|
Episode 29: September of 2005
October 6, 2005 5:30 a.m. (Baghdad Time)
Al Asad, Iraq
By LCpl Sincioco
"Great minds discuss ideas;
average minds discuss events;
small minds discuss people."
—Eleanor Roosevelt
LCpl Baldwin
The month started with LCpl Baldwin, my rack mate, and I debating the use of the Table tag in web pages. He was challenging the established norm because he was convinced that there was a better way of doing things.
“If there is a better way, I sure don’t know what it is. Why don’t you show me?” I challenged.
“Use CSS and DHTML, instead of Table tags?” he insisted.
“What do you mean?” I asked again.
“Use CSS,” he emphasized.
“Do you know what CSS is used for?”
“Yes,” he responded.
“So, you mean to say, you can re-write my web site or Amazon.com by using mainly CSS?”
Unremitting in his arguments, we went back and forth for a long while, until it got to a certain point where it became obvious we could debate about CSS all night long. Ending the long debate was just what the doctor ordered.
“I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten. Remind me again. How many years of programming experience do you have?” I asked.
“None,” he said slowly frowning as he did because he knew I knew the answer.
“Oh okay, I just thought I’d check,” I replied sounding preponderant.
Baldwin attended two years of college and was a computer science major prior to joining the Marine Corps. Intelligence coupled with stubbornness often makes for a confident Marine. He hates losing an argument, especially at the thought that he might be wrong (and who likes to be wrong?). So we went to Amazon.com’s web site and counted the number of Table tags they used. They used roughly 30+ different tables.
“You would think that one of the busiest web sites in the world would code their site better if there was a better way,” I rubbed in.
Eventually, LCpl Baldwin yielded to the idea that maybe, just maybe, CSS and DHTML will not replace Table tags anytime soon. You will only gain the respect of someone as smart as LCpl Baldwin if you can out-smart him on something. Unfortunately, he picked web design/programming as the topic, something I have exceedingly more experience than him. But that’s one of the many reasons I like LCpl Baldwin, he thinks outside of the box and challenges the conventional wisdom. He’ll make an awesome programmer someday, judging by the reasoning, character and confidence he exhibits.
Some background on LCpl Baldwin: He is from the State of Ohio and studied in Mount Union College (not cheap), ranking the 14th college in the mid-west, which has consistently stayed in the top 20. He took an AP (advance placement) calculus exam and scored a whooping 100%. He scored 100% on his math college placement exam as well. This guy is no dummy!
So, why did he join the Marine Corps again? Well, he is human. Perhaps, just this one time, he miscalculated.
September’s Promotion
As customary in the Marine Corps, the 1st of every month is promotion day. PFC Healey got promoted to Lance Corporal. The promotion started with very little notice that Healey did not have time to come and get me. As a result, I did not take any picture of his promotional ceremony. LCpl Flaherty got promoted to Cpl Flaherty as well and moved out of our room since he became an NCO. Both are happy to wear their new chevrons and to receive bigger pay. Yey! Just like the way any Marine, or employee, likes it.
Hail to the Chief
I had a quasi-promotion too, but a different kind. It involves no new shiny chevron or bigger pay; just the way the Marine Corps or any employer prefers it. Since Sgt Williams and Cpl Weller went back home, I had been the interim DSID Site Chief in Al Asad for rotation 2. Sgt Quintanilla, as it turned out, will not be joining us in Al Asad as the DSID Site Chief. As a result, GySgt Stapleton left me permanently in-charge of the DSIDs, LCpl Sawyer and LCpl Bearden.
“Sgt Q may not be coming to Al Asad, Sin. You may end up being the permanent [DSID] Site Chief.”
“You don’t want to be the DSID Site Chief?” I asked.
“No,” he laughed, as he is already the 8th Comm Site Chief.
“That’s alright, Gunny. Sgt Williams have been grooming me to be the [DSID] Site Chief for a while now.”
“Is that, right?” he asked in disbelief.
