Well, it's August 28^th, and you know what that means.

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Oh, you don't? Sorry. I'll explain then. I'm scheduled to be home some time in October, so if you're thinking of sending a package, card, or other correspondance to me you really ought to do it soon. I've had packages take as long as a month or more to arrive - although the average time is around two weeks.

If you do send a package but get it in the mail a bit late, just be sure it's made up of things any old person could enjoy. My replacement will be in largely the same situation I'm in - funny how that worked out - so I'm sure he or she would enjoy a confection or generic "Dear Soldier" letter just as much as the next person. However, if you have something specifically for me that you'd like to send, you should either hold onto it until I get back to the States or send it out as soon as you get a chance if you intend for it to reach me here in time.

On other notes, not much to report as far as happenings. It's been downright quiet around here. I mean, the Iraqis have even begun doing their jobs, so we're not having to do it for them any longer. Really makes a fella feel unwanted.

Scientists have discovered how to turn dark meat into white meat. Read it here.

Ah, the inevitable march of progress.

A letter to the editor commenting on a recent article about the growing obesity of Americans:

Judging health by comparing height and weight is idiotic. It completely ignores not just muscle mass, as your article pointed out, but any variation in body type. A person with short legs will be judged fatter than a person with longer legs, even if their relative percentages of fat is the same.

What this study shows is something that should be obvious by now: when they're not being maniacally patriotic, Americans like to be alarmed about themselves. There's nothing an American likes more than to be driven into a panic related to a deep-seated and well-hidden inferiority complex. (Sputnik! The Japanese automotive market! Obesity! Maybe next year it'll be table manners.) And then the foreign press reports these studies, because everyone else on the planet wants to be alarmed by Americans, or at least feel superior to them.

Paul

Ah yes, we do so like to worry about ourselves, don't we?

I completed the photos pages for the pre-mobilization process at Rochester prior to leaving for Texas and eventually Iraq. No, you're not mistaken. Those pics are in fact a year old. You might be fair in saying that it's taken me a little while to get around to them *lol*

If you want to check the pages out, you can go here or follow the Photos menu located conveniently to your left, which has now been updated with links to the new pages.

Unkymoods seems to have gone down. It's been down for quite a while, and the site isn't even returning 404 pages. It's showing a whole new webpage from GoDaddy.com. This seems to indicate the site isn't even being hosted anywhere.

My only guess is that he'd revamping the site and has taken it off line for a while as he works on it. It'll be interesting to see what happens come September.

I recently completed Psychology of the Internet, the class I'm currently enrolled in for my master's degree in Human Relations from Oklahoma University. I actually had enrolled in the class last summer before I knew I was deploying to Iraq. I was able to complete about a third of the course before I deployed.

I had been hoping to have enough internet access in Iraq to be able to keep up with the class work, since it was an online course. However, the deployment process was too unsettled and I just couldn't get to a computer consistently for about a month. By the time I had arrived in Numaniyah and had solid internet access, I was too far behind in the course to finish up that term.

The teacher graciously allowed me to pick the class up where I had left off for the spring term. I can't express how grateful I am to Prof. Dawson for her flexibility and understanding while I've been deployed. There's no way I could have finished this course up without her making it possible.

I recently finished my final paper for the term - "An Examination of Home Network Security" - and received an A on the paper and an A overall for the course. My goal is to take my last course and my comprehensive exams next spring and finally graduate. It's been a great program and I've learned so much from it, but I'll be glad to be done all the same

MNSTC-I puts out a newsletter titled The Advisor which details some of the latest happenings with the Iraqi military training mission. I usually ignore them because, well, I'm here. I thought you might find them interesting though so I'm posting a couple for you to check out.

Obviously you're not going to get the 100% unvarnished truth about what's going on, since it's a military publication. But it also helps to highlight that there's something other than explosions and assassinations going on in Iraq. Here's the August editions of the The Advisor:

• August 20^th
  


• August 13^th
  


• August 6^th
  

If you enjoy reading The Advisor, you can subscribe for free and have the MNSTC-I newsletter emailed to you weekly. Just visit The Advisor web page. You can also view past editions as far back as September 2004 in the archives.

Once again, the sensationalist media has struck. The latest? The recent attempted attacks on U.S. Navy ships near Jordan.

