LIke this guy…..Tom Fort

Heh…let’s see him do that again in the next 15 minutes…:)

A caller to Bill Bennett’s talk show this morning put forth a new moniker for the current crop of people who think there is nothing to put their trust in. They are coming behind the Gen Xers:

“Generation C” for “Cynic”

Fits pretty well, considering the Democratic Underground people decided within a short time yesterday that the small plane crashing into a Manhatten apartment building is part of an inside job of the Bush Administration.

Go figure…

Moving right along from Part VI, where I chronicled my attempts to “obtain” Zenith Z-248 computers from the Supply Corps. It didn’t work….

So, now I’m about 3.5 years into owning a personal computer. In Oct 1981, I had a 1Mhz processor with 48K of RAM. BY the spring of 1985, I had moved up to a 1 Mhz processor with 64K of RAM. Wow…consider how long that was compared to now. Macs were still in my future…

Apple //c with 9″ “green screen” monitor

Anyhow, I was now moving from a fixed grey hull to the life of a nomadic “tactical DESRON” troll. The Apple //c was around
by now. I was digging throught the classified ads of the Virginian Pilot and found someone advertizing a //c and it also included a 1200 baud modem! I Watched the ad for a few days and the day after the ad went out of the paper, I called and asked if he still had the computer. Yes, was the reply. I told him I’d give him $1200 for everything. He balked, I fingered the freshly withdrawn $20s to get his attention and asked “How do I get to your house?” He gave me directions.

I picked up the //c, the modem and an ImageWriter ][ 9 pin dot matrix, serially interfaced printer. Home I went with my find and had my 300 baud modem sold shortly there after.

One of the programs that had come with the //c was “AppleWorks.” AppleWorks was a combination word processor, spreadsheet and database program, and I think it also had an intergrated communications management function. This was the fore runner of the “office suite” software packages we are so reliant on anymore. I had obviously done word processing, and had played with the very first spreadsheet, Visicalc (written to run on the Apple ][ first), and also had been doing work with dBase II in C/PM. Now I had the three functions all resident within one program, which, came in very handy later on at work.

While on this adventure, and I’m not completely clear on the dates, I was able to attend the Apple Expo in Boston. I think it was in 1983, while I was at Department Head School in Newport (yes, this part is out of sequence). I recall being fascinated with speech recognition software for the Apple ][ series. You could have 64 voice files per “library.” You would speak the command, then type in the command it would execute. You could interact with the disk operating system, so you could easily increase the “vocabulary” by using some commands to load other library files. I spoke to one of the programmers and found out Apple was employing several Ph.Ds to engineer the digitizing of speech. Part of the discussion was about how we speak in analog streams, yet we still think of speech as sets of words with “white space” between them. No so for the computer. The computer has to be powerful enough to constantly be guessing which part of the captured wave form comprises discrete words, no small task. Obviously, we have come a long way, but some of the extra money I spent on Apple products went to thier extrensive R&D efforts that brought us the first viable GUIs and many other things we now take for granted.

I can’t recall the exact circumstances, but as we geared up for the Mediterranean/North Arabian Sea cruise, one of my Apple Club friends began dabbing with the IBM PC stuff and showed me a program named R:Base 5000. It was a database manager, and you could type in english like questions and it would roll out the answers from the data tables. I got a copy and loaded it on the Z-248 the staff had gotten for administrative work. We packed up our cruise boxes and I devoted a blue and white footlocker to be the carrying case for my Apple //c computer anf the printer, so I could use them to do my work while we made the world free for democracy.

I tell the story of the cruise in the series A Journey into History.

Coming next: The Watch Officer’s Notebook and rugged computers

Part II is here and covers the finger pointing the first day the “issue” with Rep. Mark Foley bubbled to up from beneath the swamp water to see the light of day.

Today, a short post on the topic. I believe I know the end game of the physicists looking for the Grand Unification Theory formula. Once they have discerned it, everything else will be understood exactly how it relates to everything else in the physical science world.

