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.