Military

I’m a little bummed. Ok, maybe more than a little. I swear (I swear!) I put my name down for a 2 month tour in Okinawa, Japan. Somehow I got passed over (as did all but 2 Traditional Air National Guardsmen - what the heck!) and won’t be going on that trip.

Sigh.

But, I was worried about it because it falls right at the beginning and at the end of a school semester. This would have made it hard to go to school this summer and next fall (though I was willing to sacrafice half a year to go to japan for a couple months - I mean, come on!). I guess I don’t have to worry about that now.

But! Good news! Today submitted my order for the next two kits for my airplane kit. I ordered the slowbuild (non-preassembled) fuselage kit and the quickbuild (preassembled) wing kit, for a grand total of $16,113 and 50 cents. Yikes.

Thankfully, they only need a 25% deposit to start getting the kits together for me. I expect the fuselage to ship in about 3 months, while the wing kit will take at least 7 months if not 9 months - they have to send the unassembled kit overseas (to Chez Republic I think) to be assembled and then sent back. For an additional $4000 I think it’s a pretty good deal to save me a year’s worth of work.

I’m starting to think about what avionics I want in my plane and coming up with a basic mockup of the panel I want. I’m pretty sure I’ve settled on the GRT EFIS dual display system, which will couple with their EIS (which will be preprogrammed for a Subaru engine). I haven’t settled on much else (TruTrak autopilot or a EZ-Pilot autopilot?) but I think I have the basics.

Here’s one of the panels I made using epanelbuilder.com :

I was thinking of going with a large map display in the middle (like you see here), with something like the VistaNav system. But, instead, I think I will just get a Garmin GPS 396 - much cheaper and you can get XM Weather for it.

I was hoping to get a used Garmin GNS430 (which is a comm radio, gps, and moving map all in one) which can also get XM Weather, but to get XM you have to buy a $5000 add-on module! The price for the 396 with everything is only $3000, so that’s silly.

I’m keeping my eyes open for other used systems: Garmin SL30 (comm/nav radio), Garmin GTX327 (transponder), electronic fuel gauge, one of PMA’s audo panels, and a few other things. I know I don’t have to buy them now, but I might feel cheated if I let a good deal go!

How much money have I lost so far? Letsee: $60 on craps, $20 on blackjack, $30 on slots/video poker, $60 on crappy fast food, $30 on amazing internet access.. a lot. (I did get a Straight Flush on one of the video poker games, but since I was only playing with nickel bets that comes out to around 75 cents winnings).

My luck just isn’t here, for some reason. It was fine the first night but ever since then the craps table has been cold. I played a little today and got maybe $15 on top so I pocketed the $20 I started with and played until that $15 was gone. I suppose if you come out even in the end you aren’t a “loser”. I think the whole problem with gambling is this: You play until you don’t have any money left to bet. So even if you win some you end up playing all you won and the money you started with as well. (Obviously, that’s what the casino’s are betting on). I’m certainly glad I’m on the night shift as I don’t feel like playing any games during the day. If I had all night with nothing to do I’d probably have spent more than I have!

We went to the Hoover Dam earlier this week, which was pretty cool. While it was really really hot, inside it was nice and cool, especially 8 floors down into the generator room. That place uses tons and tons and tons of concrete! The guide said they could easily make a sidewalk all the way around the world, on the equator, with all of the concrete they used on the dam. We had passed a place that did helicopter rides over the dam, something we might check out later.

Due to boredom during the day, I have been able to read a lot. I finally finished Red Mars which is a great book, though a little slow in spots. I think it’s great because there’s tons of politics (Earth’s corporations vs “Martians” vs government vs everyone else) and lots of interesting facts on Mars itself. I’ll be picking up the second book when I return home. I just finished my first Neil Gaiman book, Neverwhere, last night: it was awesome. It’s nice to read a “fantasy” book that isn’t the normal unicorn, sorcerer, and warrior mix. The book is very gritty and a little dark, though a light, easy read. The only other book I brought with me is Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation. I’m resisting starting it because I don’t like jumping between series of books. I’d like to either a) finish the Red Mars series first, or b) read all of the Foundation books before starting the next Red Mars book. I’m going to try to go to the bookstore and pickup another Neil Gaiman book (probably American Gods).

Well, I’ve been here for 7 days so far and I’m tired of it. Some of us are planning on going to The Strip this evening to catch what free shows we can and get dinner (so hopefully I won’t be bored tonight), but I’m really really tired of the smoke and slot machine noises and fast food. Next Saturday won’t come fast enough!

