Today is his last day.

The last of whisk broomed uniforms, sparking whites, grease shoes, boondockers, denims, bell bottoms, and Anchors Aweigh.

The Marine Porters, the bug juice, the plebe's, Lt J.G.'s, and CAGS are behind him.

Its the last day and the first day.

My father joked, on his last day, that the F4 Phantom was his baby. He joined the US Navy the same year they inducted it in to operation, he served as an Aviation Ordnance man, then as an AO Instructor on the F4 systems, and finally retired the same year they retired the Phantom II.

Each have their stories.

Perhaps once this was his?

Break the Spirit, and the Body will Die.

It is easy to go down into Hell; night
and clay, the gates of dark Death stand
wide; but to climb back again, to re-
trace one's steps to the upper air
there's the rub, the task.

Virgil. The Aenied.

In the last year, I allowed myself to climb in to purgatory. I sold my soul for a paycheck, and I let my pride, my integrity and my morality for what I thought was a career.

It wasn't right. What they did was not right. I kept my head down. I kept my mouth shut as much as I could.

At night I looked in the mirror and asked what I had become.

I told myself it was for my family. We need the money.

I'm sure treasonists, traitors and carjackers the world over have used the same rationale.

I made a decesion on Tuesday to not stand by any longer. And I paid for it. In some ways I'm still paying for it.

But I have started my journey, my climb back up. Looking for the air.

My morning starts with classes, coffee and this.

My afternoon is my daughter.

My day is open, nothing to attribute yet.

My career is non existent. I'm not ready.

But one thing I do intend to do. And I will do.

I will follow through. They have awakened my creed. Allowed me to remember who i was. And while I may have made a mockery of that persona, I will not allow myself to fall so far ever again.

Ever. Again.

My two basic responsibilities will always be uppermost in my mind -- accomplishment of my mission and the welfare of my soldiers....All soldiers are entitled to outstanding leadership; I will provide that leadership. I know my soldiers and I will always place their needs above my own. I will communicate consistently with my soldiers and never leave them uninformed. I will be fair and impartial when recommending both rewards and punishment.

Axed.

Well theres a shock heh.

I was told that I had "...an agenda.." and was released.

I guess trying to defend your field techs from poor business practices could be construed as an agenda.

But I anticipated this is what was going to happen.

But at least I can sleep tonight knowing I tried to make a difference versus just keeping my mouth shut and drawing a paycheck.

Ok, here's something for T1G, Contagion and any other beer drinkers out there.

A group of folks from around the world are striving to make the ultimate in beer.

Everyone is contributing, the recipe's are free. And Flying Dog Brewery is going to produce it as well, and is helping with the experimintation!

Read that again. Free. Beer.

The project, originally conceived by Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex and students at the Copenhagen IT University, applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product - namely the alcoholic beverage loved and enjoyed globally, and commonly known as beer.

FREE BEER is based on classic ale brewing traditions, but with addded Guaraná for a natural energy boost. The recipe and branding elements of FREE BEER is published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) license, which means that anyone can use the recipe to brew their own FREE BEER or create a derivative of the recipe. Anyone is free to earn money from FREE BEER, but they must publish the recipe under the same license and credit our work. All design and branding elements are available to beer brewers, and can be modified to suit, provided changes are published under the same license (”Attribution & Share Alike”)

FREE BEER is based on Vores Øl v. 1.

Version 3.3 has been bottled in none other than Knoxville, TN. Praise be the Vols!

Yea just check it out, I'm off to buy some ingredients

My technicians call me Top.

For those who don't know, it's a title generally given to First Sgt's of a unit. I was a SSG, not a 1SG, but they feel it fits. I won't lie, I enjoy the nickname.

About 80% of the time I try my best to represent the technicians intrests to our upper management. I was a road warrior for over 5 years, so I know what its like to be out there.

And up until the last 3 months our company has always been one to take care of our Techs. In fact our techs are generally reffered to as "Our life blood" which they are.

Our mantra's have always been "Do the right thing." and "Integrity."

In the last 3 months all that has changed.

With the introduction of a new contact Project Manager (the guy isn't even an employee) we've went from Velvet glove to Iron Fist. And its costing us.  Our turnover rate is the highest its ever been regarding field techs since I started here last July.

So today we have a Project Management Team meeting with myself, the other Project Manager and our PMO.

And I intend to rock the boat. Viciously.

And if they fire me, big deal.

At this point, quite frankly I'd welcome it, but I'm not going to stand by and watch our people fired willy nilly because they have legitimate complaints.

I tried to ignore it for the last month, and its kept me up at night. I'm just not geared that way.

Got to stand for something. Or you'll fall for anything.

Took a few hours Sunday to clean up the mess. Mostly just tree's down and limbs, nothing earth shattering. But boy the wind Saturday was horrific.

Starting tonight the rest of the week is supposed to be the same way.

Been a rough evening here at Spite Family Wilderness, and in the area in general

All weather related.

Give you a better idea in the morning when I can see the damage as it were

On Thursday, the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research unveiled the new IBM computer, dubbed Blue Fire, which will be one of the 25 most powerful — and efficient — computers in the world.

(Large Picture Image located here)

The machine is capable of performing more than 76 trillion calculations a second, per NCAR.

  It's replacing three older supercomputers with an aggregate processing speed of 20 teraflops. One teraflop is equal to 1 trillion floating decimal point operations per second.

Bluefire is part of NCAR's effort to build a computing platform called the Integrated Environment for Scientific Simulation. The system is set to go live in August.

With Bluefire, NCAR researchers and their collaborators now can add more detailed information than in the past — because there had not been enough computing power.

Bluefire also should let researchers add changing landscapes — the expansion of cities and conversion of forests into cropland — into climate models.. This should improve their accuracy.

The new computer, an IBM Power 575, is made up of 11 closet-sized cabinets and will consume about as much energy as 600 to 700 typical households.

That's significantly less than the energy consumed by NCAR's two supercomputers in use today.

When those two computers are turned off in a few months, NCAR's supercomputing facility should require about 10 percent less energy.

Bluefire relies on a unique, water-based cooling system that is 33 percent more energy efficient than traditional air-cooled systems. Heat is removed from the electronics by water-chilled copper plates mounted in direct contact with each POWER6 microprocessor chip. As a result of this water-cooled system and POWER6 efficiencies, bluefire is three times more energy efficient per rack than its predecessor. Bluefire is cooled by the  copper pipes carrying chilly liquid — not the energy-intensive air-conditioning units more common in recent years.

Bluefire more than triples computing power at NCAR,

You can see all the pictures at the NCAR website

"Go. Play"

The Shredder, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

Head over to the Castle and participate intodays fun stuff. The idea behind it is pretty simple

Got the idea? Go back in time, do something cool, then yak about it. Or *un*do somebody's cool deed or farcup.