Category: Deployment

As luck would have it, shortly after I made my last post the Internet connection here took a nosedive. As of right now, I have no idea when, or even if, it will come back up. This is, quite understandable, putting a dapper on my Bugzilla Guide type work (I can’t check my email, look at the Bugzilla patch queues or even the Bugs, etc.). It’s also quite inconvenient for my Star Wars Galaxies playing. My in game time had been dwindling anyway because of the the stuff I was doing to get set up for editing the guide, but right now I think I’m risking loosing an awful lot of in game stuff (if maintenance isn’t paid, structures go boom). I’ll try and post something here when I have more information, but that’s all I got for now.

Once again, I bid you hello from Iraq where I’ll be for a yet to be determined amount of time. When I originally left, the plan was for a one year deployment. In the Army’s book, this “deployment” time includes things such as training (I spent 1 1/2 months at Fort Dix, NJ), redeployment (the Army term for going home), demobilization and terminal leave. Those last three things take about 2 months to do (redeployment and demob take about a month and terminal leave is simply leave paid at the end of deployment that wasn’t used during the deployment). That means that in order for all the paperwork to be completed on time you have to leave the area of operations about 2 months before the end of your deployed time. Being that my deployed time according to my orders ends in early January, that means I’d have had to leave here in early November. Well, that didn’t happen. Half our company did leave and they’ll be home really soon. Those of us that stayed behind will have to be issued extension orders as there is no way at this point to be done with all the post-deployment stuff before our current orders expire. I’ve heard rumors that those orders have been issued, though I haven’t seen them with my own eyes.

In other news, I was gonna give a shot at downloading the Bugzilla Documentation from CVS onto my laptop today (maybe I’ll get some time to look at it… no promises) when I noticed that cvs.mozilla.org now requires ssh in order to access it. I’m sure it’s a good thing, but being that I didn’t get the message when it was sent out in May (didn’t look at that mailbox) I never sent in a public key. Ah well, I sent it this morning so it should be activated soon.

Obviously I haven’t posted to this blog for quite some time… well, at least it’s obvious to me. There probably weren’t any readers regular enough to realize it other than the author.

Anyway, I’m in Iraq now (as you can tell by the title). I’m stationed at a prison facility about 10 miles or so west of Baghdad. This facility, Abu Ghraib, has quite a reputation amoung the locals. It’s a place where Sadam tortured and excuted many of his political enemies and such. At least that’s what I hear and what I’ve read on the ‘net. We, being the Americans, reopened this facility as a EPW/Civilian Detainee camp though some of it still operates as an Iraqi prison. I’m sure anybody familiar with this type of operation knows that there’s not a whole lot of details I can give, but there are websites/news articles out there with some acurate information… though there’s also some out there with inaccurate information. Good luck trying to tell between the two :).

I’ve been in this little paradise since the morning of 28-Feb. For the first two weeks or so the entire company stayed in one big room, the MWR room. Once the company that we were relieving left, we were able to move into the cells they had been occupying. That’s right, I currently live in a jail cell. It’s actually fairly spacious… I can only imagine how many people were in here when this was being used as a prison, but right now there’s three of us. We’ve been able to get some wood and nails so I built myself a bed and a desk. Back home it wouldn’t really be much of anything, but here it’s near luxury. Sometime in the near future I want to post some pictures of various things, my bed will be one of them.

Well, I think that’s all I’m going to type for now. My intention is to semi-regularly post information to this site… I guess time will tell how well I do in that department. At this time I have no intention of changing the times I post to be local time here, just be aware that it’s not really 1:30am it’s 9:30am (I’m 8 hrs ahead of Eastern Time).

Not that I was updating this blog regularly any more anyway, but it will be even less frequently now (probably) that I’m getting deployed. As of right now I don’t now for sure where I’m going, but Iraq seems a strong possibility :). Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to post here when I’m over there, but quite possibly I won’t. So I’ll type at y’all later.