With those seeking the single thing/person/animal/mineral/vegtable that is the cause of all “badness” in the universe, what next? If “it” says “sorry!” will we then all move along and go back to living? Will we drop the “hunt” and be satisfied? Will we secretly break out our notes, hiding under the bedcovers, using a flashlight to illuminate our scribbling and tell ourselves “There must be something ELSE!”?

How long will it take for “goodness” to break out on the plant, where all men and women love and respect each other, when no one goes hyngry, when there is nary a molecule of “Greenhouse” gas left to cause the inordinate heating of the precious plant? How long, I ask those of you who seek this answer.

I thought of this because of the many, many press conferences when some unbiased, non-glory seeking, bright and intelligent journalists ask President Bush “Sir, what mistakes have you made in ______?” Add to that the many angry editorials where the writers DEMAND the President say he made mistakes.

Ok, so if one day, before his term is over, President Bush says he has committed a specific mistake. Sometimes he does allow for “yes, I’ve made a few mistakes” type of response, but then ignores the clamoring press corps that yells in unison “WHAT MISTAKE DID YOU MAKE?” as he turns and walks from the podium, waving and smiling. So, pretend President Bush says: “I made a mistake counting on the reliability of the intelligence that was provided to me by the CIA.”

Will you (you know who you are) then take a deep breath, breathe a sigh of relief and then say to yourself “FINALLY!” and get on about your life, no longer obsessed with just.getting.HIM.to.say IT?

This, while the topic is not fully explored for the purposes of this series, is the most pressing issue at hand. If we can find who definitively who it is to blame, will we let it go and then do something uplifting and productive for the rest of our days?

From Politics of a Patriot, Holly reports she got this email from Sew Much Comfort asking for some help.

I’m quoting it so you all can pass it along, and also take a minute and a few bucks to get a card in the mail to Sgt Kevin Downs:

OK, I have a favor to ask. There is a young soldier (a 23 year old Tennessee National Guardsman) named Sgt. Kevin Downs. He was blown out of his tank in Baghdad a year ago and left with no feet, mangled arms, and burns over 60% of his body. He is a Tennessee boy. Everyone else in the tank was killed. His condition is not good. A surgery to improve the use of fingers on one hand inadvertently caused previous skin grafts to break down, and the grafts on his legs are cracking as well and may require beginning over at square one.

Kevin is tired and low in spirits. He needs our prayers and support through cards. Would you please send him a note or card to let him know you are thinking about him? Remember him in your prayers as well. Now I am going to ask a special favor from me. Would you please send this to as many people that you can in your e-mail addresses? I would love to see him get cards from everywhere and hopefully he will know that people all over the country appreciate him leaving the safety of his home and country and fighting for our freedoms. I love America and know that it could very well be one of my family members. Thank you for all that you will do. God Bless.

His address is:
Sgt Kevin Downs
Brooke Army Medical Center
3851 Roger Brooke Dr.
Fort Sam Houston, TX 78234 USA

OR:
Sgt Kevin Downs
PO Box 118
Kingston Springs, TN 37028

Footnote: This is the mission of Sew Much Comfort:

Anyone want to help out?

Sometime in late 1989, there I was, watching Marty, the valiant rotary wing aviator and Det Officer-in-Charge (OIC), and one of his boy wonders saunter past me in the centerline passageway, wearing their flight helmets, and carrying helmet bags that appeared to have helmets in them. Me, having recalled the warning to always heed the “little warning bells in the back of your head” at Prospective Executive Officer (PXO) school, I called to marty to inquire at what looked to be out of sorts.

It went something like this:

Me: “Marty, what’s in the helmet bags?”
Marty: “Oh, tapes, XO.”
Me: “Really, what kind?”
Marty: “Music cassettes.”
Me: “Why, pray tell, are you taking music cassettes up in the helo?”
Marty: “The training device in the console can also play music.”

