A steadfast heart is a powerful weapon...

They called me on the 18th to say I'd been selected to participate in an extended exercise and would be away from home for long enough that it only makes sense to cancel my lease and put stuff in storage.

Not sure exactly where I'm going or what I'll be doing, but I've made my mind up to do the job right no matter how long it takes.

On the bright side, at least I'll be in civil temperatures once again.

I'm supposed to get certified for a leader position tomorrow. This will be the third time I have been scheduled to certify, the previous two were canceled because the people who test us didn't have their stuff together. Guess what, they test is computer based and I was told that the system it's on may be down. Strike three, who's out?

Me that's who.

Without these certs I have nothing to put on an evaluation and it looks like I have been here for six months (I will have by the time evals are due) and have managed to avoid actually doing any real work.

O well, I guess it's out of my hands, but I still feel frustrated that I can't just get this stupid thing done and put behind me.

My first niece, Lelia, on the way home from the Hospital!

Also, I have a new toy. The Oculus

Well, my internet is back...

After an Ice Storm earlier last month, my internet has been intermittent at best. Not just my internet, but internet for everyone around me. I'd call in and they'd do all sorts of stuff to test why my computer wasn't connecting, as one tech put it, "to see what I'd done to make it stop working".
I, of course, would fall back on the old, "how does something I did to make it stop working affect my friend in a different building, because it always starts and stops for all of us at the same time." The techs on the phone aren't really technically savy, they just read scripts, so of course they would just smile at me and claim it was my personal router that was causing the issue. At the same time, a different tech would be telling my neighbor the exact same thing about her own wireless router.

Long story short, I called again on Tuesday and a tech proceeded to claim that he could see my modem and computer perfectly, that the modem was working fine and it had to be my router because I swore it was attached but he couldn't find it on my network. I told him I had a telecommunications engineering degree and had been in the field since he was in grade school and that I'd been spoofing mac addresses since you could set them with physical switches on the network cards. I assured him it was my router he was seeing and not my computer, and that in any case it was absolutely insulting to believe that my router was responsible for denial of service to hundreds of customers. I finally snapped and, without cursing, told the tech in no uncertain terms that my neighbors and I were going to make their lives utter hell until they actually dispatched people to look at their half of the network because it had come to a point where it was down more than up.

The next day an actual technician called me and inside of twenty seconds actually came to the conclusion that it was their side of the network and not mine. UREAKA! He made an appointment to come out and when they did discovered that my whole complex was riddled with repeaters sending a bad signal...

I'm glad it's fixed, I just wish it hadn't taken so long.