On Errantry

Sacrificed teddy bears: "If you give her your old forgotten teddy bear, she'll cover it with clay and put it in the oven. The original teddy gets burned and vanishes but you're left with its fragile white shell."

Another creative way in which to scar a small child for life.

CNN.com - Backpack generates power from walking - Sep 9, 2005: "A backpack that converts a plodding gait into electricity could soon be charging up mobile phones, navigation devices and even portable disc players, U.S.-based researchers said on Thursday."

Coming soon to a SAREX near you:

"Jump up and down, cadet -- I need to make a phone call and my battery's dead."

I think I'm in love. I've been looking for an RSS aggregator that will play nice with Firefox for the past few months, and Netvibes pretty much fits the bill. It's sort of a MyGoogle clone with considerably more flexibility (and much prettier). If they released a nice little API it would probably take off like a park duck chased by a toddler.

Few things I think would probably go over well:

Auto-refreshing feeds with some sort of new article indicator in the title bar. I keep most of my boxes collapsed (or else they run off the screen and I have to scroll), and it would make it loads easier on me if I didn't have to pop each one open to see if something new came in to distract me from my chem work.

Ability to add new search engines. I have a ton of engines integrated into quicksearch in firefox, and I'd like to be able to transfer them over.

Better weather box. For a quick overview of what the day's going to be like, it's fine, but it would be nice if I could click on the giganto weather icon and pop up the 10-day or hourly in a new tab. (NEW TAB NOT NEW WINDOW!)

Background and title formatting. No reason not to make it pretty, if I so desire, even though the simplicity thing rocks my socks.

Better GMail previews.

Blogger plugin, for those times when I just have to share.

I'm also having some trouble opening certain feeds, like dooce and mefi. I don't think it's a problem on my end, but I could be wrong.

Now my new homepage. Information junkie heaven!

Well, the past few day have been eventful, to say the least. I finally qualified as GTM-3 (entry-level ground search and rescue; see also, grunt and groundpounder) on Saturday - hanging out with the Carroll guys again; they've all become volunteer firefighters when I wasn't looking - and Monday morning bright and early I get an e-mail from my SC asking whether I want to be on the alert list for deployment to the Gulf.

I'm sorry, did you just ask me whether I want my first real operation to be The Big One?

My first instinct was to bellow out "Hooah!" and scrape my gear together, but needless to say my mother was not pleased with the idea of me taking off for a week in the beginning of my first semester. I, of course, was fired up as anything at just the chance and spent most of the day not eating because I was too excited and sounding out my professors about the idea.

Me: "I'm on a search and rescue team [not strictly true; I'm all alone because nobody else in the squadron has current qualifications] and there's a chance I might be deployed within the next few weeks. Is there anything I can do to prepare?"

Professor Whoever: ::blink blink blink:: "Er...yes. If you know far enough ahead of time, I can give you your assignments, but if you miss a test you'll have to take it on the make-up date. So...er...good luck."

So I spent the entire day agonizing over whether I'd be willing to sacrifice my GPA for a chance to deploy and help people out, finally deciding about midafternoon hey, what am I going to remember five or ten years from now - another week spent stuffing my soggy gray matter with chem and calc, or my epic trip to a disaster area?

Yeah, I'm a touch stupid.

By this time I had spent about an hour straight arguing with my mother - school vs. SAR - and had sent off an email to the SC saying I was good to go, which I almost immediately retracted.

Not that it matters - Tuesday morning I woke up to another e-mail that said CAP was closing down ground ops in Mississippi (we'd been working out of MS wing headquarters in Jackson), hence, no need to deploy, and I'm an idiot.

The College Park Aviation Museum is looking for student volunteers to help this weekend on either Saturday, September 17, or Sunday, September 18, from 11-4 for its Jay Jay the Jet Plane Weekend. We are looking for anyone interested in working with kids of all ages, arts and crafts, and/or aviation. We are also looking for anyone interested in being the center of attention and dressing up as Jay Jay.

Do you have any idea how much fun this would be? If I weren't going to the SAREX, I'd be zipping myself into the suit in about three seconds. I mean, what self-respecting college student doesn't have dreams of dressing up as an anthropomorphized plane?

EDIT: Jay Jay himself, for anybody not familiar with his children's show on PBS:

"Our wonderful MER Chief of Staff and MER CC have found a way to cover the cost of the books and required materials from ICISF out of the MER budget for the CISM course during SAR College!"

I think that's close to the most acronyms I've ever seen in one sentence. Bonus, sir.

Things I must not do so I don't scare my new roommate/make her think I'm a complete psycho.

1. Immediately unpack ground team stuff, starting with tac vest. EDIT: Did it, but not until a few weeks later.


2. Bring underwear washed at Fred's house (nice yellow tinge -- buh-bye, Fruit of the Loom).


3. Slaver over high speed connection. EDIT: Computer done broke for a few days as soon as I brought it there. It was horrible.


4. Stick upper body out window to get better fix on GPS coordinates.


5. Begin construction of Pringle antenna.


6. Talk too much (not so much of a problem).


7. Talk too little (BIG problem).


8. Refuse to come out except for meals and classes. EDIT: Did it, but not my fault.


9. Bring more gadgets than clothes.


10. Bring an extensive toolkit.


11. Show too much familiarity with knives when opening boxes.


12. Polish boots.