Tempestuous Fury

So, news:  Within classing up in the first week at Echo Company, I fell off the Weaver, one of the obstacles on the confidence course, and turned my ankle sideways.  How exciting!  It turned colors.  I have been put back in HHC to heal up and try again, because you can’t keep up with the pace of OCS with a screwy ankle.  It was ugly; I couldn’t walk on it the first couple days.

Now I’ve been here awhile; tomorrow is the 4 week anniversary of my injury, and it’s coming along very well.  I’m going to try to class up into Alpha Company on the 7th of December.  HHC figured I’d go to Charlie Company starting next year, but I’ve decided I want Alpha lest I get injured by the clowns giving out details here at HHC.  Would you believe that today I got stuck on a heavy lifting detail along with three other OCs also recovering from leg injuries?  Who makes these details?  It clearly states on the board that Delta needs four HEALTHY people to draw weapons, and so the idiot who makes the detail sends four people who are recovering from leg injuries and still on profile!  So we all ended up hauling a bunch of M249s and M240Bs out of a 1 ton truck, and then the best part:  we hauled down the six heavy steel weapon racks to hold them, each of which was a four man lift, all of it into the basement down stairs.  A cell phone request for additional assistance to watch the weapons when we were busy (the Company CO happened by and chewed us out for leaving the weapons unwatched while we hauled) was met by our OCIC literally QUOTING REGULATIONS OVER THE PHONE to refuse us.  It was like something out of a book or movie, it was literally that bad.  The only good part was that no one was dying in combat.  At any rate, if they try to persuade me to stick around HHC if I pass the PT test, I’m going to tell them quite literally that I’m afraid I’ll get injured here at HHC and cite today as an example.

For Thanksgiving, we are allowed no further than 25 miles off post, meaning no one can go home despite our having a four day pass.  Many are irate, especially me, because I’m fantasizing about egging the Battalion CO’s car.   I won’t do it of course, but it says alot about my state of mind and feelings on the matter that I’m thinking of something so incredibly juvenile.  And supposedly the Army wonders why it has retention problems with troops.  I will not be surprised at all if the Army of the future starts relying more and more on private contractors who are at least well compensated for putting up with its stupidity.  Why do we need to practice being miserable?  How does missing Thanksgiving with our families make us better soldiers?  We’re not in Basic training anymore, we’re on the command track to becoming officers!  WTF!  What a laugh.  These people deserve to get soaked.

At any rate, I’m stuck here at Ft. Benning by an organization which really ought to know better after more than 200 years of existence.  Feel free to drop an email or call, because I’m starting to feel like I might be moping a bit this weekend.

The entire week and most of the preceding week have been spent on details around and about Battalion here and there, with study time during idle hours.  At least we get most of the afternoon off, typically getting out around 1600, 1630 at the latest.  This week I had the honor so far of latrine duty and area beautification.  I’m writing this on Battalion duty, where me and another OC (officer candidate, that’s us) handle all phone calls and inquiries to the Battalion.  It’s a dull duty, but it beats area beautification.  We sit here for 12 hours, 0500 to 1700, with a computer and ‘Net connection and a telephone, takings turns on the system.  Reading material is restricted to being military related, and of course no sleeping.

Word is we’re moving to Echo company’s barracks on Friday.  I got to see them today on the Echo company detail, and they’re decent.  I could live in it restricted on weekends with a decent roommate, and of course that’s the kicker, no way to tell who that will be.  There’s at least one dud that no one wants, company-wide; what else can you say about someone who’s been recycled twice now and never made it farther than week 2?  I don’t know, maybe he’ll change.  But I personally doubt it.

Mom and Dad are coming up for the weekend to drop off the car.  I suppose I’ll show them the Commissary and PX, and a bit of the rest of Benning, what little I know of it so far.  Tonight I’m goofing off with my fellow Echo company buddies from Ft. Jackson.  We’ll see about going somewhere on the weekend; already it looks as if one of us isn’t going to class up on Friday to Echo.  It’s a shame.  I have been advised again, and from the most reputable source yet I might add, to never get married.  We can still hang on the weekends when we’re all free though I guess, and we’ll have the Internet to stay in contact.

