Saturday, May 23 2009 @ 05:17 AM CDT Views: 295
Made it back to Germany yesterday, finally! They put me in the Charlie Company barracks since Alpha's barracks are so much smaller than all the other buildings, Southard is over there too but I'm not sure which room. 90 day loss, hurray! Started reintegration today, got through it first, even before HHC, don't ask me how I wasn't trying. Want to get my car BAD and go eat at Poseidon's (a greek restaurant) with the guys. USAA screwed me over though, paid for my insurance on the 28th of April and they still haven't posted my documents. Have to wait a couple hours for the international agents to come in so I can call and bug them and hopefully get it today, otherwise it'll probably be Monday. Signed up for internet access almost first thing, supposed to send somebody out on the 5th but I'm hoping it's already hooked up and I can just plug in and go. Unfortunately the power supply to my DSL modem hasn't arrived in the mail yet, why didn't I pack it in the same box as the modem?
Saturday, May 16 2009 @ 03:58 AM CDT Views: 322
Well we're on our way back, some of us anyway. I'm on leg 2 of about 7, so still have a ways to go. This has been a very boring and stressful deployment and I'm glad it's over. That may seem like a contradiction but those of us out here with me will totally understand what I mean.
Thursday, March 05 2009 @ 05:49 PM CST Views: 368
Well tomorrow morning I head out, back to Iraq. I've done a lot this leave, helped clean out Aunt Diane's apartment after she passed away and went the funeral. Went to both Aunt June's and Uncle Mark's for dinner. Went down to Tucson twice to spend time with my Dad and hang out with him at work. Went to Amanda and Noah's the first trip and Kim's the second. Saw my Grandfather twice, and went to my old work site to see the crew. Uploaded about 4,800
Pictures from the deployment to Smugmug. Cleaned up and threw out a lot of my old stuff at Mom's. Spent a lot of time on
Yahoo talking to people. Reread
Hyperion
by
Dan Simmons and the two
Succession (The Risen Empire & The Killing of Worlds)
books by
Scott Westerfeld all excellent Hard Sci-Fi books.
I'm not really looking forward to going back. The trip itself is long and painful, and I'm tired of the Army. We've moved as well, so I'll be going back to a new place and hopefully all my stuff survived (I did pack it before I left). Hopefully we'll be redeploying soon, although that's another huge nightmare. 6 more months to go!
Saturday, February 14 2009 @ 10:25 PM CST Views: 448
I'm at the
Shannon Airport in Ireland right now, using their free WiFi while going home for R&R leave. The whole process has been a typical and horrible Army adventure. In the end if all goes as planned it will have taken me 5 days to get from the JSS to home. Of course in the Army it's not optional and everybody has to take R&R leave.
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Comments (1) Most Recent Post: 02/14 10:44PM by peter.j.poole
Saturday, October 18 2008 @ 09:28 AM CDT Views: 531
I've upgraded to 5x1.5tb (1.36TiB) hard drives and now have ~5.4TiB of useable space! My old array was getting full and only had about 170GiB free now I have 3.7TiB free, that should last me a while. I also took the time to upgrade to b100 of OpenSolaris, and had to switch to the AHCI disk driver since it wasn't recognizing my disks with the legacy driver. In order to get the ahci driver loaded, I had to run the following command. I've been BFU'ing for a long time and somewhere along the way it never executed this command, which normally gets executed by the postinstall script of the SUNWahci package.
add_drv -i '"pciclass,010601"' -m '* 0644 root sys' -c scsi-self-identifying ahci
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
tank 6.81T 2.02T 4.79T 29% ONLINE -
Saturday, October 18 2008 @ 09:08 AM CDT Views: 469
We've moved, not far but to a bigger FOB. The DFAC here rocks but there's too many people. Have Internet access (150kbps) in my room which is awesome although slow. It rained a little today for the first time (well, more than a couple drops anyway).
Sunday, September 28 2008 @ 10:02 AM CDT Views: 551
I run OpenSolaris on my personal file server, with 5x500gb hard drives it gives me ~2TiB of useful, reliable, fast space. Since my web host gives me tons of bandwidth I'm hosting the 0811-98 image from
Genunix here. Be sure to check the
md5sum from
Genunix to verify.
Download:
osol-0811-98.iso
Monday, August 25 2008 @ 10:27 AM CDT Views: 483
First time I've been able to blog since we got back from our mission. Three weeks in the shittiest corners of Iraq in the hottest time of the year. I can't go into details of the mission, but nobody I know got hurt and we're all happy to be back at the patrol base.
Tuesday, July 01 2008 @ 08:01 AM CDT Views: 1,045
Went to the E-5 (Sergeant) Board today. I got recommended but it was pretty rough. It was like a garrison board, there were no situational questions just book stuff. I've got enough points so I should get promoted August 1st.