Interesting. Never forget sailors (and officers) will always figure out the capabilities of anything you provide to them. I will admit to also being much like that as a JO. Certainly if one person doesn’t, the next one will, and the word spreads.

Me: “So, you’re gonna be cranking up the tunes while you fly your mission?”
Marty: “Sure, it gets boring up there.”

That, well not exactly the precise words, nevertheless, portray the conversation. They headed out to pre-flight and off they went into the skies over the Med, or the Persian Gulf, to head bang while conducting surface surveillance. I’m sure they were not the only crew in the fleet to figure out they had a built in stereo system to chase away the boredom while being vibrated along with several thousand other parts of the SH-60B airframe.

The epilogue to this happened a few years later, when I was inspecting Atlantic Fleet ships for Combat Systems readiness. I poked my head into the Electronic Warfare module of a DDG-38 Class ship, and pushing back the curtain, saw the Electronic Warfare On Board Trainer (EWOBT), an IBM PC system, equipped with a CD-ROM, off to the side. This computer was fielded to keep EW operators proficient by running training scenarios, complete with audio of various electronic emitters fro the CD-ROMs provided. The headset hung close by on a hook, and there was a heavy metal band music CD laying out of it’s jewel case on top of the case. Once more, being curious, I asked the EW on watch what the CD was there for. “Oh, we can play music CDs on there, too” he said without flinching, or thinking. I had had an EWOBT on my ship (same as the one discussed above with the musical helo), and had no clue the EWs were most likely playing tunes while on watch, looking very much like they were sharpening their skills as EW operators. Oh, well.

I made a point of letting the officers on the ships that the EWs might also be enjoying some entertainment on the mid-watch.

In Part V, I described some of the wonderous “cutting edge” technologies, such as a Z-80 co-processor and a 300 bps modem. I paid the bleeding edge pricing, ‘coz I wanted them.

I had left FCTCL for Dept Head School in Jan-June 83, hauling my trusty Apple ][+ along for the geobachelor thing. I kept working on th TAGG program, cleaning it up and writing the manual. AFter some extra schooling enroute, I flew south (way south, as in Chile) to catch my ride as Engineer Officer on USS CONOLLY (DD-979). The ship’s schedule was 3 more months of UNITAS, then home for Chritmas and then off to Portland, ME and 10 months in the new Bath Iron Works facility. My CO, CDR Harry Maxiner, had prepped the ship for the overhaul, by having them get as much material as possible to complete the ship’s force portion of the ROH work package, while we were on cruise. He was another man who thought way ahead. Besides being the Naval emmissaries we had been sent south to be, the work that should have been held off until early February 84, was being knocked out daily. Some readers, if you were along for that ride will recall the installation of extra flourescent lighting in the bilge areas, and the replacement of fasterners with stainless stell ones all over the ship. This project to complete the “Ship’s Force Work List” (SFWL) resulted in a few things:

We found out COMNAVSURFLANT had a pile of Z-248 computers to be issued to the ships. Having spoken to some of the shipyard and SUPSHIP people about the upcoming yard period, they indicated they had developed a computerized interface for the ROH (regular overhaul – back then every 5 years, stretched from 3) work pacakge. We could update our work for the SFWL via a computer and modem it into the SUPSHIP Offices, and we could get status on all the shipyard and other organization’s job status in return. Pretty sweet deal. I set about, when we returned from UNITAS, to convince SURFLANT Supply to give us a few of those Zenith computers. We begged, we pleaded, the CO went and knocked on doors around the various offices, but…the “Chops” were not letting us have anything. This adventure gave me my primary education on “programatics.” The computers were bought with funding justified to support an application to assist the shipboard disburing officers, and that was all they could be used for. Handing them over for ROH work package tracking was a non-starter, and would have been a violation of the expediture of public funding. I didn’t “get it” for a while, but my later years helped me comprehend this issue much better. Net result: Updates of work lists by hand…

I will say this about the Supply Corps. They didn’t just get a bunch of computers and toss them aboard ships to the DISBO. They contracted for the design, production, support and training for the life cycle of the plan. By centralizing their effort, a lot of standardiztion saved the day. That, I saw them do with programs for the Ship’s Store, the spare parts and one other area (I can’t recall exactly what it was), all were raging successes. The black shoes never had the logic wear off on them for the most of the rest of my career.