I’ve heard that BOLC II, the second phase of our officer training after the initial 12 weeks of OCS, is severely backed up with a 3.5 month wait to get in!  It’s on account that all officers from OCS, ROTC, and West Point need to go through it, and it’s done only at Ft. Benning and Ft. Sill.  3.5 months!  Our supposed choices in the interim are snowboarding, which is hanging out at the post where you’ll trained in BOLC III for your branch in a sort of learning by doing thing, or Hometown Recruiting.  I haven’t figured which I’d take yet.  I don’t yet know if I’ll get MI, there are so many people who want that.  I might take my second choice in Engineers instead, or a third choice of either Signal or MP if it doesn’t come to pass.  But I’ve got faith in God, and things have really been going my way recently in life ever since I joined.  I think it’ll work out in my favor.

Anyhow, I’m off to hang out and take it easy tonight.  Seeya!

We graduated on the 10th, 4 days ago. The ceremony was pretty laid back and by most accounts a bit lame, as we’d practiced to do it outside and pass in review with the whole battalion and it ended up being inside in a gymnasium with all of us just standing at attention. We recited the Soldier’s Creed like good little robots and the crowd went wild, and then we went out into civilization outside the post. It was a reasonably good time, not having to be rushed at chow, eating at Blimpie’s, eating an ice cream cone, eating candy, etc. But it was good to get away from Ft. Jackson, as everyone is so sensitive there. Every last person from the highest officer to the lowest NCO seems to want his say on how we should be trained in Basic, and things done his/her way, not that other way. The Army is going soft, and it’s because we don’t do things like THIS! Or THAT! I had a couple of incidents that day that made me feel like I had become a political football that would get thrown around between NCOs back at the post because our company graduated us OCS people slightly differently, telling us to wear our E-5 sergeant’s stripes on Graduation Day, and it had never been done that way before. Ick.

So the next day we all woke up at 0300 to clean the bay one last time, and we got on Government transportation at around 0930, after it rained a bit on our stuff sitting in the grass. (True military tradition! ) And the drive was very uneventful to Ft. Benning, as we all passed out most of the way there.

So now I’ve been here for a couple days, coming off the 4 day pass given for Columbus day. It’s been very restful here at the HHC, which is functioning as the holding company for the OCS training companies. The next cycle is picked up on the 26th or so, so we’ve all got a couple weeks of busywork details till then, lots of time to prep by studying and PT. The DFAC chow is great, it doesn’t give me gas like Ft. Jackson’s did, the salad bar is always properly stocked, and you can have hot coffee or tea! It is a wondrous thing.

Personal vehicles are permitted, it’s just there’s no way for you to get off post to get them, ha ha. 25 mile off post limit during passes on the weekend. And amazingly, sharp objects are now allowed, eg Leatherman and Gerber multi-tools.

Amenities here are amazing. The After Hours Enlisted club has a late night Subway, wifi internet, big screen TV lounges for sports, and a well stocked room of computer game terminals and arcade games, the FPS genre dominating of course. It would on an Army post. There is also a corner bar serving both ends of the spectrum, beer and Pepsi brand sodas including Mountain Dew. I’ve yet to see the actual Recreation complex which my map labels as having a video game arcade; the After Hours club is not labeled as having such, but I could have confused it as a small LAN gaming business. I commented to my buddies from Echo 1-34 as we were exploring that this was what they should have taken a picture of and put in the recruiting pamphlets, and there was merry agreement. *chuckles*

There’s a bus system to get around the post, which is nice as we have no cars and this place is designed for people with automobiles. There is a college campus feel to the whole area, at least for me. Everyone is young and fit, and here to become officers and thus study. The bus system is free to those who flash military ID, which is also reminiscent of UF’s bus system, except that here the bus is actually useful for going to the main PX. Vandergraff and I walked there yesterday as the bus system was offline for Columbus day and we needed stuff for OCS at the Military Clothing and Sales store there. A nice MP lifted us the last quarter of the way there (it was about a 4-5 mile walk), and we discovered that the thing was closed for the day. Of course. *rolls eyes* So we looked over the place, got some stuff in the Exchange, and ate Taco Hell at the Food Court, and then looked over the Commissary. I got some caffeine supplements, just in case, and then we headed back. A nice fellow who was on some sort of convalescence from Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP) stopped and gave us a ride in to our barracks at around the halfway point. It seems that Benning is really several decades in the past with this sort of niceness and decency being commonplace. This is good, but can produce oddities: for example, the bingo parlor next to the Commissary. How is that even popular anymore anywhere? But on the whole the antiquities have been good so far. *chuckles*

