Sikorsky YR-4B (HNS-1) in NASA wind tunnel testing

1943 – The Navy accepts its first helicopter, a Sikorsky YR-4B (HNS-1), at Bridgeport, Conn.

Click on the picture for more history of this helo from Fiddler’s Green.

How about this for deck quals?:

H Frank Gregory, now a Lieutenant Colonel, subsequently demonstrated the XR-4 from a platform mounted on the tanker SS Bunker Hill. in May, 1943, 24 landings and take-offs being made. Additional tests were conducted in July 1943 with the XR-4, and the first YR-4A, operating from a stern platform on the troopship SS James Parker. In the course of this 20-hour test, the two helicopters made 162 landings and take-offs.

That was before they had NWP-42!

To my former shipmates from HC-6 (LCDR Al Jacka), HSL-32 (LCDR “Buzz” Buzzell) and HSL-44 (LCDR Marty ??? (age…sorry)), this one’s for you!

Part VII talked about getting ready for the deployment to the Med/North Arabian Sea.

I packed the Apple //c, the 9″ green screen monitor and the ImageWriter ][ in a footlocker (with padding) and off went. I know the computer was moved by VERTEP (vertical replenishment) (meaning it was on a pallet with other stuff, staged on a flight deck and picked up by a helicopter (usually CH-46D Sea Knights)) from a rolling, pitching deck, and deposited on another rolling, pitching deck of another ship 9 times. Yes, that’s right: NINE times.

And that little Apple “portable” kept on operating. It’s “operational availability” was 100%. We also moved a few more times by hauling the equipment down the ship’s gangways and up others a few times, too.

I had gotten reasonable proficient with the integrated suite of programs of Appleworks (which, still exists for the Mac today) because of this cruise. As the Combat Systems Material Officer, I was responsible for helping the ships stay at the highest level of readiness possible. As equipment failed, and the ship’s submitted their reports and parts requests, I was on the hook to figure out the status and keep the Commodore on the status of the repairs and parts availability. I set up a database in AW for tracking the repair parts and the estimated time the repairs would be effected.

I formatted a letter, where the body of the letter contained the current status of all casualties to the ships assigned to us. AW took care of inserting the most up to date data at printout time. All I had to do was maintain the database file when new information arrived. This sounds pretty mundane and routine for the current sate of the art of software and office suites today, but my point is in 1985, Apple had produced a very effective program to do this. I’m not sure if AppleWorks was the first of it’s kind (see the Wikipedia article linked above “one of the first”), but as far as I can recall, it was. Another milestone development, from which many other companies have gone on to “emulate” and market very well, but it was Apple software vision that most likely paved the way for all the other developments of Office software with integration.

Back in those days, Apple made the hardware and software. Years later, the software department of Apple was spun off as it’s own company, Claris. Certainly the great advantage of writing software application within the company lead to exceptionally smooth operations for the end user.

We were standing “port and starboard, chow-to-chow” watches, which meant two teams of us traded the watch when each mealtime came around. While on watch, if an update to a part status came in, I could hand annotate the info on page 1 (the casualty report status letter) of the Staff Watch Officer’s Notebook. As soon as I got off watch, I would go and make any changes, then printout a fresh copy of the letter and go back to the watch station and replace the outdated page.

The trend of my learning, documented in this series, is that I learned programs and systems more effectively and quickly when I had to face a real challenge of my management time. I then would have excellent motivation to sit down and focus on the documentation for the program I needed to get the job done.

Next time: Owl Software’s “Guide” program and stepping up to a Mac

I’ve been thinking lately about the empire building of Google. Taking the capitalistic way is sure proving “fruitful” for them.

So the acquisition of YouTube had me crank up the way (not way, WAY) back machine and consider a trend I have noticed.

About a year ago, I recall discussions over on Little Green Footballs on Google not accepting the ads a conservative organization wanted to place. Other comments around that time mentioned some conservative ads not being accepted, either. The people who had tried to advertise there did not ads for gay and lesbian and leftist groups showing up.

Later, it seemed some people noticed the results of searches left out topics specifically discussed or posted on some of the larger conservative blogs. Interesting…

Then, Google responded to the Chinese Government’s request to block content headed for China by doing what China wanted: Censoring.

