Marine Knows Twitter

Got a great lesson about twitter today from a Marine sergeant who does social media here at the Defense Information School (DINFOS).

He told us to use facebook to interact and use twitter to follow breaking news.  He gave us sites to follow and told us not to worry about hashtags, they are not necessary for searches.  We can just search twitter for subjects we care about.

He also showed us good things we can learn from Yelp and other social media sites. 

The class was two afternoons and covered all of social media.  There were no tests, no lesson plan and no homework.  The oddly informal character of the course shows just how new the whole subject of social media is to the military.

The contrast was especially strong today because our morning class was about rewriting national news into local news stories.  This was the staple of weekly newspapers, but has all but vanished now that most everyone gets their news from electronic media.

We had a very formal lesson in how to do something that is very rare, and an ungraded lesson in how to do something that will be the center of all communication with young people--90% of the military.

Bathroom Stalls Get Busier at School

No, we did not have an outbreak of food poisining.

As of today, Army students are not allowed to have cell phones during the duty day at DINFOS.  We were told about the new rule at final formation yesterday. 

We are learning to be news people.  At the beginning of today's public affairs class the instructor told us we should all be news junkies and asked how we get our news.  Everyone said, "On my phone."

The Air Force is laughing at the Army again.  "You guys can't have cell phones?"

We are allowed to write a request to the battalion commander if we want or need and exception to policy.  But very few soldiers will do that.  The jokes at class breaks say cell phones will ride in back packs and magically appear in the bathroom stalls.

61 days to graduation.

Dissing the French

One predictable form of stupidity I have to hear when I am on active duty is jokes about the French and France.  One of our instructors can't get through a class presentation without a French joke.  At least he is a veteran.

The more virulent anti-French feeling goes back to the beginning of the Iraq War.  The French joined the Afghan war from the beginning.  They are still fighting and dying there today.  The French decided that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the others who cobbled together the lies that got us in that war were full of merde.

The French were right and since they did not fall for lies in 2003 they are willing to join us now. The British decided evidence from us still smells like Iraq.  They voted NO.

The same instructor who makes French jokes says the job of the military is to "break shit and kill people."  He knows we are not well suited to peacekeeping.  The French know that better than we do.  When they went into Mali, they fought the terrorists and killed them.  They were not winning hearts and minds.

The French lost 1 million killed and 5 million wounded in World War I out of a population of 66 million--double the casualties on BOTH sides of the American Civil War.  France does not go to war since then without a clear objective.  I think we should do likewise.

Without Marquis de Lafayette there would be no America.  To me, dissing the French is stupid and ungrateful.

But then, then main group of public people dissing the French dodged the draft during Viet Nam and became patriots later when they could no longer be drafted.

C'est la vie.

Double Punishment Day

We are back from a three-and-a-half day weekend.  It was a four-day weekend for the Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines in our class, but a three-day weekend for the Army.

We had Army Values training on Friday.

Now we are back and I have two punishment sessions today.

On Wednesday last week, I got a 63 on a news release.  Anything below a 70 means remedial training.  I made an error in fact which is an automatic 20 points off, plus enough other copy errors to drop my score below the passing line. 

All we had to do is come in one hour before class officially starts and write another news release.  I passed this one with no errors.  It was not difficult, but it was another hour that I could not be doing my other work--which would allow me to get more sleep. 

And that's the difficulty with our schedule.  Because the Army (and no other service) has Physical Training at 5 a.m., which means formation at 4:45 a.m., which means getting up at 4 a.m., we are chronically tired.  At least the older guys (me and the 30 year olds) are tired. 

And at 4:30 p.m. today we will have remedial PT or drill and ceremonies because that's what we do on Tuesdays after classes from last week until we graduate. 

So the morning was an individual punishment for a mistake I made.  The afternoon is a mass punishment because some of us do not use proper form on some of the warm-up and cool-down exercises we do.  We are collectively good at the actual exercises, but because a few of us did the bend and reach or windmill with imperfect form at 5 a.m., we will practice it every other week from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

Catching Up on Sleep--Then back to the trenches

The Labor Day holiday weekend  began earlier than I had hoped.  I expected to spend most of Friday in Army values classes, but we were released from the class at noon Chow and I got a text before 1 PM that said we could sign out.