Internet connection is annoyingly restricted.  All gaming sites, including Penny Arcade, are restricted by the post firewall as pornographically explicit and inappropriate or some such, a big stop sign graphic with alot of text comes up in the browser window explaining how the Army is protecting me from myself or something.  Myspace is also prohibited on General Principles or something.  Some poking around indicated the firewall is organized on a blacklist basis however, which is good.  Could have been worse, it might have been a whitelist basis, which would be tougher.
Anyway, must go.  Accountability formation occurs at 21:00 tonight, which is ~40 minutes off.  I’ll keep in touch from here on out to all you faithful readers, heh heh!

I’ve done just about everything that needs to be done till the 23rd. There’s nothing left to do here, except PT, which I do everyday to boost my score on the APFT, which has really slipped from where it was in college. I’ve got to boost things to around 290/300 at least, which is 20 and some odd points above my best score from ROTC. It’s pretty ugly when PT is your daily highlight, eh?

I’ll soon be getting a new email address, one on the us.army.mil domain. And that’s not all; the system is known as AKO and it’s kinda like the old Gatorlink system from UF: one big ID to tie everything together essentially. It’s a convenient place they’ve made to keep track of all your paperwork and records, where you can look at all your ERs, even request transcripts with college credit equivalents for military training and experience. I find that last funniest; maybe if I don’t have to stress too hard with too many classes and lots of training to fill reqs., then MAYBE I’ll go back to skrool for a masters of some kind. I dunno, but supposedly any classes you take while in the service are paid for.

And then there was all this other stuff my recruiting sergeant showed me. Apparently, the Army cut a deal with Symantec and McAfee, so I’ll be kept in antivirii for the entire time I’m there for any Windows box I have. Most interesting to me was the library link, so we clicked on it. My recruiting sergeant commented he’d never been here before; we were presented with a screen of buttons to various subjects such as history, government publications, etc. like any normal library. So since none of us knew anything about the library part, we clicked on the GWOT button next, which was probably the most contemporary thing there. I found it terribly interesting; I recall seeing a page with lots of links going everywhere, from some congressional Iraq War report in the center which was subtitled with something that implied the war was lost (or maybe it was the old NIE that claimed no WMDs in Iraq, I don’t remember), to one little link in a corner stating that it was a compilation of English translations of captured Iraqi war documents publicly released thus far, or some such. We clicked out of that area just then though, because there was another recruit present and the point of the exercise was to demonstrate AKO, not read up on the latest public dispatches and assessments of the Iraq war.

The thing’s got an IM client and military people finder connected to it too; plus this paper I got from the sergeant claims I get 50 MB of storage there as well. With all this stuff on it, I think there ought to be a way to make it honk over the computer speakers, I just have to find it. I mean, damn, it’s got everything else, even controls for allotments and stipends from your paycheck to someone else, so now you don’t even have to get mad at AG before they fix your paycheck just how you want it.

But of course there’s a catch: I think it’ll only take IE. I’m not quite sure yet; public parts of the site render in FF just fine so far. But it’s just one of those things I suspect deep down. I’ll find out in the next few days when my login finally clears with it.

But if you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard this before recently. Updates on that theme:

1. I passed the board on Tuesday with no complications; I am now approved to go on to OCS and become an officer. Thank you all for your letters of reference; let me know if you get any calls, eh?
2. My shipping date is July 23, and it is estimated that the entire Basic Training experience will take 10 weeks. I say “estimated” because Basic Training, which we know takes 9 weeks, is preceded by Reception, which is estimated to take 1 week. Inoculations, uniform issue, organization into units, etc., take place during Reception I understand. Also, I’ll find out my shipping address for while I happen to be in Basic Training, and I figure I’ll write everybody so they know where to write back.