The second effect of the early completion of much of the planned work was the free time made available for the crew to train for the end of the yard inspections, in my case, the “LOE” (Light Off Exam). Captain Maxiner wanted to know whare we were in the process and I sat down, once more at the Apple ][+, armed with dBase ][ and designed and programmed an application to track the items to be done for the LOE. It was an early lesson n relational databases, but you have much more manual work to do to connect the different data tables. I would print out the report of all items daily and hang in on the side of the file cabinets forward of my desk in the Log Room. The people responsible. mostly my five division officer, would mark up the status by the end of the work day and I’d edit the progress/chnages into the computer. Each morning, the CO also got a copy, fresh as of the end of the day before. This helped keep him on top of things without coming down to the Log Room of the Engineering spaces. Not that he didn’t but he didn’t need to come nearly as often. It was a fun project, and helped a lot of us keep on top of the many individual tasks necessary to pass the LOE on the first try. The same POA&M (Plan of Action and Milestones) tracking program was filled out to get us ready for the post-ROH REFTRA (refresher training) in GTMO, where we were also going to have the OPPE (operational propulsion plant exam) Equivalent exam at the end of the 6 weeks down south. Both REFTRA and OPPE went very well, and because we could devote more time to training, and less time to paperwork.

Near the end of overhaul, the Weapons Officer, LCDR John Taylor, was being relieved. He turned over the Senior Watch Officer duty to me. This entailed managing the watch assignments for inport, and also the officers when at sea. About this time I had moved up to an Apple ][e, but was pretty much like the Apple ][+ from a performance standpoint. Using the ][e, I did another database project, where I entered the entire crew into the tables, then recorded their status for the seven major watchstanding duties: Command Duty Officer (CDO), Officer of the Deck (Inport), Petty Officer of the Watch (POOW), Duty Engineer, Duty Operations, Duty Supply and Duty Combat Systems. I also recorded their date of achievement, from their service record entries, and I had the computer assign a weighted value by paygrade. This accounted for experience. Besides just then tweaking the major qualifications portion, all we had to do, as we headed into port, was put in the desired inport section assignments. The initial printout then added up the values and gave an overview of the experience any one section had, as well as the body count. If these values were markedly different, it became an easy task to move people between the sections and balance things out. Someone asked me wahy I spent all the time writing that program, beacuse they could do it faster by hand. I told them they could the first time, but every time after that, I’d win. They got it.

During the ROH, I had the opportunity to pick up my first hard drive, the first one Apple produced. A few days ago, I found a picture of it, but, in amongst the many bookmarks I have, I can’t track it down. It held a whopping 5 megabytes of data and was about the size of a shoebox. That doesn’t seem like much, but given floppies held 134K of data, this was a huge axpansion of capability, not having to constantly dig through showboxes full of 5 1/4″ floppies to run anything. Cost (as best I recall): $1200.

I picked up my first paying job near the end of this tour, when a shipmate, who had retired, hired me to come and assist his programmers in getting their dBase ][ application up and running. I drove for 2 hours to NC, worked most of the day, had the program doing all they wanted it to do, and was paid $200 and a steak dinner. Not bad for one day of work, but it was a result of almost 3 years of creating and managing databases.

Next segment: Auctions, portable computers, SQL before it was SQL, and how to buy smart.

Well, was it a nuke, or wasn’t it?