“I’ve been on day-shift for over 3 months now,” I said, trying to put his mind at ease.
As if Sgt Williams had a premonition that something like this could happen, he had set my expectation for the possibility that I could be the interim or permanent DSID Site Chief once he and Cpl Weller leaves. I’ve got to admit, I have a big shoe to fill. Sgt Williams was an exceptional DSID Site Chief, and had an equally exceptional NCO who assisted him, Cpl Weller, which something I am lacking in this rotation.
All the DSID Site Chiefs in Iraq are Sergeants, except for me.
Second is Best
We’ve all been taught to be the best of in everything we do, but unless you’re planning on winning a beauty pageant or interviewing for your next job, being the best takes an enormous amount of time and energy. Some cannot handle the stress of being “the best” for a long period of time; just read about the life of people who are rich and famous; people cave-in from their own success. Well, okay, maybe except for Bill Gates and Microsoft. Anyway, I’ve learned to be the best in certain things, and accept the fact that I cannot be good in everything. I also like being the under-dog, the Harry Truman-guy, the guy you’d least expect to succeed. When people’s expectations of you are lower than what you can achieve, you’ll never cease to amaze them.
Hell to the Chief
But, being a DSID Site Chief is not always glorious. In one faithful day in September, SIPRNet went down. Not once, but twice due to operator error. And I’m not just talking about 1, 2 or even 4 links. I’m talking about all links! The first instance lasted for roughly 30 minutes, and the second just a few minutes.
LCpl Bearden ran and woke me up in my Tin Can one morning. Mind you, he hates running.
“Sin, wake up!” he said while trying to catch his breath.
I poke my head out of my fortress of solitude.
“Ah, you miss me already, baby?” I joked.
“This is serious. SIPR went down,” he explained.
“Which link?” I asked.
“All of them!” he exclaimed.
I asked LCpl Bearden what happened. He said he was in the middle of updating our Virus ACL and all of a sudden the router kicked him out and all the pretty-green lights on our Link Monitor turned red. He tried to troubleshoot it, but after running out of options he came and woke me up.
I could not figure out exactly what happened that morning as I was getting bits and pieces from LCpl Bearden. Given that SIPR had been down for about 20-25 minutes by the time I got to work, I thought it would be best to start my troubleshooting by rebooting the entire DSID suite, something we have not done before. Everything came back up just fine.
I tried to put the pieces together, but I did not come up with any reason as to why SIPR would just go down on its own. The thought of someone hacking the SIPRNet, however remote, did not escape my mind, but I could find no traces of the hacker in our logs nor any suspicious activity such as a virus or a worm. Unable to arrive at any conclusion, I wrote it off as a possible fluke-in-nature. The router have not been rebooted in months, after all, so I thought maybe it was just time. Until, it happened again for the second time…
Later that evening, all the links went red again as LCpl Sawyer was updating our Virus ACL. This time, I was still at work, so I was able to do some troubleshooting, instead of just rebooting the DSID suite. As it turned out the router was processing the new ACL before it has completely pasted (as they were copying and pasting the new ACL in a DOS Window), causing the router to block all inbound traffic to its interfaces, including telnet sessions, which blocked even the DSID Operator himself!
Suffice to say, the higher-ups were not too pleased that SIPR went down twice on the same day. MSgt Kurwin joked, “Good Sin, SIPR went down twice on the same day under your watch.” I’m quite mindful that all jokes contain an element of truth. But mistakes will happen, especially when you’ve got a new crew. The only thing I could do to prevent the same thing from happening again was to forbid them from copying and pasting any ACL to any of our routers (they started using TFTP instead).
Off-Line Schooling
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, where unfortunately enough, Grantham University is located. I should take that as a sign that HE has other plans for me. Simply put, Katrina put a damp on my online schooling. But that’s okay, Battle Field 2 kept me busy in the first part of September.