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Comments (1) Most Recent Post: 08/13 12:48PM by peter.j.poole
Sunday, May 25 2008 @ 09:08 AM CDT Views: 567
I've been in Iraq for a few weeks now, but this is the first time I've gotten my computer on the net so I figured I'd blog about it. We're living in a pretty nice place and the area doesn't have much insurgent activity although the surrounding areas do. Working on getting commercial satellite access with about 20 of the guys so we can get on the net from our rooms, but that'll probably be a few weeks out. I've got to figure out how to wire up a LAN first, and it's a pretty big space for plain old ethernet and a low budget. Wireless is too expensive at the distances involved, buying all those antennas adds up, so I may try a cantenna. Wired is looking like the biggest possibility right now, I'm not sure how it'll handle a single subnet with switches when most of the long links are 100m, so I may have to route and wind up with a couple of subnets. I'll give more details on the network layout later for those who are interested.
Tuesday, April 15 2008 @ 02:16 AM CDT Views: 542
I'm in Kuwait right now, waiting to go to Iraq. It's hot during the day but not scorching, and the nights are cool. We've been working really long hours and everybody wants to get to Iraq and stop messing around here. The internet access here is really slow but it's being uncharacteristically fast right now so I'm taking advantage of it.
Sunday, April 06 2008 @ 04:47 PM CDT Views: 1,105
The formula for calculating Kinetic Energy is 1/2m * v^2 where m is mass in kg and v is velocity in meters per second.
The M829A2 120mm APFSDS-T (armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot-tracer) round's penetrator weighs around 4.9kg and has a muzzle velocity of 1680m/s. That comes to about 6.9 megajoules.
The M829A3 has a heavier penetrator (the net doesn't know but I'll ask one of our Mike Golf's) and a muzzle velocity of 1555m/s. KE yet to be determined.
More interesting data quoted from
http://www.frfrogspad.com/power.htm:
Lets see now -- KE (ft lbs) = (W * Vē) / 450436. That gives us (65,870 * 5480 * 5480) / 450436 which boils down to (hold on to your hats!) 4,391,500 foot pounds (that's right 4.3 MILLION ft lbs). Sectional Density = W (in pounds)/Dē. That gives us 9.41 / .6 * .6 which equals 8.4. (That's eight point four--and you thought your 220gr .30 cal bullet had high sectional density at .343 (that's "point" 343.) The newer M829A2 round throws a 10.85 pound , .8" dart at 5512 f/s. I'll leave it to you to figure out the details.
As an interesting side note, when fired at 55 degree elevation, it will travel 113,111 meters (123,630 yards or roughly 70 miles) and reach a height of 44,073 meters (48,171 yards or almost 27 miles). You are NOT safe if someone aims one of these at you. The accuracy of the dart is sub-MOA and the stated effective range is about 3000 meters (3270 yards). However, first round killing hits have been obtained out to about 6000 meters (6540 yards).
Sharp-eyed readers may note the 55 degree elevation for the maximum rage of this projectile. While spin stabilized cylindrical projectiles reach their maximum range in air at angles of between 25 and 35 degrees (45 degrees in a vacuum) the "dart is fin stabilized and not spun (the 120 mm gun is a smooth bore) and this gives it its maximum range at 55 degrees elevation--the fins keeping it point first through out its trajectory and providing some lift.
Sunday, April 06 2008 @ 04:29 PM CDT Views: 566
Just finished watching
Cloverfield, probably the best movie I've seen in a long time. I thought the shaky cam would be really annoying, but it wasn't that bad actually (although on a big screen it would probably be vomit inducing). The characters were totally believable and most of the effects were perfectly done. I would have liked to see more of the Army, and you can't tell me a sabot round wouldn't put some hurt on that thing. I'm going to look up the amount of energy delivered by a 120mm APFSDS round now I think...
Friday, March 21 2008 @ 04:21 PM CDT Views: 498
I'm typing this from Philip Lapple's Wife's Father's House in Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg is about 600km from Baumholder, and is a pretty interesting place so far. I forgot my camera, which I can't believe. Lapple and Natalie are staying at her grandmother's house and me and Tom (Block) are stayinig here. It was nice of him to let us stay here. Tom and I are watching stupid videos on the net in his kitchen right now, and my battery is runing low so I'm about to take off.
Update: Visited the Reeperbahn tonight, it was interesting but that's not really my thing. I've eaten so much this weekend it's ridiculous, most of the food has been really good though.
Monday, March 17 2008 @ 10:14 AM CDT Views: 442
Got a big surprise today, SPC John Yokeley showed up. He used to be in A 1-35 but PCSed a while back to Schofield Barracks. Apparently it sucks there even worse than here. He's on R&R leave right now and decided to come here instead of visiting home. He'll leave about the same time we do, in another 2-3 weeks.
