Somehow, I managed to sign up for three traditional courses all taught in the exact same lecture hall. Mechanical Design 1, Thermodynamics 1, and Mechanics 1 (Statics) are all in the same room! The other course I am taking is Engineering Computing and is given online. To continue on with a declared major of Mechanical Engineering there are five courses that make up something of a do-or-die list. If you do not pass those five courses with a 2.25GPA between them by your second attempt you must change your major. I am taking four of those five courses this semester. If you don’t see me blog/tweet/facebook/do anything but study between now and Christmas break you know why.

The pictures can do the talking from here, slideshow below. The each ISO is displayed 5D first, 5DMK2 second. The final two slides are ISO 12800, and ISO 25600.

With this semester out of the way, I am looking at six more full-time semesters until I graduate with a BSME. If you’d asked me when I graduated high school in 2001 if I thought I would still be working on an undergraduate degree in 2010 I would have laughed at you. Here I am looking at a 2013 graduation. Sure, I changed my major four or five times and spent five years on active duty in the Army – but I still never imagined it’d take this long. If the world ends in 2012, I’m going to be pissed.

Update: Managed a B in Calculus 3 as well. Yee + Haw.

In this latest leak, tens of thousands of classified documents from Afghanistan were leaked. From what I have read, and I did admittedly get quite bored somewhere around the 10,000th report, these are almost entirely SIGACT reports. A SIGACT is any report of “significant activity” in an area of operations (AO). What exactly constitutes a SIGACT varies from commander to commander. If Private Joe Snuffy is in an outpost and a traffic officer fires 3 rounds from his AK47 into the sky instead of using a whistle (a practice common in Baqubah during my first tour in Iraq) chances are that action constitutes a SIGACT to his commander. It means absolutely nothing but it will be reported anyway.

The above example is exactly the sort of SIGACT found in the vast majority of the Afghanistan leaks. Several of the reports are of such little relevance that I can assure you, having recorded tens of thousands of SIGACTS myself, the next higher echelon wondered why anyone even wasted the breath to relay the message. This is not to say the entirety of the leaked information is irrelevant but that the majority of it is completely useless drivel. That is, if you understand it. A key problem surrounding the discussion of this leak is that very few people outside the military actually understand these reports. Unfortunately, that does not stop the ignorant masses from opining loudly about the content they’ve read and failed to comprehend.

One of the largest areas to have been discussed in the wake of these leaks is that of civilian casualty reports. Again, without knowing what generates such a report the discussion is rooted in ignorance. Any dead civilian seen by any friendly forces generates such a report. Reading that some unit’s callsign reports four dead and seven wounded civilians near some location in no way indicates by itself that the reporting unit had anything to do with the death or injury of those civilians. Nobody is denying that US-led forces have in fact killed civilians, whether justifiable by ROE or not, but few pay any attention to the very significant number of civilians killed intentionally by other Afghans. Regardless of who does the killing, dead civilians result in CIVCAS (Civilian Casualty) reports.

Perhaps the single most ridiculous claim to come from Julian Assange is “this material was available to every soldier and contractor.” While it is certainly true that each soldier is quite likely granted a provisional secret clearance while deployed in support of combat operations it is patently false to state that each of them is given access to the SIPRnet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network). In a given infantry company the number of soldiers with digital access to classified information past the moment they report it is very small. Not all contractors have unfettered SIPRnet access either. You get SIPRnet access only if you need it. That need is not determined by you, but by strict policy enforced by the unit’s intelligence and network sections. It follows quite logically then that those in the best position to exploit the SIPRnet have access to such by means of their position inside the intelligence section.

Furthermore, everyone with a real secret (or higher) clearance and access to the SIPRnet is briefed on what is and what is not authorized. There is nobody with a clearance who is unaware of the nature of their access and the consequences of violating the laws under which that access is covered. This gives rise to the baseless nature of another Assange claim wherein he asserts that because everyone can access the information (which is either a gross misunderstanding on his part, or a bold-faced lie) the US military failed to give due diligence to its informers. Assange, as the face of a secretive organization, ought to know full well that security is an illusion. Many of the people with whom he is associated know this all too well, and work actively to break security mechanisms so that they might be made more secure as a result. The US military did not release the names of Afghans with whom they had worked to the public. Those names were classified, and their secrecy bound by rules and regulations the violations of which carry strict punishment. Someone broke those rules and regulations and provided the information to WikiLeaks who in turn released the names to the public. WikiLeaks released those names. The US military did not. There is no way to mistake who is explicitly at fault for releasing those names to the public: the individual leaker (possibly Bradley Manning), and the publishing organization (WikiLeaks). These leaks quite literally endangered the lives of Afghans trying to do what they believed to be right. Is it hypocrisy for Secretary Gates to say Assange has blood on his hands? Probably. I know I have blood on my hands, and have dealt with that. Assange needs to come to terms with it himself now. A HUMINT (Human Intelligence) source has a very limited lifespan once exposed, and he as exposed many.

