Defiantone.com

Gone is the angry red and back is the calm and serene blue color scheme. I’m almost out of here and I was growing tired of the red scheme - so, I edited one of my photos for a new header and BAM! there it is.

Hope you like it.

(if you can’t see it hit refresh)

To save you some of your valuable time I’ll paraphrase - I’m incredibly bored. The rest of this post will consist solely of me griping about it. Ok, get on your bike and go on your way.

I rely on work to make me feel happy. When we have weather that keeps the planes grounded, as we have the last few days, there is little work to keep me occupied. As a result, I am no longer a happy camper. On a normal day people see me as a grumpy, cynical, curmudgeon. On a day that is filled with work they see me as a cynical wise ass. Last night I spent a few hours re-parking trailers - oh the joys! Most people have not had the opportunity of backing a trailer and if they do score a chance it probably does not have any steering system (campers, semi trailers etc). These are incredibly easy to park - incredibly easy. I could park one right up your… fill in the blank. We fight a different beast because we park trailers with a front steering system - much like the wagon that was always hooked to the tractor when I was a kid. They are extremely heavy and often need to be parked in gravel - deep gravel. This can make the job quite interesting. If you don’t get enough speed you’re bound to get bogged down and all progress will stop. We used to have a 4 wheel drive tug but its been out of commission for a while so we’ve been stuck with the real wheel drive model - it doesn’t help me finish my quest. Moving trailers has been the highlight of my night. The rest of the time I sat around looking for something to do - I’m not in a reading mood and the internet has lost all of its luster.

If we were killing more terrorists/insurgents/whatever the pentagon calls them I would be much happier - solely because I would have something that would occupy my time. Writing this utterly pointless blog post gave me something to do for five minutes - and for that I am grateful. Unfortunately, my creativity is at a low at the moment so you’re only going to get a drawn out version of I’m bored

I hope that cured your boredom for 26 seconds - if not - welcome to the club

I’ve been reviewing some of my old posts and I noticed that I spend most of my time writing about things that cause me grief. So, I’m going to break off some of those onto a new blog called How I loathe thee

I do need some other bloggers so if you’ve got something that grinds your gears let me know and I’d be happy to share the space with you. Topic choice is up to the author and you are free to write pretty much whatever you wish. Feel free to check it out - I’ll be writing some stuff there on occasion.

I wrote about BlueCoat blocking blogs on the 24th - Wired Magazine did it on the 28th - their story was much better than mine - I just beat them to the punch.

They even did a follow up - check it out right here!

Read their article if mine was even remotely interesting - they did research - I just wrote what I knew. I guess thats why advertisers pay to put content on their site.

I live inside of a fenced and concrete walled compound. Blast walls and revetments surround every building on base. Sand bags can be found everywhere - they surround most of the buildings. Construction crews, scurrying around the base like ants, build new walls daily further fortifying the nearly impenetrable fortress. Larger buildings are fitted with a secondary roof to deflect the blast of an indirect round. Arrays of sensors scan the perimeter of the base for incoming rounds and intruders - nothing will get past our defensive nets.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only type of barrier that I deal with on a daily basis. I spend a few hours every day browsing the internet for the latest and greatest - well, everything. Downtime at work is inevitable - the unofficial Air Force motto is “Hurry up and wait.” At the moment, we are spending most of our time waiting for something to happen. When it does happen, we all jump at the chance to do some work. In fact, we often fight over who gets to do the work yes, we are that bored. I tend to stay in the news/science/technology vein but I do like to have a good laugh once in a while. Many of the most popular sites on the internet are available for me to browse at my free will - many other sites are blocked by a demon known as BlueCoat.

BlueCoat is a content firewall that classifies websites based upon perceived and real content. If the algorithm determines that a website contains profanity, the filter will label the website accordingly and block the domain from being accessed. The filter is designed to restrict content so that it falls within acceptable use guidelines for military networks and it also restricts content to preserve bandwidth. We are given the luxury of being able to surf the internet to improve morale - often we do not have this luxury.

