A Geek’s Think

Last night I had the pleasure of heading over to the Jacksonville downtown area and attending a wonderful concert by the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it - I’d forgotten how much I love the symphony. It brought back memories from my own band days in high school. Yes, I was a band geek, and proud of it! It was also fun to watch a bunch of elderly blind men jumping around, singing, and having a great old time. And by elderly, Jimmy Carter, the lead vocalist, has been with the group since its early days in the 1940’s! I hope I have half their energy when I’m their age!

I arrived in town a bit early to avoid the traffic for the Rascal Flatts concert and Monster Truck Jam also going on and decided to walk around town a little. Jacksonville’s a nice little city: check out some photos I took during my wandering.

Well, I’m home at last - in more senses than one! Admittedly, I’ve been home from my Navy deployment since late December and have seen many of you since then, but that’s not the complete story. I’ve also more recently moved off the ship into my own apartment, which is a really, really nice thing. I can’t describe the joy of moving away from a ship where I lived with 70 other people in the same room and could not easily escape from work or find a place of my own. And thus I gladly say that I am writing this post from my apartment and will be sleeping on my very own and very comfortable bed.

Now on to the deployment. We left Florida’s Naval Station Mayport July 24th 2007 and returned home December 21st, having visited (at least briefly) Key West, Columbia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Panama (multiple times). We caught two major drug shipments, each of which was the second of its kind in naval history and whose combined value was in the hundreds of millions. I left as an Electronics Technician Third Class (paygrade E-4), and was known as ET3 Strickland. I returned ET2(SW) Strickland, meaning I both advanced one paygrade and completed a major qualification known as Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist (ESWS). I experienced extreme tiredness and seasickness; I was also able to visit some great countries, read some great books, and save a good deal of money.

It was a long deployment, and I can’t say I particularly enjoyed being away from home and out to sea for that long - but then again, I think most of the sailors on my ship would say the same thing. But we made it through and we’re home, and I’m enjoying it while it lasts. We’ll deploy again before too long, but that’s the Navy way.

Click here to see some pictures taken during the deployment, and feel free to email me if you want more information about any of them. I’d like to say I’ll eventually put descriptions with each photo, but that probably won’t happen. So enjoy the pictures and imagine some elaborate plot to go with them.

This article describes our first drug bust involving a semi-submersible craft full of cocaine.

This article in the Mayport Mirror describes our deployment and mentions our second major bust where we discovered liquid cocaine being transported by a shipping vessel.

It’s great to be home!

I’ve been meaning to sit down for the past month and write about my deployment and how nice it is to be back, and I’ll still get to that eventually, but a piece of news I received this morning has prompted me to post about it instead. President Gordon B. Hinckley, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the past twelve years, passed away last night at the age of 97.

President Hinckley led the Church during the most formative years of my life, as I grew from an adolescent into a man. His constant love, his endless energy, and his humble yet powerful testimony of the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ were and always will be a shining example for my life. I remember once, while attending a General Conference of the Church in Salt Lake City, seeing him playfully tap a security guard on the head with his cane. It struck me then how great a man this is, who leads the Lord’s Church on earth with such love and kindness as to reach out and brighten the day of a tired security guard. I will truly miss President Gordon Bitner Hinckley, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator.

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.