Michele Malkin, most noticably, recently noted some of her YouTube postings, all very right wing in nature, were dropped from that site. Other video clips, such as the recent lampooning of the Clinton Administration’s policy carried out with North Korea over the development of nuclear weapons, has been blocked as “offensive.”
Update: A rather embarassing YouTube post of Harry Reid hanging up in an investigative reporter has been pulled. “Copyright infringement.” Yeah, right. Take a look around YouTube and thousands of clips from movies or TV are there.
This “educational video” regarding the aftermath of the physics of missile attacks on Red Cross Ambulances in Lebanon has also been removed, and the poster threatened with having his account shutdown on YouTube.

Why does this matter?

Google owns Blooger Some of you may have heard of this site, and a few of you may even use it…:)

What if one morning, you get settled with your cup of coffee, and click on the link to your blog’s control panel and get a message like: “404 Site Not Found?” Then when you check email, you find out your entire blog has been deemed offensive and therefore deleted….

I hope I’m wrong, but, for those using a free service, with a demonstrated propensity of denying access to conservative content, you have been warned….

I don’t really have any objection to a business setting standards, after all, they aren’t the US Government, obligated to let you have your free speech. I just am not sure the path they seem to be headed down is one I think will tolerate conservative and Christian content much longer.

(Hint: if you’re serious, get your own domain and hosting…it’s not that much)

Plenty of others have beat me too this post, but, I’m not one that likes birthdays much anyhow.

But, to the only service that has a mandate to Congress to be constantly authorized, 231 years of fine service to the Nation, at home and aboard.

Much has changed, an back in the begining, the CHENG was the Deck Deparment Head.

There were no aviators to sit in the wardroom and complain thay had seen all the movies already

There were wooden ships and “Iron Men.” We still have one of those two commodities.

Submariners were a “Navy of One.”

The Navy was a “wet” one. It took a politician many years later to make it “dry.”

Deployments could last much longer than 6-8 months.

There was no “Trade School” for officers; you learned by an apprenticeship type program.

No evaporators, so no complaining about “water hours.”

No “twidgets,” but no cool electronic gadgets, either.

Anyhow…just a few thoughts on this 231st occasion of the Birth of the US Navy.

Eagle1 posted, as did others, in rememberance of the the attack by a small boat on the USS COLE (DDG-67) in Yemen.

At Linda Sog’s blog, she has posted pictures of the 17 shipmates we lost that day.

We can take solace in knowing the USS COLE, as are all other vessels attacked in the the ramp up to the GWoT, returned to sea service and were not lost, a tribute to the crews we entrusted with these large vessels.

From the The Canton Rep:

CANTON – When 1st Lt. Aaron Seesan died in combat on May 22, 2005, in Iraq, his parents did not know he had written a prescient poem, “Eulogy of the Common Soldier,” as a high-school senior six years earlier.
[…]

Here is the poem:

EULOGY OF THE COMMON SOLDIER

All mortal beings, which God brought forth, die the same
Man is not exempt
All will inevitably end as the dust from whence we came
It matters not of age
Do not mourn me if I should fall in a foreign land
Think this of my passing
In a far-off field a finer soil mixed with the foreign sand
A dust that is American
A dust that laughed, cried, and loved as an American
On this plot there shall be
A little piece of America, a patch for the free man
Which no oppressor can take
From this soil grows grass shimmering a little greener
Brilliant emerald ramparts
A Breeze whisping White Poppies with scent a little sweeter
Flowers towards heaven
Mourn not my terrible death but celebrate my cause in life
Viewed noble or not
I would have sacrificed and gave all that I had to give
Not to make man good
But only to let the good man live.

— Aaron Seesan

H/T: Old War Dogs

LIke this guy…..Tom Fort

Heh…let’s see him do that again in the next 15 minutes…:)

A caller to Bill Bennett’s talk show this morning put forth a new moniker for the current crop of people who think there is nothing to put their trust in. They are coming behind the Gen Xers:

“Generation C” for “Cynic”

Fits pretty well, considering the Democratic Underground people decided within a short time yesterday that the small plane crashing into a Manhatten apartment building is part of an inside job of the Bush Administration.

Go figure…

Moving right along from Part VI, where I chronicled my attempts to “obtain” Zenith Z-248 computers from the Supply Corps. It didn’t work….

So, now I’m about 3.5 years into owning a personal computer. In Oct 1981, I had a 1Mhz processor with 48K of RAM. BY the spring of 1985, I had moved up to a 1 Mhz processor with 64K of RAM. Wow…consider how long that was compared to now. Macs were still in my future…

Apple //c with 9″ “green screen” monitor

Anyhow, I was now moving from a fixed grey hull to the life of a nomadic “tactical DESRON” troll. The Apple //c was around
by now. I was digging throught the classified ads of the Virginian Pilot and found someone advertizing a //c and it also included a 1200 baud modem! I Watched the ad for a few days and the day after the ad went out of the paper, I called and asked if he still had the computer. Yes, was the reply. I told him I’d give him $1200 for everything. He balked, I fingered the freshly withdrawn $20s to get his attention and asked “How do I get to your house?” He gave me directions.