3. All the guys going to OCS like I am that I saw in the waiting room on Tuesday are all shipping the same day, to the same place, Ft. Jackson, with me. Then we’ll all see each other again in OCS, again on the same schedule. What fun! So I’ve already chatted with some people that I’ll be seeing for the next several months. I’ve got a good feeling about most of the other OCS guys.
4. I’ve got a good feeling about most people I’ve encountered at the MEPS processing station in Tampa, a place I’ve spent a great deal of time in now.

5.  I’ve put in an order for custom arch supports.  Expensive, but worthwhile I think.

6.  Counting down the days to July 23. 

But don’t take my word for it.

This article really knocked me for a loop. You would figure that a safe deposit box would be one of the safest possible places from thieves, you know? But it’s not safe from the biggest thieves ever, those lovable G-men.

Forget Social Security, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, or the confiscatory income tax rate. Forget all the indirect taxes levied through corporations or goods we buy, like gasoline, and don’t think about the cap-and-trade thing being discussed in Congress. One can at least pretend for sanity’s sake that this is all legit and although perhaps excessive, legally the Government’s purview. But it’s hard to ignore when these people start stealing out of people’s safe deposit boxes.

Sure they just started doing this in Britain (here), but in light of how they’re the closest along to being an all out surveillance society, I really just sort of expect that from them. But for that to be happening here… 4th Amendment anyone? And there isn’t any gooey gray area either, this is people’s property. Any dolt from the 18th or 19th century would understand this issue and that it ain’t good, no debate necessary.

Banks apparently aren’t a safe place to keep valuable items. And not just cash money anymore; I always figured until today that even in a worst case scenario like a bank run, you could always get the stuff out that you had stored in the safe deposit box. Like, say, your personal gold stash that you keep as a hedge against the dollar collapsing, or important documents, or jewelry. But now your local, state, or federal government can just waltz into your local bank branch and steal all your shit you keep locked there, and auction it off for the general budget like in California. Maybe it’ll take’em a week, like in the British article, to break into the box with diamond tipped drills, if your bank goes for good boxes, but they’ll get it in the end.

I understand that Florida is next in line behind California when it comes to budget crunches on account of the depreciating home market/bubble. Not reassuring. Draw your own conclusions, and be especially careful if your state or city is contemplating defaulting. This is getting extremely ugly.

For those who are interested in such things: tie bar clip.

It’s two and a half inches long by one quarter inch wide, and as you can see it’s got that nice, shiny silvery mirror finish. It also cost just barely over $20 off Amazon with shipping, which is a quite the deal in my opinion because no one seems to carry these anywhere except for jewelry stores. Tie clips are apparently considered jewelry, and classy looking ones are accordingly often made of sterling silver, while the cheaper stainless steel versions have all kinds of weird holes in them and styling BS which dilutes the effect of propriety I’m trying to achieve. I mean really, if I wanted to look New Age or in touch with my inner child in a suit, I’d grow a ponytail or wear an earring, not put on some ridiculous looking piece of cheap stainless steel that looks like some kind of industrial manufacturing error. After all, I have role models that I look up to and have to emulate.

It’s quite exciting to have found something which stylistically appears to be identical to what was used in the movie, don’t you think? Makes me want to go out and look at prices and weight figures for Desert Eagles. You know they always lose in the movies, but no one can deny the Dark Side has style and class going for it. Plus, real life isn’t a movie.

I’m going to start wearing it to my job tomorrow; it just came in today. Freaking awesome.

