place, enough for 4 office buildings. It's definitely different than sitting around in the office, waiting for something to happen. It's nice to get out of the office for a bit, but I'm not used to being on my feet all day. All the same, it's fun. Work on my class schedule programming pro...

Alright, this week seems to have been a return to my passions as a computer science geek and electronics nerd. To begin, my work planning for college has rekindled an old flame of sorts. I've had the urge to design a class scheduling program. This would take a list of the classes I want to take, and then use the class times for that semester to build the perfect schedule. Of course, that's a very general description. One of the most immediate problems that comes to mind is: what is a perfect schedule? It's a fuzzy, arbitrary goal. I have several ideas to make it more concrete, and if I get that far I'll probably incorporate them all. Another technical issue to be solved is getting the actual class times. I'll have to start by hand-entering the ones I'm interested in, but I wonder if there are better solutions. Perhaps the Computer Science department can hook me up with read-only access to parts of the school's database. Or maybe I can find a way to scrape t...