A Geek’s Think

I got some great news this week - I’m being advanced to Electronics Technician Second Class (aka ET2, pay grade E-5), the equivalent to a sergeant in the Army or Marine Corps. Having only been in the Navy for a little more than a year and a half (’since breakfast’ in Navy jargon), I’m quite pleased to be advanced as quickly as I have been.

In related news, my brother Jacob was recently advanced to the rank of Staff Sergeant in the Army (pay grade E-6).  Congratulations Jake!

The deployment is going well so far, and I’ll be home for Christmas, so I’m excited to see you all soon!

It seems that thus far on our deployment, the USS De Wert’s ‘home away from home’ has been Panama City, Panama, right up-river from the Panama Canal.  We’ve been there three times already, and will probably pause there at least once more during our trip home to pick up fuel.  Two of those visits have been actual port visits, where we were able to leave the ship and head into town.

I’ve enjoyed these visits for the most part, though they haven’t been as culture-filled as my visits to other countries have been during the deployment. In fact, a great majority of my time in Panama has been spent in a mall known as the MultiPlaza. It has most everything a waterlogged sailor could want: food, Internet, a phone center, and souvenir shops. And, for those who are so inclined, a casino. I am not so inclined, for various reasons, but my companions were and I therefore spent a bit of time in the casino watching them lose their money.

It’s my hope that my next visit to Panama City will be a more culturally-enlightening experience, and I’ve since encountered some others on the ship who have the same goal. It may not be until our next deployment that I return, but when I do, the mall is the last place I plan on visiting!

On a more positive note, from the pier where we were moored I could look across the Panama Canal and see what I believe to be the Panama City Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Seeing the temple in the distance is a little touch of home for me, and brought a tear to my eye.

I do have pictures of Panama and more, which I’ll upload once I get back and have access to a decent Internet connection.

Due to my current work situation (see the picture on the right of the page), I’m currently stuck with an extremely-low-bandwidth connection to the Internet.  This can turn simple tasks, such as checking my bank account, into monumental exercises in patience.  I once spent more than two hours trying to pay a cell phone bill without success.

While I can’t do much to get web designers to stop eating up my bandwidth with useless flashy interfaces, I’ve found several Mozilla Firefox extensions that make my browsing significantly faster.  Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

Adblock

Adblock is without a doubt my #1 tool in saving bandwidth, and I’m not just talking about blocking ads. Large images (anything over 5 KB!) or unnecessary Javascript files get the Adblock treatment, too.  Slashdot, one of my favorite sites and a notorious slow loader, now loads in less than a minute versus 5+ minutes before being trimmed down by Adblock. To check for large images, use the Media tab under Tools -> Page Info in Firefox. For a whole-page view of bandwidth sucking files, check out websiteoptimization.com.

DownThemAll

Downloading a large file can be laborious over a satellite link, especially when the connection seems to die every minute or two.  DownThemAll will keep on chugging past interruptions, not stopping until the whole file is down. It’s saved me from many a headache.  DownThemAll also functions as a powerful download manager, with support for download queues and other standard features.

Flashblock

Flashblock replaces embedded Macromedia Flash objects with a clickable image that when clicked loads the blocked object. In my experience, there are very few times that Flash actually contributes positively to a web page, so rarely have any reason to click. For those few exceptions, Flashblock has a whitelist feature to allow Flash content to be displayed without interruption.

NoScript

I just installed NoScript this morning and am loving it already. It blocks Javascript content on pages, which, like Flash, is often superfluous and bandwidth intensive.  Again, for those sites where Javascript is necessary to access the content, a whitelist feature is provided.

ScribeFire

Another recent installation, ScribeFire allows me to post to my self-hosted WordPress blog without actually visiting the slow-loading blog administration page. I’m using it right now, in fact, to post this blog entry. ScribeFire also works with other blog hosts such as LiveJournal, Blogger, and Wordpress.