My gripe with BlueCoat is that it does a crappy job of filtering - instead of using a M82 sniper rifle and popping the target square between the eyes the algorithm tends to grab an AK47 with a spray and pray method. The filter, from what I can ascertain, blocks all pages with the word “blog” in them. These pages are classified “personal” and are subject to being blocked. Instead of looking at the content of the website - the filter looks for one single word and instantly adds it to the ban list. My website is blocked and I am unable to access it from work - not a huge deal but it means I have to type this article, email it to myself, check my email at the cyber cafe, and post it there at a later point in time. Some websites - like the NY Times - use a sub domain “blog” for articles written by members of their journalistic staff that appear on a re-occurring basis. Other websites use the loosely defined definition of the word blog in their meta name (tags used to help a search engine better classify a website) and are banned from access.

The definition blog - Short for “Web log,” a specialized site that allows an individual or group of individuals to share a running log of events

They have a log of events - written by an individual or a group. So, we can have logs written by groups or individuals but we cannot call them blogs? We cannot view any website written by an individual that is not part of a corporation or larger entity?

I am at the mercy of a poorly written web filter - where is a good coder when you need him?

Hmm… I wonder if I can get a local cleric to issue a fatwa against it?

I’m currently modifying some code and images for a new theme for the website. Gone should be the dark background and light text and it should be replaced with something slightly more readable. I thought I had it correct but apparently I missed some code so its not going to go live yet - if you’ve been surfing in the last 20 minutes I’m sure you’ve seen some strange things.

When its available, let me know if you like it. I should have it live within the next 24 hours.

- I’ve had a little spare time on my hands.

You won’t see much of a content change, its just going to be the same crap in a shiny new wrapper.

broke my blog… didnt follow instructions… damn

edit: fixed it - I didn’t check all of the old plugins but the back-end works as advertised

I know that for the 2 readers of my blog you’ve been wondering where in the heck have I been for the last week or two? Well, I haven’t gone anywhere but I’ve been busy doing other things. If you didn’t catch the other post, I spent a week with my sister when she came out for a visit. We did some of the tourist type stuff but after that we ended up just sitting around my apartment and really just hanging out. Its been a long time since we’ve done that and it was really cool to get a chance to hang out with her for more than a day at a time. Her visit got me thinking about some of the other family members that I rarely see. Its a shame that I don’t have the time to get out and visit more of you but thats just a hazard of my job. Oh well, thats why they invented phones and email.

I’ve spent most of this week working at the Tyarget (Target). For the most part, its an extremely boring job where I get little to no job satisfaction. Once in a great while does something interesting happen (we catch someone stealing, a fight breaks out, etc) While I’m waiting for something to happen I get the wonderful opportunity to stare out the front door and wait wait wait. I really want them to transfer me to the Tacoma store as its only a few minutes away and I’m not looking forward to paying the $4.00 a gallon that gas is speculated to soon cost to drive all the way down to Lakewood. Its not that I don’t like the people there, I just don’t like the drive and what I do there. Wow, its much like the Air Force… I loath my daily job but the people keep me interested. One day I hope I’ll get approved for that holy grail of a job. Speaking of jobs, I’m off to part 1 of my physical today…. this should be interesting. I was originally scheduled to return from leave Friday to go see the doc but as I expected they called me and moved it a day forward. Luckily, I left one day open in my schedule to prepare for the inevitability of military scheduling… oh what a joy it is.

For those of you reading between the lines: yes, I’m dating a girl and she is great.

Thats all she wrote until later

I made a minor change to the template that you see and replaced the top image with one of my own. I’ll have to look through my files to see if I have a better one somewhere because I might replace it. If I can find the code I might make it a rotating picture set of pictures I’ve taken.

After a quick search I found a tool to import all of my old posts from blogger. When I’m talking about old posts I mean all of them… all 498 of them. Everything can now be searched and the whole thing is much easier for me to manage (not that you would notice). Well, thats all for tonight… off to sleep so I am well enough rested to face another day.