Tone Parsons

Back in the day, I was young and stupid.

One of the stupid things I did in my youth was join the Army. To this day, I have no idea why I signed up to be a 91A10 Combat Medic. Apparently, I wasn’t doing anything that day, so I talked to a recruiter.

I found this picture the other day and it made me laugh. It was taken in March of 1986. You can see me in the top row, 4th from the left.

Yup… all baby faced and such.

Basic training was actually a blast. Everything my mother ever told me not to do… that’s what we were doing. Playing with knives, crawling through the mud, shooting weapons! Sure, I had a Drill Sergeant yelling at me, but he was yelling at everyone, and I knew that after my 8 weeks of training, he’d go away… so it didn’t bother me at all.

One of the best memories I have of basic training is the day we qualified to shoot the M203 (a grenade launcher mounted to the underside of the M16). I did everything perfectly, and was chosen to be on of the 3 privates to fire an actual M-72 (LAW rocket) at a stationary tank. I actually hit the tank, sending the hatch on top about 150 feet straight up in the air. After looking inside the tank after the fact, I pity anyone who might be on the receiving end of such a thing.

Because I scored high on the tests they give you, I was offered the chance to go to West Point. I declined (they take your soul, starch it, and hang it in a closet. You don’t get it back). My Drill Sergeant didn’t understand why in the hell someone would say “um… no” to something like that and made my life a little rough until he finally gave up (assume the position and do push-ups until your arms fall off). I still have no regrets about my decision, and would make it again.

The 4th of July celebration at our place was very low key.

I grilled some kick-ass steaks, we blew off a few fireworks, and then we retired to the deck on the back of my house to drink beers and wait for the big show at the baseball field (which we have a lovely view of).

We got a big show… but it wasn’t from the stadium.

Around 9:30, black nasty clouds rolled in, the wind kicked up, and lightning went everywhere! We did manage to get a few good pictures with our digital cameras (by just repeatedly taking snapshots of the sky… most were just dark pictures, but a few are pretty cool).

Clicking on a thumbnail will get you an 800×600 image.  If you want to see larger ones, you can visit psychoducky’s page (he has them full size)

The stadium never did launch it’s fireworks… so maybe they’ll do it at tonights game.  Unfortunately, I’ll be asleep, because I will be working the graveyard shift for the next two nights.

It’s July 3rd, and you know what that means…. it’s “Dependence” Day!!

It’s the day when we celebrate our dependence to England! So, find yourself a Brit (for me that’s easy… I just go to my brother-in-law), serve them some tea, and give them a dollar.

Tomorrow, you get to kick their ass. 🙂

Today was the day.

I’ve been hosting websites from my home for about 6 years. Durring that time, keeping the script kiddies (mostly from Brazil) out of the box has been my second full-time job.

That all ended at 10 AM this morning.

I moved my domains to Dreamhost (a professional webhost) in January, and have been slowly helping the owners of the other 50 some odd domains I was hosting off my server and on to someplace else (most have also gone to Dreamhost). Today was the day that I shut everything at my house off.

So… now I have to figure out what to do with my webserver.

It’s a dual AMD MP 2800+ with a 3ware 9500s 64bit hardware RAID controler (connected to 4 Seagate Barracuda SATA drives set to RAID5 with a hot swap spare) and comes with an Iomega REV drive for backups (35GB native, 90GB compressed).  The images above were from when it lived in an Antec case, but now it’s in a shiny all aluminum Thermaltake Tsunami

I’m thinking it’ll make a dandy file server for the house.