There’s a lot of activity at Nellis AFB, even during our evening shift (6pm to 2am). Nellis is very large and has a lot of fighter squadrons with F-16s, F-15s, E-6s (A-6s doing counter measures), B-52s, and assorted cargo aircraft. Last night while we were waiting at EOR two F-16s and two F-15s did go-arounds, which means they abort their landing and go around to land again. When they go-around they put in full afterburner and stay low to pickup speed before returning to pattern altitude. This put them about 200 ft above us - which put them about 300ft away (good ol’ trigonometry). It was very cool to see and feel them fly by that close. (Thank God we had our double hearing protection on).

Since there are 5-6 other squadrons here (from out of state) participating in Red Flag, EOR can get very hectic. There are usually 8-16 jets there waiting to be armed or de-armed, which can cause problems for us when one of our jets can’t find a place to park except are the far end.. makes us run around a lot. Among other excitement at EOR: one of the F-16s (from another squadron) had hot breaks after a fast approach. Due to high speeds they can easily overheat the breaks after landing and even cause them to explode. Thankfully that didn’t happen, but they did catch on fire. The ground crew was able to quickly put the fire out and preventing the tire from exploding but it still caused quite a ruckus. I think there were 5 fire trucks there in a matter of minutes waiting to see if anything else exciting happened.

I did see some F-22s from Edwards AFB fly around and takeoff. I was hoping to find some on the ramp but haven’t run into any yet. I really want to catch them cycling their bay doors so I can see how the missiles and bombs attach to them and get tucked away.

So it’s not been a terrible trip, I’m just bored crazy when I’m not working!

So I’m in my hotel room (paying $10 a day for internet access - this internet has yet to go get me Starbucks or give me a massage so I have no idea why it’s so expensive), here on this balmy Sunday evening. Though by the time I finish typing it’ll probably be early early Monday morning.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

I’m here for two weeks for a military exercise called Red Flag. This is an exercise for our pilots so that they can practice tactics against aggressors. The aggressors are pilots who fly in that squadron (I forget which one) and it is their job to do these execises which they do all year long for various different units. Apparently there are 4-5 other units here also participating in this Red Flag. Two of which are our good buddies: the New Mexico and the Montana Air National Guard. These are the guys that shared the stint in Iraq with us.

It looks like I’ll be on the late shift this week (swapping for the day shift next week) which means I’ll be working from 6pm to about 2am. Not terrible hours. Hopefully we’ll be able to head home early when the jets are down for the night, but our NCOs typically like to make us sit around for a couple hours. So we’ll see.

We’re staying in a hotel off the strip, in a not so great neighborhood so we won’t be doing any excursions on foot directly from here. We do have rental cars, so the plan is to make use of those to go see the sights on the Strip at somepoint along the line. The hotel we are in is also a casino (go figure), which is ok in that we don’t have to go anywhere when we are bored and want to blow 20-40 bucks. But it really really sucks because people are constantly smoking in the casino proper and your clothes smell like it. Even just passing through to get to the elevators to the rooms is enough to give me a headache.

Bestest new betting game: craps. I really like playing Blackjack but I seem to be in a slump. If I can’t get the dealer to bust with hands that should bust 6 times in a row I get annoyed and go somewhere else. After watching some of the other guys play craps for 30 minutes I was able to step in and have a lot of fun. After 3 hours, playing on just $20, I had won somewhere around $55. It really is a fun game but there is tons of stuff going on and tons of different kinds of bets and placing odds on bets and yadda yadda yadda. I’m just barely scratching the surface but at least that part is pretty fun.

Much like playing Texas Hold’em, it’s nice to be able to play for awhile on a small amount of money as opposed to Blackjack which (in my mind) requires at least 80-100 to play and you could easily lose all of that in 10-15 mins.

I hope to make it out to Treasure Island and Caesar’s Palace this coming weekend, so I’ll try to post an update on Monday and let you all know how it went. Have fun!

I thought I was being sly when I decided to order all the gifts I could online. Oh, I was able to order 8/10 gifts online, but that final gift I ordered for Cheryl was a big snafu. I just reordered a similar (but not exact) gift just yesterday with the SuperSpeedyShippingFor$50 option selected: I sure hope it gets here in time (they promise it will).

Other than that, everything went well. Had most of my shopping done by Dec 10th or so, with a few items to pick up at the mall.

I felt bad not updating the blog, but I was (am) just having way too much fun playing Worlds of Warcraft with my spare time. If you have more free time than you know what to do with, I recommend you pick it up and say “Hi” to Viin on the Icecrown server.

I had pre-ordered a copy of Raph Koster’s new book, Theory of Fun for Game Design. So far: interesting. It’s a pretty light read, with drawings and all, but interesting. Raph is one of the guys that I try to keep up with, not least because he’s made a career of making games (the dream of many, I’m sure).

