2 days ago I got an email about a different kind of going away party, a friend of mine, known him for 5 years or so, has been active reserves for a long time but recently switched to full active duty, but just states side.  He's Navy, so that meant driving back and forth between Columbus and Dayton.  About a month ago during a every-other-month get together, he said he's been "put on notice" that his time to jump over into the sand pit could be coming so this wasn't a surprise.

In the email he said we'd have a thing on sunday because he felt he could be gone before Thanksgiving (which, btw, his wife is t3h w00t when it comes to making a turkey) so ok fine, I forward it on to the group.  This morning ...I get this.

Friends -

I regret to inform you that the party has been canceled. The navy would like [him] to be on a transport to Iraq on Sunday, and he will actually be leaving town for San Diego sometime Tuesday, October 28th. 

For those keeping track, that's -today-.  I called him, see how he was feeling about it, how long, etc.  He's excited, 6 months, doing what he wants to do.  I outrightly warned him not to do anything stupid because the last thing I want to hear is he's coming home in a box.  To put this in perspective, he wanted to be a pilot and asked "would you fly with me" if he would get the OK -- I'd do it in a heart beat (mostly to out-fly him!) and even filled out some paperwork if he got it.  Well, he was turned down for that but did get commissioned to be an officer anyway.  Good thing is its a great position.  Bad thing is he will be required to move a LOT -- transports are easy to shoot at.  Granted, most of his movements should be by air ...but that ground comes up fast sometimes.  Damn gravity.

I'm not really worried about him or his ability to handle combat situations (see: being shot at) which he shouldn't see much, if at all, but I do wish, at the least, I would be going with him.  He's got a wife that's not in the greatest health and needs him from time to time ...I don't have that problem.  During the summer, we had talked about the realistic nature that he'd be going off and what I could do around the house, things his wife can't handle.  He insisted nothing (bullshit) but gave in by saying "make sure the mower has oil in it, it needs rebuilt so its eating it after every few runs".   Just the kind of guy he is.  So it looks like I'll be doing some shoveling (snow) and maybe some shrub cutting, lawn mowing and whatever else comes up while he's out playing in the big sand box of the east.  It's the least I can do.

The great thing about Ohio is we don't get all the "extreme" stuff everyone else gets.  Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, etc we don't get all that much.  Last night, we got some stupid high winds, so much it took down a lot of trees and totally screwed us in the power department.  The message @ AEP (my power company) said that it might be a week before power is restored...and I live near downtown!  We haven't had power since Sunday around 3pm.  Other bonus, one of the big trees finally let go directly across the street, putting a huge stress on the poles in the area.  Look for the big fork in the middle of the picture.

What's better, the guy's house it fell on -- JUST left for vacation last night.  One of the guys has already called him and there's not much he can do.  So, as a funny, we're going to send him this as a christmas card "from your !@#hole neighbors, Merry Christmas!" with a small caption of "you thought the wind took that tree down?"

I thought long and hard about posting this up, mostly because it's deeply personal.  This morning I decided I would.  If you don't care, consider this your "not a tech post" warning.

9/11 did affect me, more so than others.  Years ago, while working at an oil change place and talked to an army specialist about what he did and "what it means to be American".  We talked about how my generation didn't have a huge ordeal like previous generations had and I made a comment that haunts me, even today, "I think it'll takes something big, HUGE to get my generation to wake up".  I hate the fact I was right.  I came across a site asking if the rememberance of 9/11 was forgotten by many and people have returned to their daily lives, to some capacity I agree, but the the comment I left, I realized that it wasn't a reply but more a poem of sorts, and I'm no poet. 

I haven't forgotten...
I haven't forgotten how people ignore truth ...even when its right in front of them, plain as day.
I haven't forgotten how some think life is a commodity.
I haven't forgotten how people believe a plane can't atomize when striking a well-built structure.
I haven't forgotten how my military friends WANT to go defend our freedom.
I haven't forgotten how some of them are not coming back.
I haven't forgotten how unrealistic people have become about our rights.
I haven't forgotten how to stand up for what is right.
I haven't forgotten how I felt 7 years ago.

and most importantly...
I haven't forgotten I'm still not afraid.  I am a citizen of the United States, not a subject to the world.

This past friday, something absolutely amazing occured.  Before I get started, let me say first that most of my friends/family have no freakin clue what I do, much less understand to any degree how complex it _can_ be and in effect, don't care what I do, its "something with computers".  Well, my girlfriend started to ask about it because she didn't understand why some of this stuff zaps my brainpower after a day at work.  This was a mix of things that brought this on.  1, an ad on TV about "get a technical degree in multidirectional impact devices!" and 2, I had mentioned I was doing stuff with this really cool-named product, Ninject.

I know she's got the mindset to figure this stuff out and a little mind stretch is never bad so why not?  I offered to show her the bare bones of programming, a simple (cringe) hello world website with the cliche button, textbox and label.  No sweat, easy stuff, went very very smoothly and with a slightly concerned face, she looks at me and comments "this ...really isn't that hard" then something astonishing happened - she says "well, lets do something for the dogs, I want it to say who was a good dog today".  Ok, so we removed the textbox with a dropdown and went along with that until "what if I want to say more than one dog was good? ...and can we make it say the other dogs were bad?".  The ball was rolling at this point!  Did I mention we were using "best practices" in control names too (lbl = label, txt = textbox, etc)?  That she was telling me?  Correctly?  The first time?  She was getting it!

After a while, we ended up making a design decision that we would use a checkboxlist, run though the list, display which dog was good, which was bad now insert the astonishing comment "wait, if we have Buck and Kimber selected, the (verb) tenses won't be right ...we can't have it say Buck Kimber was a good dog.  We'll have to do ...something that figures that out won't we?  And can we put and in there when there's more than one selected?  What about commas?  Is that possible?"  Where's the heavenly awe music when you need it??

We had to write an if statement to check the counts, make a decision and give us a string that was acceptable along with a flag that let us know if it was a good dog comment or bad dog comment.  After about 2 hours, she was happy with what we'd created and was amazed at the level of complexity that something as "simple" as making a page say what dog was good and what dog wasn't.  I also demonstarted that since we put in the work now, if we added 5 more dogs to the list, it didn't matter, it just worked.  When we were finally done she commented, almostly slyly "I'll never look at checkboxes the same ever again" - HA!

No, not nascar, but open wheel, SCCA GT, LeMans GT1, GT2, P1, P2 -- except for the prototypes and indy, they are cars you can go out and buy without all the stickers and ...lack of interior.  I like that kind of racing.  Even better this year, I bought a "super ticket" which gave me all weekend to go and I got a paddock pass so I could go watch the crews work on the cars, even chat with a few of them and meet some of the drivers.  I was there all 3 days and I had a great time.  One thing that caught me off guard was this car... a Porsche GT3

Yep, sponsored by Windows Vista.  Good stuff, and there was two of them.  So back to the paddock area ...how close do they let you get to the cars?  This close.  They had to go to tech to get weighed so they're all legal and allowed to even qualify.  GOOOOD stuff.  I've got a ton of other pictures I took, but ulimately, my ferrari's took 1st in GT2, the Porsche Spyders took 1st in P2 and the Audi reclaims their #1 overall victory position (no surprise really).  I can't wait until next year.