Bryan Strawser

For the first time, during the flight home from St. Croix to Boston, I heard President George W. Bush’s speech at the National Cathedral a few days after September 11th.

I had never heard this speech - I was working that day and never got a chance to hear it. I may have read it in the days following, but I certainly never saw it on television or on the radio.

It’s fantastic speech - and one that I deeply regret missing at the time.

I have been thinking about September 11th the last few days - just finished reading American Ground about the deconstruction of the World Trade Center between September 11th and May of the following year. It’s a great read that looks at the emotional anguish of the firemen and police - and others - as well as the technical and leadership challenges involves in cleaning up after an incident of that magnitude.

As the sky darkens as this plane races north, my thoughts float back to what we experienced - and how I felt - how we all felt..

I remember. Do you?

Some things that I’d like to blog about in the coming days and weeks ahead:

• D-Day
• WW2 Memorial
• Long Vacations
• Traveling Soldier - Dixie Chicks
• Brevity
• Great Speeches
• Gadgets in my Bag
• Golf Equipment
• VDH
• Master and Commander
• Plane Crash
• Great Scenes from St. Croix
• Rumsfeld - Prisons & Accountability
• A Book on WW I

I’d write about some of these things now the damn seats in this Airbus 300 are so tight together - and the jackass in front of me has lowered his seat so low - I can’t expand my screen any further than it is right now. Grrr. Frustrating.

Sgt. Hook writes today about demonstrating courage with one of his peers with the 25th Infantry Division in Afghanistan, where they are presently deployed:

When I arrived at the hangar I found 1SG Richard supervising the moving of a mobile containerized office commonly called a SPAM. He saw me coming.

“Hey Hook, how’s it going?” he said walking towards me. 1SG Richard stands about a foot and a half taller than me, which adds to his ego as he’s always looking down to talk.

Stopping just a few inches from him, I turned and leaned against a workbench, he followed suit. Looking straight ahead I spoke first. “What the hell is going on down here Dick?” I asked using his first name for the first time.

“I had your guys move their stuff out of the way Hook, we got word that the engineers are going to pour some concrete here,” he feebly replied.

“Let me get something straight with you Dick, if you ever tell my Soldiers to do something without my prior knowledge I will take you out,” I said as calmly as I could.

Cutting him off with a raised hand but still not looking at him, “understand this Dick, my Soldiers are here to fly and maintain these aircraft and they’ve done a damned good job of it for the past six weeks and I will not allow somebody else to interrupt that mission, engineer project or not.”

“There is a right way to do things and a wrong way Dick. Make a note; we do things the right way around here Dick. I don’t give a rat’s ass about an engineering project that does not include my unit’s input or address our needs. There are combat units around this country that are depending on these aircraft and I’ll be gottdamned if you or anyone else is going to screw that up!”

Finally looking at him I asked, “understood?”

He immediately apologized and started kissing my ass, but I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted the line in the sand drawn and I think he saw that.

I turned to walk away and said over my shoulder, “I’ll see you later Dick.” A group of my Soldiers watched in amazement as I left the hangar and walked back up the hill.

The Army’s Creed of the Noncommissioned Officer states that my two greatest responsibilities are the accomplishment of my mission and the welfare of my Soldiers. My mission is the welfare of my Soldiers and I think I accomplished it that day. We haven’t had anything but the utmost of cooperation out of Dick since.

I will be sending his story to my team at the real job when I return from vacation tonight - it’s a great example of challenging and “self-policing” amongst a peer group.

As Sgt. Hook says, this we’ll defend.

Christensted, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands: 84 Degrees, partly cloudy, 9 knot winds.

Taunton, Massachusetts, USA: 47 Degrees, cloudy, 6 knot winds.

*sigh*

It appears that I already have updates to my “essentials” list below.

I’m now using Mozilla’s Firefox as my web browser - this appears to be a good workaround to the memory issues that I was having before with Safari - and I was able to import my bookmarks, so we’ll see how well this works.

I’ve also switched from Microsoft Entourage over to Apple’s Mail.app - with SpamSieve continuing as my mail filter for Spam. Hopefully this will do the trick.

I’ll post an update in a week or so.

Ahhhhhhh…..

Not that interesting, but I’ve updated the “about me” page.

Update: This post is now out of date. The current version is here.

Mark Pilgrim has inspired me with a great post about the essential software that he uses day to day, so here’s my breakdown of the same:

1. Text Editing: BBEdit. While it’s not cross platform, I’ve not found anything that worked as well for me as BBEdit - runs on top of Mac OS X. Handles PHP, HTML, and CSS flawlessly, has remote capabilities, and does alot of other things like slice my bread and make fresh cheese for me.
2. Web Browsing: Apple’s Safari - I’ve been using it since some of the early beta versions. Includes tabbed browsing, which I now find that I can’t live without. Syncs bookmarks between the laptop and the desktop. Exceptionally fast. I will be testing Mozilla Firefox shortly though since it is getting great reviews. One annoying bug: why does it keep locking up on me from time to time in some applications? Ack!
3. E-Mail: Microsoft Entourage. I’m not sure that I am going to continue using this since it doesn’t do everything that I need and Apple’s Mail.app seems to be catching up with functionality. Nothing that I am doing is tied directly to Entourage, so it’s likely I’ll be switching. Is there a Mail.app to Entourage tool?
4. Remote Connections: SSH - is there any other tool? I think not. My servers allow access only via SSH. I have SSH setup to allow access into my home network from the outside - and no other path. I use SSH to tunnel POP, SMTP, and other tools across the internet. There’s no other way to do this the way that I want…
5. PDA: Compaq iPaq 3850 - it’s nearly three years old now but does everything that I need. I’ve added Pocket Explorer and PhatNotes to the default applications and don’t need any others. I’d get a newer laptop but my employer still doesn’t support USB, so I can’t upgrade. Besides, I like what I have.
6. Backup and Mirroring:rsync. I backup my servers to a Dell NAS on my local network. It also does MySQL replication. It’s a great tool.
7. Web Server: Apache - usually with PHP and MySQL added on - as well as a few other goodies. There’s nothing else as robust or as simple to use.
8. Server Operating System: Debian - a linux system with outstanding package support. It’s the only server OS that I use. Automatic upgrades, great security services, outstanding documentation.
9. Desktop Operating System: Mac OS X - running this now on a laptop and a desktop. Allows me to work on sites and other code locally without any special add ons. Applications exist for almost everything that I need to do. Disappointed by the lack of support by some vendors for their products on this OS, but I’m confident that they’ll come around eventually!
10. Instant Messanging: Proteus from Indigofield. Simple shareware that supports MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and ICQ all in one package with pretty icons and other notification options.
11. IRC: ircle - I’m not often in IRC outside of tech conferences and the like - but when I am, I use this highly popular IRC tool. I’m also known to use BitchX from the command line - it takes me back to my hacker days.
12. Weblog Publishing Tools: Movable Type - currently using v2.65, but will be switching to v3.0 as its released. A set of custom templates and a CSS based layout. I also use ecto for remote publishing and other weblog management tasks.
13. News Aggregator: NetNewsWire from Ranchero Software. A Mac OS X based newsreader with support for all feed types and soon will sync news feeds across machines, which will be simply awesome for my desktop when I’m at home.
14. Scripting Language: PHP - it’s the only scripting language that I code in - though alot of my server applications use Perl.

Those are the key applications that I use at home and with my own computers - I’ll skip talking about my real job and the applications that we’re required to use there - but they’re mostly from Microsoft….