Due to most of my time being spent playing WOW I haven’t finished the last Reality Dysfunction book yet, but I’m getting close. I haven’t even gotten to play Half-Life 2 much, darn it Blizzard!

We had our little Buckley ANG holiday party earlier this month, which was fun if only because we got to wear civilian (normal) clothes, have a good breakfast, and leave early. Funnily, the day before we played dodge ball in one of the aircraft hangers - not something you would except a bunch of on-duty military folks to be doing - but it was pretty fun. It’s interesting to see how competitive people can get even with a silly game like dodge ball.

Cheryl and I will have the Christmas Hop to play this Saturday, but it shouldn’t be too bad. We’re doing our own Christmas dinner (mm, pizza) on Christmas Eve and then heading to my mom’s house Christmas morning. After that, we head over to her sister’s house for another Christmas dinner. Thankfully, both of our families are pretty close by so we don’t have to travel with everyone else - yuck.

On a sad note: quite a few people were cut in the layoffs in AOL a few weeks ago, including a few friends on the development side of stuff here in Denver. While it sucks, I know that they are smart individuals and will be able to find something as good or better. Good luck to them!

Well, I’ll leave it at that for now. I hope everyone has a Good Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ever have one of those days where everything is fine until a certain point and then it just rolls downhill from there? That was yesterday. Why? No clue. Maybe it had something to do with the Lunar Eclipse? Which, btw, was pretty cool.

The Red Sox have won the World Series. Yay.

Today also marks the beginning of the Guild Wars World Preview Event. You should hop on if you need something to do this weekend and want to check out a forth-coming game. It’s probably a total of 55megs to download to start playing, but you can create a character after the first initial 10megs or so. Some folks from F13 will be playing as well, hopefully we can get a guild going to try some Guild Vs Guild combat. If you play, look me up - I’ll be ‘Viin Seeven’.

I had a SUTA drill last weekend with our new One man; Ben is still the three man so we basically know what’s going on already, but our One man is new to being a One man and has to get use to his functions. We started our Initial Certification for weapons loading which is basically going through the steps to perform 60-day (use to be 30) Functional Checks and load various munitions (within a specified time frame). We got through the functional checks, Mk-82’s, AIM-9s, and AIM-120s. We’ll be doing another SUTA in November where we should be loading the rest of the standard munition types: Mavericks, GBUs, CBUs, JDAMs, and whatever else they think we should know. Unfortunately, I also have to go in for our new annual physical fitness exam on the 6th (which is the normal drill weekend, as opposed to the SUTA weekend); hopefully it won’t take more than a few hours, I don’t really want to be there for two weekends in a single month!

Jeremy and I saw the Van Helsing movie last week: It wasn’t that bad, it could have been worse (maybe not by much). It was sorta interesting, but some of the FX were funny and kinda threw it off. Of course, I like vampires and things of that nature so maybe I liked it a bit more than the average joe. 2 and 1/2 stars from me! **`

I also started watching Samurai Deeper Kyo but have only seen two episodes. Not sure what to make of it yet, so I’ll tell you more later. :)

For those of you familiar with SOE games such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and the new EverQuest 2, this quote from Raph Koster is pretty funny: FWIW, SOE has no such policy of intentionally releasing early. :P

You can find the full thread here at this Terra Nova thread I said Lunch, Not Launch!.

I finally made it home!

We took a C-130 to Al Udeid, Qatar. It was a 3 hour flight and very cramped. I’ve decided that, given a choice (ha!), I won’t fly on one of those again. The pilot got to do his combat jinxing during take off, so we had some fun G’s for awhile, but the plane is so darn cramped with 45 people in it. It’s crowded, hot, stuffy, and claustrophobic. Doesn’t make for a very good flight!

Once we got to Qatar we had about 24 hours until we flew out, so we were able to go to the BX (and buy some shorts and a t-shirt since mine were packed) and otherwise look around the base. They have a small above-ground swimming pool, which is nice. The base is a lot like Balad but is smaller and has hardly any permanent buildings.

There’s some cool satellite imagery of Al Udeid to be found here. (There is also a little bit of Balad, Iraq to be found here, but not as much info due to Force Protection measures I assume).

We flew into Frankfurt, Germany for our crew switch and refueling stop. It was 1330 Sunday (local) at that point and apparently everything closes at 1pm, even the USO people had gone home! (Though they did leave us some cookies). So we were stuck in a passenger terminal with no open shops for an hour and a half. At least they had DSN (government) phones for us to use.