Let's clear one thing up: it was not a missile attack as initially reported. It was not a "rocket" attack either. I mean, technically it was a rocket, but it was a rocket only in the purest sense of the word. To you and me, it was a mortar. What's the difference? When Joe Average hears the words "missile" or "rocket" he thinks of a jet propelled device that flies in a straight line. An attack of this type would be referred to as direct fire, because the enemy is shooting directly at you.

Unfortunately for the ratings mongers at CNN and company, the attempted attack was carried out with a mortar. A mortar works by dropping an explosive shell into a tube, which then launches the shell into the air. The shell arcs through the air, falling back to earth and exploding (hopefully) on whatever it hits. This is called indirect fire because, while the enemy may be trying to hit you, they are not shooting directly at you.

Think of it this way. Direct fire is like playing the traditional game of darts, the kind you see played at bars and pubs. Indirect fire is like playing lawn darts, or maybe horse shoes. And we've all seen how good most people are at horse shoes (beer consumption not withstanding.)

Even the best mortar teams rarely hit their intended target on the first try. Mortar teams are trained to aim as best they can, then adjust their aim based on where the initial round lands. They use mathematical equations to calculate how far to raise or lower their mortar tube (as well as taking windage into effect) in order to fire more accurately with each successive round fired. This is called "walking rounds into the target." They fire a round, see what they hit, adjust, then fire again until they hit their intended target.

So what do we really have in this latest attempt to attack a Navy ship? We've got a couple of Arabs trying to lob an explosive of questionable quality through the air, hoping they hit their intended mark. A well trained mortar team can be quite effective, but that requires training and competence, something most terrorists do not have. There's a reason they use car bombs and suicide bombers - they don't require much precision or practice to be effective.

So let's all relax, ok? The Green Zone in Baghdad is mortared pretty much daily and no one bats an eye about it. Why? Because most mortar attacks by Arab terrorists are nothing more than some punk kid taking a pot shot with a mortar tube and a couple of old Soviet rounds that are older than he is. His skill level amounts to little more than pointing the tube in the general direction of his target and hoping he gets lucky. More often than not the mortar rounds are so old they don't even blow up on impact.

I mean, for chrissakes, they were shooting at a ship! As we saw, they managed to blow up a storage warehouse, hit a hospital, put a crater in a road, and scare the shit out of an Israeli cabbie - all while completely missing their target. A big ass stationary target, I might add.

So much for those dastardly and dangerous criminal masterminds trying to destroy the very fabric of American life (you should read that last sentence with a vaguely British accent and an extremely grave look on your face.) Sometimes I think we ought to send everyone in America over to the Middle East for a couple of months so we can get a better sense of just what kind of individuals we're up against. Everyone might sleep a little better at night.

You may notice the site loads significantly faster. This seems to be a nice side effect of the new web host, PowWeb.com. I had never really noticed that AMhosting.com downloaded slowly because, well, I had no point of reference! They were my first and only web host.

Videos, pics, and pages should all be loading much more quickly. Let me know your perceptions of the speed of the site so I can get a sense of whether it's just my imagination or not.

OK, we're back in business. The delay was caused by my somehow deleting a very important system folder off of my host directory. I even knew not to delete it - I did my homework and read up on what I should and should not do before setting up my site. And yet I still managed to screw things up! Thankfully, the PowWeb customer service guys fixed the problem in about five minutes.

And yes, I did quote L.L. Cool J. Oh, yes I did. I gots mad street credz, don't you know?

Not much to tell you from the Iraq front. Nothing exciting going on. At least nothing I can tell you about. And to be honest with you, even the secret squirrel stuff isn't that exciting. But it would at least be something to write about!

The sand storm only lasted about 24 hours or so. I've been packing things up and mailing them home in anticipation of heading out of here in the coming months. Kelley loves all the souvenirs I've been sending home from Iraq. All in all just working on finishing up my time here and moving on.

I guess the 80^th Division has been officially activated now, so that's a good sign. The 80^th are the folks who are coming in to replace the 98^th, of which I am part.

Dinner's in a half hour. I've lost a little weight, which is also encouraging since I bloated up to biblical proportions before I came over here *lol* But don't worry, I'm not going to come home looking all starved. I'm back to where I normally am. I'll be looking forward to hitting the weights once as I get home. I do miss going to the gym, I have to admit. I like the warm, sunny weather here for running, but we don't have a gym and Baghdad won't build us one. We've asked several times. Mind you, they'll drop millions of dollars on a water treatment plant for the Iraqis which the Iraqis turn around and ask "What do we need this for? We'll just draw water from the canal." A $10,000 gym? Can't afford it.

