BTW, CBS has the majority of the embedded reporters and should provide the most up2date news.

We have begun. It was pretty interesting yesterday when everyone was getting staged to go in. Last night, we took out an 8-building apartment complex and secured a hospital. Back here on base, all you can hear is the sound of artillery pounding away, all night and all day. There hasn't really been any incoming. I think the insurgents are being kept pretty busy elsewhere. The next 14 days will be pretty darn interesting.

Today's a tight-lipped day. All comm is shut down, and that's all I have to say about that. However, I can point you to some publicy available information that has been around for quite a while.

• globalsecurity.org
• Camp Baharia is where I stay.
• I have a good many friends staying at Junction City

I can't say too much of what's going on out here, but I guess if you read the
news, you can extrapolate what is going to happen very, very, soon. It's really wild to be part of a new-making organization. Imagine reading about things that happen just outside your door on the news the next day, knowing that people are hearing about it on the tv as well. When a jet breaks the sound barrier and shakes my house, I can read about air strikes on fallujah the next morning. Weird, wild stuff there. As an update, still no serious injuries for the PA marines (at least at my position). Some have taken fire in different places, IEDs, RPGs, and the like, but God is still watching over and keeping them out of harm's way. Thanks again to everyone for their prayers and support. Please keep it up, especially in the upcoming week.

---

On a side note, I am becoming very pleased with Gmail's conversation view. I can have 11 emails revolving around one thread, and it only takes up on line in my inbox. Clicking on the message allows me to read all messages centered around that conversation. Mail clients have supported thread view for years, but this is the first time I've seen it work in a predictable fashion. Very nice, and very conveinent. Thanks Google. Also, if anyone wants a gmail account, I have 5 invites to use up. Drop me a line.

Patron signs in. 21 is the next open computer, already written in next to his name. So I say:
Me: You can get on 21.
Him: (confused look) what?
M: You can get on 21.
H: Er no, it was already there...
M: You can get on 21.
H: I just signed up.
M: You can get on 21.
H: Oh. Ok. Thanks.
M: No problem.

Tell me again why I shouldn't mock these people?

Not a whole lot going on as of late. Things have been pretty slow at the cafe, but we have been bring some serious force to bear down on the insurgents of Fallujah. They've been retaliating with mortars out by my location, but so far they've done nothing more than stir up the fish. They were at it again before 5 this morning in fact. These people have no consideration for those that may be sleeping. I'll guess we'll just send some of the boys around to rough 'em up a little.
During the slow time, I went outside and fixed up some things around the place. Some of our camie netting was falling over, so I fixed that up in a more permanent fashion (driving stakes into a brick wall was interesting). After that, I was standing around with my hatchet looking for something to do, so I decided to go ahead and do something about the dilapidated cardboard box that has been serving as our bike's basket for over a month now. So I went to our wood scrappile and busted apart an old pallet, pulled nails out, cut boards here and there with the hatchet or brute force (as the situation dictated), and began assembling a new basket.

Before I got too far, I realized that I would only have enough useable wood for the base and 3 sides of a 4-sided box. So I thought about it a bit and made the 3-sided box.... big enough to hold the cardboard box. So now, I have the wooden box bungee-corded to our bike somewhat (but not quite) permanetly, and the cardboard box can be taken in and out of the wooden box. One bonus I wasn't planning on is the fact that the plywood on the wooden box sort naturally curls inwards, sort of gripping the cardboard box inside.

Now, if only I can get Cpl. Obringer to draw a new flower on the front of this new, improved, bicycle basket (not available in stores)>

Well, it's been a while since my last update, so here goes. We have had all sorts of connectivity problems here. A crossover cable went bad (intermittenly bad), shutting down internet access. On the phone side, our modem went bad (slowly degrading over time), and then, we got hit by a virus on the computer side and segovia shut us off. These things happen I suppose, but when it all goes on within a weeks time, it tends to be very fustrating. Since then, I've replaced the crossover cable, removed the defective modem (awaiting replacement), and re-partitioned/ghosted all of the computers to have very limited security policies and antivirus installed. Now, internet is back up and as soon as the modem gets here, we'll have phones again.

On another note, I am actively recommending the mp3 player "billy" as a replacement for winamp on windows systems. It is very lightweight (less than 1mb in size), and can read in huge playlists of songs in a split second, and has an easy to learn interface. Basically, I was getting sick of how winamp bogs down when I put in a cd with over 600 songs in it. I tried ultraplayer with even worse results. Upon reading in the filelist from the cd, it crashes about 300 times with visualbasic errors. Media Player never likes mp3s with compressed idv3 tags, and has a bad enough time reading 622 songs as it is. But then, I found billy. Billy installs and runs as a green diamond in your taskbar. You open it up, choose the menu item "add folder" and select the cd drive and in a split second, your list is there. Then, I usually shuffle the list and hit play. No sweat. Granted this program doesn't have the best playlist editor. Granted, it doesn't read in idv3 tags, but that doesn't seem to bother too many people.
On another note, I wasn't too impressed with natty, the email checker. It may just be my system, but when I click on "add" it freezes and blinks on me.

OIF II pictures are uploaded! Check them out!

Well, I have finally fixed the photo album so that I may upload new pictures. Then, after fixing it, I dedided to go ahead and upgrade from 1.2.1-p1 to 1.4.4-pl2. It has a lot new features (that I may never need), but it changed some of my template files, so the colors are all different now, plus you don't get the links at the top. It seems to have the ability to have headers and embedd itself into webapps, so I may be able to get this fixed in a different way then before. For those of you who use rss readers, there is an rss link you can use on the bottom of each page of the gallery. This is in-line with my goal of making sqbnet xml based with an rss feed. For those of you who have no clue what xml, rss, and headers are, don't worry. The pictures are all there, and stay tuned for more pictures coming soon!

I just got news (well, a day or two ago) that a former co-worker and good friend fell ill while on vacation. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with Leukemia. A day later, he went into a coma. Within a day or two, he was taken off of life support and died. The whole thing from feeling sick to death took place within a few days. Mark Strozzi, you will be missed.