Job is boring. I show up and hang out all day long in the office, hoping someone comes in to have their taxes done. Business has really died down now to almost nothing; we’re waiting for April to roll around when all the procrastinators start rolling in and freaking out. I’ve taken to reading Alfred P. Sloan’s autobiographical My Years with General Motors, which is all about the development of the corporate committee structure of GM which everybody else then studied and tried to implement in their big time companies. Ever wonder where the term “bean counter” came from? It apparently arose out of GM, most likely from the Operations staff as a convenient moniker for the Finance staff. The original intent of the committee system was to act as a policy making body to decide upon policy, which would then be implemented by individuals. The intent was to “centralize control and decentralize execution.” The reasoning was simple: a committee couldn’t implement a one size fits all policy everywhere; only individuals could do that because only they at their level would know the best successful way to do things within the intent of the policy. (Amusing sidenote: If I recall correctly, I first saw that particular quoted phrase in the US Army Operations Field Manual, FM 100-3 I think. It would seem they plagiarized Mr. Sloan’s management concepts into their own operational doctrine as early as 1973, if not earlier. *chuckles*) Anyhow, I got onto this because I got a free book entitled Call Me Roger, all about how some GM CEO named Roger Smith steered GM into the tar pits, going from industry dominance industry to not-dominance in the 1980s.

Talk about your PHBs. It would seem that GM was on the leading edge there, too–I wonder if American industry again analyzed what GM was doing and recreated that in their companies in the early 1990s to produce the idiocy that Scott Adams would make tons of money satirizing. This is apparently what happens when you put bean counters rather than Ops. in charge: things go into the toilet because those jokers don’t generate money like Ops. does. So rather than reading the apologetic, heartbroken whine of one of Smith’s speech writers going on about how Smith was “visionary” but “didn’t understand people” and “had the best of intentions” (look where that last one got you, lost market share), I opted instead to read the book written by the Sloan, which both these people seem to reference as a minor religious saint.

I’ve read alot of dry tomes on management and leadership, but this one takes the cake. It causes me to wonder why there’s a recommendation on the cover of it sourced to Bill Gates. Granted, it’s… Interesting… At times. Certainly the development of what we know as the modern corporate structure and management system is compelling, but other parts are not, like the statistics of GM’s volume of sales for specific years and the bloody Org charts after every reorganization. It is interesting to see the same traps dealt with then that corporations have fallen into today, too: Overcentralization. In Sloan’s case, he carried alot of weight on the board and his arguments generally succeeded on putting the company away from that, which lends credence to what I’ve believed for a while: that it’s individuals, not systems of humans, that make the world go round and cause things to happen. Take a crappy system with good individuals in it and a great system with crappy individuals and the good individuals win out every time in competition. A well designed system of human beings, or bureaucracy, with good policies, etc., simply takes longer to destroy or fail if composed of morons, because the morons have to overcome bureaucratic inertia first to alter the system and introduce destructive policies.

What a run of rambling that was. OK, time to sack out. Oh yes, and my concept of how the gold price moves seems to more closely match Reality now. I am more cautiously optimistic than before; I move very carefully now and only in certain times and places, and my losses have been much smaller than my gains. Amusing coincidence: 2008 is the Year of the Rat, my personal year on the Chinese Zodiac, and thus of course it’ll be a banner year for me. Interesting that my proficiency is reaching practical levels right about this time, isn’t it? *chuckles* A good omen.

Do we owe the favor of this particular post.

For the second time in the last couple months I’ve had to take apart Trouble apart to dust out the insides because the power supply fan was getting noisy. I’ve got to get a dust filter going for Trouble’s fans, this is crazy! Every time I disassemble and then put Trouble pack together, I always forget to reconnect power to something, and then rebundle all the cables. Last time it was a CD drive and the graphics card I forgot. The drive I figured out immediately, but the card puzzled me for awhile: the only manifestation of problems would be when I played a game that used it, which would cause the system to shut down automatically as the card tried to pull too much power through the motherboard PCI connection. Not cool. This time, I forgot the second hard drive, causing the thing to fail on me randomly after a bit of usage. So I took it all apart looking for problems, unplugged everything and swapped power supplies to fix it, and then forgot to plug in BOTH hard drives! Didn’t even get the courtesy of the system telling me it had a kernel panic, just a flat demand for a boot CD. So, this weekend I put some kind of dust control solution on.

Also, in speculation I’ve for the most part gotten gold down, and have now started simulated trades on S&P 500 futures contracts, which seem to adhere to the same sorts of rules as gold. Since those futures don’t require quite as much margin as crude oil, I might diversify into those first before oil. Besides, there’s something to be said for predicting the S&P 500, eh?