Back in 1965, the Navy conducted a series of tests (two underwater ones at San Clemente Is and three surface shots) that simulated an atomic bursts, by building a really, really big pile of conventional explosives (TNT) and yelled “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” while ships were parked on concentric rings around the penninsula of Kaho`olawe Island.

More info on Sailor Hat here.

I know of this, because we used to use the Navy training film to fill classroom time while the training devices for the team trainer were down.

Maybe they just stuffed lots of semtex in a hole and fired it up, just to see what we’d do…It’s called OPDEC (Operational Deception) if they did…

The “Lost Battalion,” the 1st Battalion of the 308th of the 77th “Liberty” Divison of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was trapped behind the German Lines in the Argonne Forest from the 2nd thru the 8th of October. This would be the day, 88 years later, that they would have been back safely form the fight.

Many sites on the net are out there, here is one.

Here is a well done movie I saw a few months back, where I first heard of the story.

600 men went in, led my Major Whittlesey, 200 walked out. Quite a story of tenacity in a pretty hopeless situation. 3 Medal of Honors, 29 Distinguished Service Crosses. That list speaks of plenty of herosim.Secret Passage movie download

>Part IV concluded the story of TAGG and adventures into the BASIC and HP-GL programming launguages….

The Tidewater Apple Worms club helped me learn more. One day I mentioned I was considering getting a modem. Bill, who I knew by aquaintance only, said I couls borrow his for a week, and see how I liked it. It was a Hayes 300 baud modem, the internal card type. I was amazed at the offer, and later in the week, went over to his house and he pulled it out and handed it to me. Back home to begin the inderstanding of serial digital to analog communications. I got to where I knew what “ATDT” menat and how to change the volume of the modem’s speaker and other important things.

I broke down, after I took it back to Bill, and bought one myself. In 1982 dollars, we were talking $250 for the priveledge of communication at 300 bits per second, but it opened a whole new world. baout this time, I also decided, when the price dropped to $99, to buy a “Language Card” for the Apple ][+, which was a fancy name for an extra 16K (yes, K, no type here) of memory, bringing me to a whopping 64K of RAM.

One of my neighbors came over and asked if I could help them at work, beacuse Peachtree (one of the very first accounting pacakages) seemed to have a bug. I told her I’d give it a try, and, upon arriving at their office, found out Peachtree was written in Apple BASIC, and I could look at the listing, as it wasn’t compiled. I tracked the problem down and was able to successfully patch the bug out of existence. I wasn’t smart enough back then to know I shold have sent off a report to Peachtree. As a result of my work, not only did they pay me, but they asked if I’d like “this.” “This” was the entire, unopened copy of Apple PASCAL, which was sold to them when they got the computer (even thought they didn’t need it). I seem to recall the list price was $475, so I nodded and said I thought I might find a use for it. I did. I went and took a course in PASCAL at the local community college. While I didn’t ever use PASCAL directly for anything, shortly after this, I started working the dBase II, and the programming language was essentially PASCAL beefed up for doing datbase programming.

Along with dBase II, I had to get a “co-processor” card, which, as most people are aware of now, is like plugging a second computer in. I got a board with the Zilog Z-80 chip and was then able to boot up in CP/M, an newere operating system, which was very much like the PC-DOS/IBM-DOS/MS-DOS that came into wide use later.

I heard you could make money compiling mailing lists and being able to sort them for customers. I set out learning dBase II building an application to enter and printout labels, customized to do a selectable amount of columns of labels. Never did make money on that, but I learned database design and report building well.

By this time, it was getting harder and harder to find people in the club to answer questions, now mostly about software, for few were building applications. Most were using their machines to prduce word processing or use pre-packaged applications, so I was running ahead of the pack I had been running with. Now I had to start digging up books on the subject.

Next stop: Lobbying for Z-248s from the Supply Corps, the POA&M Application and how the Senior Watch Officer could balance watchstanding sections in a few keystrokes.