DVDs

It turns out the CD/DVD drive in my laptop is acting up … again. I’ve had this thing replaced two times already, so I’m starting to think it’s either me or the way this thing is made. I’m choosing to blame the manufacturing process because I haven’t used it but one time since the last replacement got completed.

I went to burn the DVDs of pictures for my ASBC flight mates and it turns out I couldn’t. After calling around a little bit trying to find someone in town that would let me come over and burn disks for a few hours, I realized everyone I know is either out of town or has relatives in town this weekend. That made it very difficult and I ended up just going to work where I know there are DVD burners. I wasn’t the only one there, so it wasn’t bad at all.

I didn’t realize until just the other day that I have 4.5 Gb of pictures and videos to send to everyone. It took me six CDs to move them from a laptop to the computer otherwise I would have just burned everyone a CD.

While I was gone at ASBC, I had two packages delivered here. They were both signed for by the lady in the office and now they are missing. No one in the office seems to be able to find them. There is one room where all the packages go and UPS says both of them are there. I ordered them on Amazon, so I can get a reimbursement from Amazon or from UPS, but I really want my apartment complex to pay for them. I have the signature of the people in the office on the delivery slip, so it’s not as if the package didn’t get delivered. I’m going to call the main office sometime tomorrow evening and talk to someone about this.

Home Again

I made the long drive home in one night. I stopped once to take a little nap (about an hour and a half) because the rain was too heavy for me to see too far ahead and I didn’t want to get in an accident. I pulled over at a rest stop and leaned my seat back. After that, I walked around a bit outside (the rain had died down enough that I only got moderately soaked) and got back on the road.

Last night I had a few buddies who were driving through here on their way back home and we went out to the party that is downtown right now for dinner. I’ve never seen any of these bars, pubs, restaurants or clubs so packed as they were last night. And I was amazed how many older people were out there. It’s not that I don’t think older people can’t party with the best of them, it’s just that the music and atmosphere of these places was not … geriatric appropriate.

I’m exhausted and I’m headed to bed in an hour (two o’ clock) to try to catch up on some of the sleep I have missed over the last six weeks (especially the last two days).

Horray for successful graduation and getting back home!

Lessons Learned

1.  Always check to be sure the guard is on the hair clippers before you start touching up places you missed.

2.  There IS a big difference between guard #1 and no guard at all.

Last night we went and saw a cover band at a local pub and we were all pleasantly surprised to find they were REALLY good! You can go to their website to check them out, they are call Hidden Element. It was a lot of fun to hang out with everyone who went on our last weekend here. After this coming Wednesday, we’re pretty much set and all we have to do is stay alive until Friday. Then it’s home again!

We had to say goodbye to our flight commander this past Friday because he is headed off to SOS (basically, he’s going from a teacher upstairs to a student downstairs) and we got introduced to our sub. We’re pretty excited to be finishing up but it sure would have been nice to have our Captain stay all the way through to graduation.

Speaking of graduation, we’re working on both our flight movie and the end of course video at the same time. They have to be Windows Media Files though because that “increases compatibility”. I would argue that is not the case. The most widely accepted movie format is NOT WMV, it is MPEG and it can be played by any movie player worth its salt on any computing platform. If they had said it “increases compatibility on Windows systems”, I would have been on board with that idea. Then again, the world runs on much more than just Windows.

During Combined Ops (which was awesome, by the way) my flight did one of the same obstacles in Project X that we did as a flight a few weeks ago. We were able to get it done really quickly because some of us had done it before, but it involves making a human bridge for people to crawl across at the beginning. It wasn’t until I got back and changed that I realized I had two giant bootprints on the back of my BDUs because I was the base person in the bridge. It made me laugh because it was really noticeable and no one had bothered to say anything to me as I wore that uniform for about two hours after Project X finished.

Combined Ops

This past week was all classes due to the compressed schedule my class is testing out. The new schedule is nice because it’s putting six weeks worth of classes into only five weeks meaning there is less sitting around doing nothing because the day’s schedule is already done. Basically, the final format of this school is going to be four weeks of class and two weeks of hands on material because they have found that hands-on training allows people to retain information much better. It’s nice that they are finally moving toward a method of teaching that is going to make this information more applicable and more likely to stick in our heads after we take our tests.

MacHeist is going on again. This is the third time I’ve bought a software bundle from these guys because every year they manage to get some pretty awesome programs bundled together at a really steep discount. I think this year the total cost of the bundle would be a little of $1300 if you bought all the programs separately. If you did the challenges along the way as they got ready to reveal the programs that were going to be included in the bundle, you got an even bigger discount (I think I paid $33 dollars in the end). Some quick math would show you that $33 is less that 3% of the total cost of that software! I will never use some of the programs, but others will get used almost daily. Completely worth it.

This coming week is Combined Ops where the SNCOs from the SNCOA down the street come and we mix up our flights with their’s. This way, we get to talk to some people who have been in the military for 20+ years and who have some real world experience when it comes to dealing with difficult bosses, belligerent employees and confused 2Lts. I think both sides are pretty excited about this!