Battle Field 2 (BF2)
I’m not much of a first-person shooting game-type, but in BF2 you get to play as a Marine in present-time which what excited me about the game. Wow, I get to be a Marine! The game is a squad-based tactical first-person shooting game. The towns in the game have a middle-eastern look to them which GySgt Stapleton said reminds him of Al Asad.
You don’t need to imagine what grunts did to clear out the streets of Baghdad. Play BF2 and you’ll get a sense of the teamwork—as you’ll live and die by them. The .50 cal overheats just like in real-life. The Marine in the game taps his rifle like we do. Bodies fly when a mortar hits a group of people. It may be too violent or too realistic for some, but it’s only a game. Or is it?
The Moral Network
What good is a multiplayer game unless you can play against real people? One afternoon, GySgt Stapleton and I decided to run a cat-5 cable to connect the DSID shop to S-6 shop. Using my personal router, we run a private network exclusively to play games. We dubbed this network the “Moral Network.” The two games we play in the M-Network are Empire Earth 2 (EE2) and Battle Field 2 (BF2).
S-6 was talking smack about kicking our butt in Empire Earth 2 since they’ve had the game for a while and have been practicing. So GySgt Stapleton and I played against them and proved to them why DSID rules. Unfortunately, I mistakenly setup the game in “sole survivor” mode so after GySgt Stapleton and I defeated the S-6 team we had to break our alliance and turn on each other—that was fun…for me.
In the DSID shop, we play BF2 on occasion. Does two Lance Corporal equal one Gunnery Sergeant? We put it to the test. LCpl Bearden and I teamed up against GySgt Stapleton one day. After two successive defeats, suffice to say, Gunny won’t openly challenge to play against two Lance Corporals anymore. :-p
Major Cool Points
I brought 4-pairs of cammies for this deployment and somehow I’ve managed to get holes on 3 of them because my rifle rubs against a spot when I walk. I’ve been on a quest to get new cammies for months with no luck. So one day I told GySgt Stapleton about my situation. In about 5 days, two pairs of new cammies made its way to Al Asad from Fallujah, earning GySgt Stapleton some major cool points. I gave him one of my headphones as a token of my appreciation.
Wrestling/Grappling
What’s cool about the month of September is LCpl Sawyer teaching me how to wrestle/grapple. I told him once I’ve always wanted to learn how to wrestle, so one day he decided he would teach me. In the last two weeks of September, he came and woke me up at 0430 and we would run to the gym on about 0445 every Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. We stay in the gym for about 1 hour. One hour of wrestling can be really tiring on some days, especially since my body is not use to all the physical beating which helps me get a good night sleep.
“I’m teaching these things so you don’t get your ass whooped every time,” LCpl Sawyer said.
“What style am I learning?” I asked.
“There is no style, do what’s natural and comfortable for you.”
“Is this the anything-goes wrestling/grappling art?”
“Basically.”
Throw in some wrestling, grappling, and some stuff we see in UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and you’ve got the making of our anything-goes program.
A Geek’s Paradise
In September, all the gadgets I want arrived: my desktop computer, my Bose speakers, my reading lamp, Visual Studio .Net 2003; all that a computer geek would need for a nice and happy deployment.
My new desktop is the fastest gaming machine I have ever owned. It makes playing new games so utterly pleasurable. After tweaking the equalizer in my computer, those Bose speakers are the best 2-pair speakers I’ve ever heard. Everyone who hears it for the first time asks, “Do those come with a sub-woofer?” Actually it does. It is built-in to the back of one of the speaker which amazes people even more.
The Panasonic lamp is bright and perfect for reading. Best of all, it folds so you can get it out of the way. And the Sony headphones, after the equalizer has been tweaked, not only look awesome but they sound great too. Now, only if I had a pair of noise-canceling headphones, so I can listen to my music in pure silence. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll forget where I really am. Not in a geek’s paradise but Iraq.
—LCpl Sincioco
United States Marine Corps,
8th Comm BN, Support Co., Data Platoon
"You don't have to die; heaven and hell are in this world too."
—Japanese Proverb
|