Aviation Ball Photos--Some Really Great People I Served With

Tim Blosser and his friend Jen.  Tim and I deployed to Iraq in 2009-10. 

He makes as many bad jokes as I do.

Pilots and commanders from the deployment in 2009-10 and after.

Four really great soldiers.

Delta Company's long-time first sergeant Gary Williard and his wife.

The McCrackens, Melanie and Mike, maintenance leaders in Delta.

Darren "Doc" Dreher and his wife Kate.  More deployments as a 

Blackhawk pilot than I can remember.  Great guy.  We argued politics through the 

whole deployment. I am his favorite Liberal. 

Mr. Smith and his wife.  Dry sense of humor.

Real aviation expert.

Adding Army Information to Wikipedia

Yesterday I went to a monthly open workshop on how to contribute to Wikipedia.  The organizer of the workshop is Mary Mark Ockerbloom, the Wikipedian-In-Residence at Chemical Heritage Foundation, the place where I used to work.

This month, with Mary's help, I contributed to three Army-related pages.  My first question was whether I could add all the information I compiled in spreadsheet about all the tanks in service around the world.  I got the info from a Wikipedia page, my spreadsheet just made it possible to sort it and get totals.  As it turns out, it is not possible to add spreadsheets to a Wikipedia page, but I could add a one-paragraph summary of the data with a link to my blog post offering the spreadsheet to anyone who wants it.

And I did just that.  Here's the page listing all of the main battle tanks by country.  Scroll to the end of table and just after tanks in the Army of Zimbabwe is the paragraph summary I added.

By the way, I just love the data on that page.  Particularly that Mali has just one tank, a 50-year-old Soviet-built T-55 tank.  Imagine the pressure on the guy in charge of that one tank.

Mary also helped me to add the video I did comparing C-Rations and MREs to the Wikipedia pages on C-Rations and MREs.

I'll be going back next month to learn more about adding photos to the Wiki Commons.