From there we had a looong flight to Bangor, Maine. When we got there, there was a bunch of veterans and other families in the terminal, shaking everyone’s hand as they came off the airplane. While that’s nice, it’s still very weird to have people you don’t know come up and shake your hand and say thank you. I’ve had to happen in the grocery store and other random places while in uniform. It’s kinda cool, but when that happens I feel like I’m obligated to act some soldier-esque way .. wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone, now would I?

Anyhow, there were also a bunch of Marines lounging about. They were on their way over to Iraq, poor guys. Since they weren’t allowed to drink any beer all the Air Force guys made up for it by drinking twice as much. Despite that, we only had one mishap: a Marine, some how, stepped through a floor-to-ceiling window at one of the shops. Since he wasn’t drunk I can only assume it was fatigue/jet-lag/whatever that caused it. Or maybe he was just bored (apparently they had been there awhile already). The USO folks there had a bunch of cell phones they were letting people use to call their families, which was nice: we didn’t have to use our calling cards or call collect!

And, finally, after 2 and a half hours in Bangor, we left for home. At that point I was pretty tired since I had only slept maybe 4 hours during the other parts of the trip so I was able to crash for a couple hours. Once we got off the plane there was more handshaking (Generals and Colonels this time) and cheering (well, at least family members were cheering when they saw their loved one disembark). Even thought it was only 40 days or so, it was infinitely satisfying to finally hold my girlfriend in my arms again. It had been years!

I was pretty disappointed that I couldn’t find any good souvenirs. Since we were on a closed base it’s not like I could go out and buy some local ale or anything. I did bring back some Coke and other pop cans that are in Arabic (at Sheila’s request), which is kinda cool - but I only got to bring 4 of them. Other than that, I don’t have anything! (Well, I did get Cheryl a shirt).

I guess I could order T-Shirts (or those coins military people seem to have a fetish for) for everyone, but that’s expensive. :P

I’m on orders for at least another 2 weeks, but most of that should be recuperation and vacation time (I have to use any earned vacation I have before I get off orders), so it shouldn’t be so bad.

And so, I’m home again.

We finally got to bomb something! You probably saw it on CNN this last weekend, blowing up some building in Fallujah. It’s nice to see that after all our work our pilots are finally able to bomb something. It’s also nice to see that we loaded them right, otherwise they would have missed (no fins came out to guide it) or not blown up (fuze wasn’t pulled)! I don’t think it was one of my bombs; we’ve loaded, unloaded, and loaded again a lot the last couple weeks, so who knows who’s bomb that was.

Over in OPS they have the cockpit video but I haven’t had a chance to go over and see it yet. I hear the secondary explosions are pretty cool.

The current rumor of the week is that we will be leaving for Qatar on the 26th, and then leave from there on the 28th. Hopefully that means I will be home by the 29th. We’ve not been told for sure, and we probably won’t know until the day before we leave.

I really feel sorry for the Army guys who have to be here for a year or more! While I could probably handle any period of time over here, it’s infinitely harder to stay motivated when you have no idea when you are going home. Matter of fact, I think 30 days is harder than 90. It’s always almost time to go home, at least with a 90 day stint you are resigned to hanging out for a couple of months.

It sounds like it’s nice and cool back home, I can’t wait! (Watch: I’ll get in on the 29th or 30th and it’ll be 99 degrees!)

I was trying to find some more pictures to post, but haven’t really found anything good. The photographers here on base upload all of their pictures to a shared drive so I get to look through them. Unfortunately, a lot of them haven’t been approved for public release so I can’t post some of the better ones.

Things are going well here, we haven’t had more than a couple attacks since the one that killed those guys. The food still tastes the same, the showers and latrines are broken half the time, and my bed is half buried in dust. Same as yesterday, probably the same as tomorrow. But not for long! :)

Yahoo! News

Thankfully, no one I know was hurt. It is still unfortunate that this happened! One of our guys was too close for comfort when this happened, but he got away without injuries. (Note: I don’t know why they call it a “logistics” base, but we are the only base near Balad; just FYI: the Army side of the base is known as Camp Anaconda).

On a semi-good note, they did fix the generator for our rooms. It comes complete with that locomotive engine sound, even with the “chuga-chuga-chuga” of a fast moving train! I think they use a sound track, but I can’t find the speakers. We were given a half day off today (thankfully), so we were able to catch up on our sleep.

Anyhow, please keep the families of these guys in your thoughts. It will be rough on them once they are notified.

Update: I didn’t want to create another post for this, so I’m tacking it to the end of this one. This is a picture of EoR (end of runway) where we prepare the jets for takeoff. You can see me standing next to the AIM-120 missile. I really like working on the jets when they are running; it’s not something you get to do everyday!