Anyway, I digress.

I signed up for hosting with a new company today, so I should be transferring the site over to the new server over the next couple of days. If the site goes down, it's because I'm either in the process of moving over or having problems moving over. Either way, it'll be back up eventually. Hopefully this whole process turns out to be painless, but since this is my first try at switching web hosts I expect to make some newbie mistakes.

I had been hosted by American Internet Inc. They've been great in the time I've been with them. Wonderful customer service and I can't recall my site ever being down because of a fault on their end. But I'm running out storage space for the site, and so I started looking around at getting a larger hosting plan. American Internet is giving me 150 MB of storage for around $5 a month. I love the price, but it just wasn't enough space.

After doing some research I settled on a company called PowWeb. They offered 5 GB of storage for $7.77 per month, plus they had a summer discount of an additional 6 months free if you signed up for a year of service. With the additional six months it brought the per month cost down to $5.20 a month. They also offer a 2 year plan that comes with 14 months free for a total of 38 months. That plan worked out to $4.90 per month, which is an incredible deal, but it was longer than I wanted to commit to without having worked with this company before.

You can see why I switched. American Internet couldn't come close to matching the value.

So all in all, it should be a good learning experience. If all goes well, you - the loyal reader - will notice no change at all. Wish me luck!

The wind started kicking up last night and blowing sand around. I woke up this morning in the midst of the best sandstorm we've had yet!

Everything in the building is slowly building up a layer of dust and sand on it. You can even see the sand suspended in the air indoors. The stuff just gets everywhere.

The upside? It's cooled down a bit with so much crap blocking out the sun. It's only 102 degrees.

Here's a couple pics to give you some idea what it's like here. You can click the images below to see a larger image. These were taken at 9:30 in the morning today from a second story window in our building:

CNET reports that yet another work around has been discovered to bypass Windows Genuine Advantage.

I was walking past the TV room today when I heard the following snippet of converstation:

" . . . and then I was groped by an eighty year old woman."

I just kept walking.

We took another trip to Scania today. Scania is the name of a small FOB located about 45 minutes west of Numaniyah. We get our supplies and mail and such from them. They also have a small PX where we can pick up personal items, and other MWR facilities where we can chill out and relax for a bit.

Out back of the FOB the Iraqis have set up a little shopping mall made up of plywood shacks where they sell movies and other assorted junk that the soldiers just love to buy. We call it the Haji Mart. It's quite an experience to see and the Iraqis who sell their wares there put on a good show, so I took a couple short videos to give you an idea of what a Haji Mart is all about.

• The road to the Haji Mart with Saddam the Camel
  


• The Haji Mart
  

The videos are a little jerky because I was walking as I recorded, but otherwise they came out ok.

I set up the little thermometer Dad got me so that it would read the temperature from inside my room. It has a sensor that you can run outside your window so that you can get the temperature outside without actually having to keep the thermometer outdoors.

Anyway, I set it up about three o'clock, but of course I forgot about it because it was innocently sitting on the window sill. I noticed it again after I came back to my room later in the evening.

It's 98 degrees at 9:30 at night.

So, who wants to tell me about how hot it is when they sleep?

I've got another little video for you. This one comes from our friends over at CPATT. CPATT is the organization responsible for training the Iraqi police force. You may recall that I fall under CMATT - the organization responsible for training the Iraqi military.

This video is really very well done. I was very impressed when I saw it. It follows a training cycle from recruiting to graduation during their time here on An Numaniyah. All the scenes and pictures you see are from Numaniyah, so you also get to see a little of what ANTB looks like. The video is set to Linkin Park's In The End and runs approximately three and a half minutes.

You can view the video here.

PS - At the end of the video the letters BLP and CTSO flash across the screen. In case you're curious (and I know you are) BLP is short for BLP Services Ltd., an Australian civilian contractor that has been hired to help with training for CPATT. CTSO stands for Counter Terrorism/Special Operations, which is a branch of the Iraqi police force. Kind of like an American SWAT team.

WOOHOO!!

Ever since the new IDN system was installed and the buildings were all wired up, it's been a pretty slow time around here. The system went down yesterday so that gave me something to do for an afternoon. But even that consisted of contacting the right people and making sure they access to the equipment so they could fix it.

Yep, it's been a boring couple of days. *yawn* More time to go running and do my homework I suppose.