So I rode to company headquarters and signed out just after 1 PM. Wow!   I was on pass until Monday. So I went back to my room and put the laundry basket in the car and put all my papers in my backpack and thought I would just rest for a few minutes I was so tired.

At 5:15 PM I woke up. At that point the traffic in Baltimore was beyond terrible. This weekend the Indy cars were racing on the streets of Baltimore. Many downtown streets were closed and fenced so traffic on this holiday weekend was even worse than usual. So I went to chow and went for a ride and waited for some of the red lines in Google maps to turn to yellow before I drove home.

By the time I left the traffic it subsided and I made it home in a couple of hours. And I was still tired.

On Saturday I rode 22 miles so I did change my recent habit of the Saturday exercise Sabbath.   In the afternoon the boys and I went to Philadelphia to my office. I worked for a couple of hours while they played on computers.   Then we went to dinner with one of the visiting scholars from where I work and her daughter who is at Cornell University this year getting a Masters degree in chemical engineering.  We went out for Chinese food and as usually happens when the boys are at dinner people who do not know them are surprised at how much they eat. Jacari ordered two entrées  and did not have a lot of leftovers. Nigel ordered a large appetizer and entrée again not a lot left over. We did bring all the leftovers home and the boys ate Chinese food for breakfast on Sunday.

On the Thursday before this weekend my wife had an event on campus with pizza. She brought home for leftover pizzas. She and Kiersten each had two slices. The boys ate the other 28 slices. They had 10 each for dinner and three each for breakfast and to others just in between.

On Sunday I tried to catch up on exercise. I rode 36 miles:  29 with my wife in the morning and seven in the afternoon Nigel. I swam a mile at the F&M Pool  while Nigel ran and hid a tennis ball into Jacari was off at church event.   I tried to run after that and did an extremely slow 2 miles quit.

Now I'm going to go  back to Fort Meade and get ready for tomorrow's public affairs test. Long day tomorrow!!!!

Current and Future News People. . .NOT!!!

Each day we have public affairs class, Mr. A starts the class off with a news quiz.  In every class he encourages us to have news feeds on the computers at our desks.  (The other two instructors DO NOT want us to be multi-tasking when they are talking.)  Mr. A says we should know what is going on at our base, in our community and in the world at large.

He is right.

But what news do students, faculty and other folks here at DINFOS care about?  Today I was eating lunch at the end of chow hours, about 12:40 p.m.  Since I was sitting alone, I sat near the CNN TV.  Each of the five dining areas in the dining facility has a TV up high on the wall at each side of the room:  one on CNN, one on ESPN.  I was watching a speech by John Kerry about Syria.  I had to leave, so I got up in the middle of the speech.  As I walked toward the back to drop my tray, I went into the next room where about 20 DINFOS people, civilians and soldiers, were standing looking up at the TV.

For a millisecond, I thought they were watching CNN.  Nope.  ESPN was re-running bloopers from a NY Jets press conference.

Part of the reason I chose this career field was my obsession with the news, a Gussman family tradition.  This is a career field for those obsessed with the news.  It will be tough out in the fleet and field for folks who really don't care about local, national and world events.

High in the Morning: Low in the Afternoon

Today was the best and the worst day so far here at DINFOS. 

At 4:45 a.m. this morning we lined up to take our first fitness test.  The test started worse than usual for me.  I have gotten the maximum score on the fitness test for the last two years.  The first event is the pushup.  I needed to do 53 pushups in two minutes to score the maximum.  I could only do 50.

So I knew I was not going to score 300 again.  But I did enough situps to score 100 on that event.  I have not actually run since 2010.  Soldiers over 55 years old have the option of walking or riding the bike for the aerobic event.  I took the bike.  This time I decided to run since we will take two more fitness tests before we leave.  I did the two-mile run in 15 minutes, 10 seconds.  That is 12 seconds faster than I needed for a maximum score.

So I got a 297 out of 300.  Not max, but it felt good to get a top score while doing the run with everyone else.

Then in the afternoon we got our grades back from three days of Public Affairs training.  We have to score at least 70 in all graded exercises.  In the initial news release, I made an error in fact and a few small errors.  Together that dropped my score to 63 on that assignment. 

So Tuesday morning when school resumes, I have to do a remedial session before class. 

It is a relief that if I blew an assignment that it was a single large error.  In this case, I said all of the victims were transported to the post medical facility when two went directly to the hospital. 

Oh well.