Right now, I am happy but pissed. Happy that I predicted the gold market upswing starting around the 14th of Feb., pissed because I planned to get in on Monday, Feb. 18, and didn’t realize that was Presidents Day which the CBOT observes. I haven’t been so annoyed at myself since that time at BTSR when I lost a cache of Jones Soda I’d hidden in the creek bed to a flash flood. To remedy that, I just spent the last hour finding and then entering onto my master calendar all observed holidays for the CBOT. This won’t catch me blindsided again. The next major date is March 7-8, and at this point I might just end up sitting it out till then. I’ve missed both major retracements at this point, and that date is only a couple weeks away now. Besides, the gold price is just hovering at around 950 these past couple days. I don’t rightly know what it’s going to do. Should be dumping it now with near 45 points of profit if I’d gotten in on Monday as I had planned, drat it…

I went backpacking with Dad and the local Scout Troop last weekend. Twas’ fun, but it created maintenance issues and reminded me of other longer term maintenance issues I have with other gear, so I’ll spend the weekend resolving those issues. Like my main hat: haven’t washed it in months, but I haven’t noticed because I have many hats. And the sleeping bag, although kept mostly clean through preventative measures, should really be washed on principle alone simply because it hasn’t been yet. The Stormies really should get another oiling too…

The only other thing of note is BTSR… Still uncertain, but I might see enough old time staffers in the High Adventure area to justify my going back. Rumor surrounding the kitchen is solidifying into fact though: the veteran kitchen staff don’t seem to have applied to come back, meaning the whole kitchen might be raw recruits, and the camp director has sent us a friendly email encouraging staff apps. from veterans which stated that he’s already filled base camp to capacity for the year, and High Adventure is continuing to fill. Again, the trade off here is getting to tell the story and have the memories vs. putting up with the management doing ungood things like packing the place… If the kitchen is new and strained with mouths to feed, some kind of alternate food arrangement would be required, and the jury’s out on that for now.  People tell me they’ve walked into camp with their apps. in hand on occasion, and I might put off the decision till then, although I’d hope to know more about what’s happening in my life before then.

Anyway, time to knock off tonight.  Cheers!

I should say something here, because it’s been awhile.

So the investment thing is going, but I’m still learning. I had a brief and fascinating flirt with high profitability for a couple months there–very nice. That’s honestly never happened before; I reckon I might be maybe 60% of the way to full viability. Very exciting indeed.

So, right now I have to get some kind of job. Turns out it was a good idea to hedge the bets; I’m now employed doing as an income tax preparer with Jackson Hewitt. Unfortunately, the local franchise owners are dishonest and misleading; they mislead Mom and I about the size of our end of season bonus and how it’s figured, and then lied to me about letting me work 40 hours. Basically, I started this last Monday on the schedule with 40 hours to work, and that very day word came down that I had been cut to 20. Not cool. And with an hourly rate of $7, not doable at all. I had wanted this job to be a springboard and intro to the financial services sector, but these people just flat suck and won’t pay for anything. So, I’ve applied with Amscot, and we’ll see what kind of answer I get. That was Tuesday, and the ad said they’d reply within the next week. They’ve also got a recruiting thing on this Tuesday at the local Brandon location, which I’ll skip out of work to attend. I’ve already decided what I’m going to say to the Jackson Hewitt manager when asked why I quit: I had too much time on my hands and used it to find a better job, one that pays $12-$15/hr at 40 hrs. a week. So it’s peak this week, when everyone gets their W-2s? Wow, what a coincidence! I have a better job offer at this time too! Amazing how these things line up. Good luck!

Or so I hope. We shall see. I’m quite optimistic about the Amscot ad because it said they’d take no experience types, claimed they were opening a new location roughly every 12 days on average, and good credit rating was a job requirement because they don’t want to hire deadbeats who’ll steal out of the cash drawer. That last isn’t exactly what the online ad said (”the odd late payment isn’t a problem, but…”), but you can see that message if you read carefully between the lines. I’ve got a good credit rating and a college degree, and they keep running a duplicate of this ad every Sunday in the local newspaper, so it looks good for now.

