Afghan Lift

CSM Bones gets a lift from the Afghans. They are flying MI-17s - just like the Iraqis.

Gratuitous Photo of Iraqi 14th Division soldiers

As seen at Camp Wessam.

Moribund no more!

Not too terribly long ago, I was mourning what had appeared to be the permanent demise of a once popular NHL franchise.

Oh my, has that changed. A good friend of mine gave me a pair of his season tickets, and I went to the game Wednesday night. What a difference from last visit. A full house of very fired up fans, a team full of speedy and skilled players who worked their butts off. They won 4-1 in a very entertaining game (kudos to the fan sitting behind me who urged the Hawks to "Hit 'em. Hit 'em again! Hit 'em harder! Take your skate off and stab him with it!!").

I realize that the change in ownership (from father Wirtz to son Wirtz) is probably the single biggest factor in the turn around [now home games can be seen on TV, a new GM, etc] but I wonder how it could have happened so fast. My only experience in the total rebuilding of an organization was joining the Army National Guard in March 1985 - we were just finishing the last throes of the Carter years...

Anyone have any insight into how you can so quickly turn something around, in what seemed like a death-spin downward?

CSM Bones Visits an Orphanage

Outside of Kabul. In 2004 I noticed that Afghan kids always seemed to "read" CSM Bones as safe/OK. We could be standing at a street corner in Charikar, and he would end up with the kids coming up to him. Good to see things haven't changed.

Your Business-Speak Example of the Day II

From a company-wide e-mail:

Root cause continues to be lack of mainframe resources due to continuing record usage rates, year end processing demands, and contingency-system-resource constraints. These were again detected early with mitigations beginning immediately. System resources from development/test regions have been allocated to production to help with the load, and the team performed special load balancing.
IT will continue close systems monitoring and other measures will continue in order to mitigate further disruptions.
This will be our final communication on this issue but we will continue our communications tomorrow if system issues persist.

Translation: Because everyone is using the same system at the same time, the computers are slow and people started whining. We stole some processing power from other stuff to help. Leave us alone.