Others

Several other Firefox Extensions make my life easier, but aren’t specifically bandwidth oriented:

• CustomizeGoogle - Allows me to choose what I see (and don’t see) when searching via Google.
• Download Statusbar - Replaces the download window with an informative status bar at the bottom of my screen.  I like.
• MediaPlayerConnectivity - Allows me to download embedded videos instead of viewing them directly in the page.  Also makes my life easier as a Linux user when dealing with Quicktime or Windows Media Player files, which have no official Linux player.
• Tab Mix Plus - Ever want to customize how your Firefox tabs behave? Ever had 20 tabs open when your computer crashed, losing hours of research? Ever accidentally close a tab? Tab Mix Plus fixes all that and more.
• Web Developer - Developing a web page can be complicated business, especially when CSS or large table-based layouts are involved.  Web Developer provides countless tools to make that process easier. It is one of the most popular Firefox extensions for good reason.

We’ve now been deployed for a little over a month. Since my last post the ship visited two ports, though I didn’t actually do much off the ship in either port.

The first was Acajutla, El Salvador. Apparently, the whole region is one of the most dangerous in the world, so our visit was limited to a couple of hotels in Acajutla and a mall in San Salvador. I decided to stay on the ship for this visit, as neither of those options interested me. I prefer to see the real side of a city, not the tourist traps.

Our visit to Golfito, Costa Rica was what we call a ‘Brief Stop for Fuel’ (BSF). Basically, we pulled in one day, refueled, and pulled out the next morning. Due to the shortness of our visit, we were unable to leave the pier, but what we could see was beautiful. It was raw jungle, deep enough to completely hide the little town next to the port from our view. And to top it off, as we entered the port, we saw a complete rainbow - from end to end. Wow.

In between ports, we caught some drug runners, which was a nice fufillment of our actual mission out here. ABC News mentions the bust here.

It’s been a busy month, with plenty to do most every day. I can’t say I’ve had a great time, but I’ve had a passable time, and I’m starting to get used to it. The most important thing I’ve found as I’ve gone along, though, is my daily prayer and scripture study. I can’t do this without the Lord’s help.

The last week has included two interesting events - a port visit to Cartagena, Colombia, and passing through the Panama Canal. Cartagena was an interesting visit in that the two days I went into town were completely different. The first day I went with a couple of other guys, one of whom is from Cuba, so he worked as a translator for us. I could understand quite a bit of what they were saying from my high school Spanish and my Portuguese from my mission to Brazil, but it was nice to have him around. That day we went to a section of Cartagena called the Old Town. It is basically a little city with some preserved buildings and monuments. Though I tend to enjoy visiting historic places, I wasn’t a big fan of the Old Town for two main reasons. First, the streets in the Old Town are full of people, all wanting to sell you the same things and give you a tour. You end up saying ‘No thanks’ about once every two minutes to someone or other approaching you and trying to sell you something. It got aggravating very quickly. The second reason is our meal there at a little restaurant recommended by our ‘tour guide’. They gave us menus made up specially for tourists, meaning the prices were about three times what the locals were paying. And the food wasn’t even that great. I didn’t say anything, as I didn’t want to make a fuss, but I was not happy about getting ripped off that blatantly.

The next day in Cartagena was much better. I went out with two other guys, neither of whom could speak Spanish, making me the sole translator for the group. That day we visited the new city of Cartagena, which was much more like I would have expected from a South American City. The people were nice there, and though there were street vendors, they weren’t nearly so persistant and irritating as those from the previous day. The city, in many ways, reminded me of the two years I spent in Sao Paulo, Brazil as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The smells were similar, the methods of construction were the same (red hollow bricks on concrete), and the people were very similar. They even sold ham and cheese croissants in the local panaderia, or bakery, which by the way is one of my favorite places to visit in Latin and South America. I ate several pastries while in the new town and loved every one of them. Mmmm, mmmm, good!

A couple of days ago we passed through the Panama Canal, which was an interesting event. They use a series of locks to raise or lower the ship a little bit at a time until you arrive at the other side. The ground isn’t that far away from you on either side as you go through, and we’re a fairly small ship compared to some of the vessels that pass through the Canal. I took a few pictures, which I’ll post as soon as I get enough bandwidth to do so. Until then, click here to see a small photo of us going through that taken from a webcam overlooking the canal.