Transparency is important. Make no mistake about my feelings in that regard. The public, to whom our government is legally accountable, deserves to know what is going on in the name of their protection (and at the great expense of their tax dollars). This means both our government, its agencies, and the public have a lot of work to do. Uncle Sam needs to own up to its mistakes and release information in a clear and direct method the public can understand. The public needs to educate themselves on how to go about understanding, as best they can without the frame of reference gained by experience, that information.

What exactly it is about the carrier I’ve not figured out. Chances are I won’t bother figuring it out either. The solution, it seems, is to make sure if you’re on VZW and you’re trying to MMS someone on AT&T that your message includes a subject and some caption text in addition to the picture. My fifty-something message trial today was met with a 100% failure rate on MMS sent from VZW users. When I asked the senders to try again with a subject and text the messages came through as expected.

Don’t you just love easy fixes?

Now, if you’re using an iPhone 4 and your MMS messages are being eaten by the evil data monsters – try resizing the pictures to fit under the 600k limit. Every other phone on the planet it does that automatically, but yours doesn’t.

The best part about being finished with physics is that I actually have time to think now. No more waking up and going to campus early every single day. I think that method, going hard every day, is probably the best way to learn. Of course, I don’t particularly enjoy the amount of work that method requires. No one said it would be easy, right?

There’s a fairly decent chance if you’re reading this you’ve also read my analysis of the sensationalized editorial Wikileaks ran as news. The video that caused most of the stir captures an engagement between an Apache and a group of armed and unarmed men in a posture perceived as hostile to nearby troops. The subsequent 15-6 investigation, which is not just a dog-and-pony show, found no intentional violation of the ROE.

What could Manning possibly have hoped to change by leaking that video? Was he trying to send a message to journalists and photographers that being embedded with men carrying RPGs near a patrol of coalition forces is probably going to get you killed? Perhaps his goal was to urge persons of all professions to exercise personal responsibility and fully realize the dangers of their actions. Somehow I doubt that is the case. Manning has been compared to Ellsberg, but that’s a faulty comparison at best. Ellsberg had a point to make; it would seem Manning does not.

It seems Wikileaks is upset that the Crazyhorse crew hasn’t been charged with the deaths of the Reuters personnel they killed in the leaked video. The argument seems to be that because the identification of the photographer as a man armed with an RPG was made in error that the engagement amounted to cold-blooded murder – something clearly against both military and civilian law. If that is the metric being used – that the clear violation of a well-known law ought to result in the filing of criminal charges – Wikileaks ought to then fully support the charges brought against Manning. It’s very clear that one is only authorized to operate within his or her official capacity on the SIPRnet, and that failing to do so is a violation of the law. It is equally clear that the possession, and/or release, of materials inconsistent with their official markings is a violation of the law.

So, again, from what exactly is it Wikileaks wants to save Manning?

HTC Aria and iPhone 2G

The first thing I noticed about this particular phone was the tiny size. In the smartphone arena it certainly won’t be compared to Goliath. It comes in physically smaller, as illustrated above, than the iPhone 2G by around half an inch (on its longest side). If you pop the backing off, which is a little difficult the first time, you gain access to the SIM card, microSD card, and battery of the device. Screen size and resolution are not going to win any contests either, but they’re well balanced and certainly allow for an enjoyable experience with both text and multimedia content. In the upper right side there is a power button, and on the left a volume rocker. The small circle at the bottom of the phone’s face is an optical trackpoint. Touch sensitive regions along the bottom of the screen are present for the home screen, menu, back, and search functions.

Using the phone is quite simple. Anyone who has ever used an iPhone should be able to pickup the use of this Android phone very easily. I spent most of yesterday trying out different apps and reconfiguring my theme. At no point was it ever confusing. Unsurprisingly, the applications from Google work flawlessly on the Android OS. Navigation is awesome. The integration with Google Voice, Gmail, and GTalk is equally excellent. While the Android Marketplace lacks the sheer volume of applications found in Apple’s AppStore, I was able to quickly find applications do to exactly what I wanted to do. Not a single one of them cost me a dime either. To Apple’s credit, I never paid for an iPhone app either.

Battery life is the one negative comment I’ve read. The Aria certainly does not have the largest capacity battery on the market. It does well with the battery it does have though. As of this writing my phone has been on, and active, for more than six hours. It still has more than 70% charge remaining. Now, I’m not one to sit around and use my phone all day to do things for which an actual computer is better suited so perhaps I’m not as picky as others. That said, if I can make it through my time away from home in a any given day while maintaining the means to communicate with others I’m happy. This phone fits the bill.

Everything is finally finished with my i7 desktop build. It’s pretty sweet. Click the photo to visit the Flickr page and read the specs. I don’t feel like typing them again.