I got a copy of UT3 over Christmas; there isn’t even a Linux client out yet. I’m waiting for that before I even try to play it; with my hardware specs, I’m barely in the limit for the game. I don’t dare try it on Windows XP; I’ll need every bit of processing power I have to play that, and that means 64 bit architecture in Linux, not 32 bit Windows. I already have issues playing Halo 2 in XP when I turn it onto Legendary. I suspect the difference in AI between Heroic and Legendary is just enough to start causing conniptions with processing power. Either that or it’s the fact that I only have 512 MBs of RAM. Oh well; I’m not upgrading.

There’s a new computer shop in Brandon. Their bread and butter seems to be service diagnostics, probably meaning the purging of spyware and such from Windows boxes, but they also do custom computer builds for a flat fee of $60, which strikes me as cheap insurance. Sorry Pug, but I only watched you applying that gunk/bondo heat conducting paste once to a processor, and then attaching the fan somehow. It’s all rather foggy now, and if I get an AMD processor I’d be afraid to do it wrong and fry the thing. Maybe they’ll let me watch though… I am seriously thinking about getting a new system within the next year or two. Trouble has served well, and will probably continue to do so as a file server and router box with suitable hardware modifications, but if I want to keep gaming, it’ll be time to get something with a bit more oomph to it soonish.

I don’t know if I’ll head back to BTSR for this summer. Most of the senior staff and directors were pissed off at the camp director when we left in ‘07 because of his moronic management practices, trying to pack the camp as hard with paying campers as possible. One director told me in an email that I might be one of the few experienced hands returning, and as such, I might get tapped as a program director myself. All I can say to that is, “Hell no!” While it’s very flattering, I’d have to be paid quite well to put up with the stupidity of the the camp director, at a rate that could be best described as “profitable.” It’d be more like work than fun, and I’d have to get paid appropriately. Unless I could get assurances from other senior staffers who’d hire on as directors over me, and I could reach certain agreements with them, particularly regarding requisition forms. See, one of the important departments that got pissed was the kitchen staff. I’ve got to ensure that I’ve got good food for the weekends if the kitchen staff old timers rebel and don’t show up, which means operating outside of the normal channels and making certain oddball food requests on requisition forms as program supplies. Since the director signs off on his/her forms, they’ll have to be in on it. Maybe if I give them a share of the food..?

If I do return, I’m considering pranks again of course. The current one under consideration is the most audacious yet in terms of technical expertise: wiring the camp PA to an office computer’s unused sound card output, thus permitting the playing of arbitrary digital music files over the PA at any time via the shiny new 802.11 wireless network. The camp director would probably think the thing was possessed if I did it right; he’s not an A/V nerd and staff doesn’t have any others that are around regularly willing to help him. Ideas up for consideration are old classics like Tom Lehrer’s Be Prepared, more modern pieces like Barbie Girl (for the joke on our camp director) and The Macarena, and an audio rendition of All Your Base Are Belong To Us for after he reads the riot act to the staff about playing with the PA, because nothing says “screw you” like that badly translated classic. I am also considering playing Blue Moon during some random night after campfire, but before lights out, preferably on a night with a full moon of course. I’ll have to get a copy of that one, as well as the Macarena. I’ve still got Barbie Girl on Sky I think…

Does anyone know of a plug-in FM radio that has a squelch option? I need an FM radio to constantly receive on one wavelength, but not broadcast any static, just any signal strong enough to punch through the squelch, such as one from, say, a small FM transmitter running off a nearby wall outlet. And the plug-in, of course, to eliminate the need to change batteries.

Also, assuming the line-in is a standard 1/8 inch jack, would a Y or T splitter permit both the PA speaker and the radio to talk to the stereo system? This is an extremely important question. I’ll have to figure that one out. Fortunately, I’ll have the Internet and a local Radio Shack at my disposal on site.

EDIT: A new idea for pranks: Playing the audio of the first of Rejected’s cartoons: “my spoon is too big.” Because hearing a canyon PA system tell you its spoon is too big is really screwed up. And don’t forget the looks that it’ll get when it tells everyone it’s a banana.

What did you do?

It’s easy! All you need to do is ask for the historical annual inflation rates of the Swiss Franc as well as the exchange rates between the US Dollar and the same from 1979 to modern day.

Try it! You’ll be amused.