I picked up the //c, the modem and an ImageWriter ][ 9 pin dot matrix, serially interfaced printer. Home I went with my find and had my 300 baud modem sold shortly there after.

One of the programs that had come with the //c was “AppleWorks.” AppleWorks was a combination word processor, spreadsheet and database program, and I think it also had an intergrated communications management function. This was the fore runner of the “office suite” software packages we are so reliant on anymore. I had obviously done word processing, and had played with the very first spreadsheet, Visicalc (written to run on the Apple ][ first), and also had been doing work with dBase II in C/PM. Now I had the three functions all resident within one program, which, came in very handy later on at work.

While on this adventure, and I’m not completely clear on the dates, I was able to attend the Apple Expo in Boston. I think it was in 1983, while I was at Department Head School in Newport (yes, this part is out of sequence). I recall being fascinated with speech recognition software for the Apple ][ series. You could have 64 voice files per “library.” You would speak the command, then type in the command it would execute. You could interact with the disk operating system, so you could easily increase the “vocabulary” by using some commands to load other library files. I spoke to one of the programmers and found out Apple was employing several Ph.Ds to engineer the digitizing of speech. Part of the discussion was about how we speak in analog streams, yet we still think of speech as sets of words with “white space” between them. No so for the computer. The computer has to be powerful enough to constantly be guessing which part of the captured wave form comprises discrete words, no small task. Obviously, we have come a long way, but some of the extra money I spent on Apple products went to thier extrensive R&D efforts that brought us the first viable GUIs and many other things we now take for granted.

I can’t recall the exact circumstances, but as we geared up for the Mediterranean/North Arabian Sea cruise, one of my Apple Club friends began dabbing with the IBM PC stuff and showed me a program named R:Base 5000. It was a database manager, and you could type in english like questions and it would roll out the answers from the data tables. I got a copy and loaded it on the Z-248 the staff had gotten for administrative work. We packed up our cruise boxes and I devoted a blue and white footlocker to be the carrying case for my Apple //c computer anf the printer, so I could use them to do my work while we made the world free for democracy.

I tell the story of the cruise in the series A Journey into History.

Coming next: The Watch Officer’s Notebook and rugged computers

Part II is here and covers the finger pointing the first day the “issue” with Rep. Mark Foley bubbled to up from beneath the swamp water to see the light of day.

Today, a short post on the topic. I believe I know the end game of the physicists looking for the Grand Unification Theory formula. Once they have discerned it, everything else will be understood exactly how it relates to everything else in the physical science world.

With those seeking the single thing/person/animal/mineral/vegtable that is the cause of all “badness” in the universe, what next? If “it” says “sorry!” will we then all move along and go back to living? Will we drop the “hunt” and be satisfied? Will we secretly break out our notes, hiding under the bedcovers, using a flashlight to illuminate our scribbling and tell ourselves “There must be something ELSE!”?

How long will it take for “goodness” to break out on the plant, where all men and women love and respect each other, when no one goes hyngry, when there is nary a molecule of “Greenhouse” gas left to cause the inordinate heating of the precious plant? How long, I ask those of you who seek this answer.

I thought of this because of the many, many press conferences when some unbiased, non-glory seeking, bright and intelligent journalists ask President Bush “Sir, what mistakes have you made in ______?” Add to that the many angry editorials where the writers DEMAND the President say he made mistakes.

Ok, so if one day, before his term is over, President Bush says he has committed a specific mistake. Sometimes he does allow for “yes, I’ve made a few mistakes” type of response, but then ignores the clamoring press corps that yells in unison “WHAT MISTAKE DID YOU MAKE?” as he turns and walks from the podium, waving and smiling. So, pretend President Bush says: “I made a mistake counting on the reliability of the intelligence that was provided to me by the CIA.”

Will you (you know who you are) then take a deep breath, breathe a sigh of relief and then say to yourself “FINALLY!” and get on about your life, no longer obsessed with just.getting.HIM.to.say IT?

This, while the topic is not fully explored for the purposes of this series, is the most pressing issue at hand. If we can find who definitively who it is to blame, will we let it go and then do something uplifting and productive for the rest of our days?