An Army of 1 in 10

I know it’s been a long time since my last post, but being deployed to Iraq limited my time and opportunities to post to Unsilence.  I left Iraq last week and I’m getting settled back in.  I’ll be leaving on a wonderful trip to the southern hemisphere in a few weeks, so expect some more delays in my posting.

Today also happens to be bittersweet for me.  I am fairly conservative and am a registered Republican.  I disliked both candidates that were running for President and I would have been dissatisfied with the result no matter who won.  However, I did state in an earlier post some time ago that this election I would support the candidate who would best bring about the abolishment of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

That candidate has won.  While I worry about what his liberal policies will do to this country, I don’t think that they could possibly make things any worse than they are right now with the economic crisis.  I look forward to the day when I can serve openly without fear of losing my job.  Hopefully, that day is not far off.

To the President-Elect, I congratulate you on your victory and the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.  I pray that you will work to allow me to serve this great country of ours without fear of losing my job due to my being gay.

Well, it’s getting time for me to deploy. I will be leaving very soon, and I’m not sure how often I’m going to be able to post to A1in10 considering the policy of registering blogs (obviously not something I’m going to do!). I’ll post when I can, but it’s likely to be less often than lately.

Before I leave, however, I will ensure that I have a copy of Unsilence’s source code so that I can update the site and fix the blog registration bug. I haven’t been able to do that due to how extremely busy I’ve been, but I will fix it before the year is out. I’m probably going to have to have someone else upload the new code, but it’ll be in place so that we can start accepting registrations again.

I will be in Iraq for the next 15 months and while I do know where I’m headed, I’m not going to say. One, because that would violate OPSEC; and two, because that would be giving too much personal information. By the end of the month, I’ll be in Iraq; and the next time I post will be from Iraq. I plan on posting as often as I can without getting caught with an unregistered blog, but I first have to see what the network situation is down there. I may end up having a trusted person do the actual posting for me if it seems that I could get into trouble for not registering An Army of 1 in 10.

See you guys on the flip side!

Well, I had a blast on TDY. The city I was in was beautiful, but I forgot to bring my camera so I have no photos of it. Sorry.

Internet
My ISP still hasn’t reconnected my internet connection. What a crappy company. I’m currently at a new net cafe that’s opened on post, so at least I can now get on for a short while (at a monetary cost). I should be able to get the registration bug fixed soon … please be patient.

Deployment
I’ve also learned that my brigade has been place on notice for deployment. We don’t know where or when we’re deploying yet, but it’s probably going to be during 4th quarter. With the new 15 month deployment, I’m going to have to figure out something in regards to the disposition and maintenance of the site. I may have a trusted person post my entries for me and make updates.

On the bright side, that means I’m going to come home with a lot of money in the bank. Since I’m single with very few bills, the deployment will be pure profit for me. And with the 15 month deployment, that’s also going to mean an additional $3,000 for serving in combat over 12 months. All tax free. Yep, I’m looking forward to it.

So it’s been a month since I last posted anything on A1in10, and some of you may be getting concerned. In case no one noticed, I did post a quick explanation on the main SIU blog a week ago, but I realize that not everyone probably reads it. Here’s what happened.

Last month, I was preparing to move when my internet service cut off. This was expected, as I had requested that it be moved to my new location; however, while the phone service was reactivated, the internet was not. I was then unable to access the internet from home, and I’m certainly not going to access A1in10 or SIU from the government network (especially when my login is tied to my CAC). On top of that, I’ve been TDY for the last two weeks (still have a week to go), and my internet access is spotty here.

Hopefully my ISP will have straightened out its act and have my DSL line reactivated when I return home next weekend. If that turns out to be the case, then you can expect me to resume posting on a regular basis then (AND to fix the blog registration bug). If not, then I’ll continue to be offline for a while.

Basically what it boils down to, is this: if you’re worried about my well-being, then rest assured that nothing has happened to me except for a bout of bad luck and bad timing. My career is still safe, and aside from going through internet withdrawal, I’m fine.

When I was in middle school, one of the classes I took was photography and I promptly fell in love with it. I took the class again in my senior year and once again fell in love with photography. Over the past n years, I haven’t kept up with that love very much because of the very fact that I just couldn’t afford a good camera. In recent days, I’ve been bitten by the photography bug again.

So now I’m looking for a good camera. I would prefer not to buy a film camera, so I can save on film costs, but the camera must be an SLR so that I can have more control over how my images turn out. I’m definitely not a professional, so I won’t be considering professional-grade cameras, but I would be willing to spend as much as $1,000 on a good camera (preferably significantly less). One that can take black/white pictures in addition to color would be a bonus (I prefer b/w photography).

Since I’ve been out of the photography scene for … a while, I’m woefully ignorant on camera prices and features. I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on a camera only to find another one with the same capabilities for much less. Any advice would be immensely appreciated.

I’m not normally a person that goes along with an internet meme, but I’ve decided to do this one for a couple of reasons:  1) to see if I could think of 100 interesting facts about me, and 2) it might be fun.  So let’s get started!

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There has been an explosion of discussion in the AKO Forums (make sure you’re logged in before following the link) in the “Bi?” thread.  A Future Soldier made this comment which set off a firestorm:

i personally wouldnt want any faggots in the military PERIOD.

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I am now beginning the process of moving the old blog over to this one, so any comments that you wish to make on any previous posts of mine should be made here and not the old site. Don’t bookmark this URL though, because by the end of the weekend, it won’t work and my original domain, www.armyof1in10.net, will be the URL for this blog.

This past month that I’ve been working on bringing SIU online has been very long and I started getting a bit impatient for the launch date to arrive. But it came and went, and the launch went very well. SLDN has registered a blog (which I hope they use on a regular basis), and there’s a new blog: CPT Queer’s Army.  I don’t know who he is, but I hope he starts blogging soon.  I’m sure we’ll see some great and insightful things coming from him!

I’m also going to start putting together some tutorials for the first-time user, because there really are a lot of features packed into this site, and it might seem a little overwhelming at first for some people.  If anyone wants to contribute to that, I’ll be more than happy to accept the help.  I want to make SIU the best blogging host for LGBT Service Members there is (right now, it’s the only one, so by default it’s already the best).

Well, Day 2 of Serving in Unsilence’s official existence has ended, and it’s already receiving quite a bit of traffic. I’ve been monitoring the referrers to see who’s linking, and there are quite a few links from sites I’ve never seen, so that tells me that the word of mouth is spreading rapidly. I even noticed a link from a MySpace group which gave me the idea of creating a MySpace profile for myself, to which I’ve added another link to SIU.

In launching Serving in Unsilence, I worked closely with the fine folks at SLDN to ensure that the site’s terms of service and privacy policy were as strong as they could be. The published TOS and Privacy Policy are products of their suggestions and concerns. I fully believe that they will give me the legal leverage necessary to protect the identities of users on this site.

My other blog, An Army of 1 in 10, will be moving to this one over the course of this weekend. The URL will remain the same though – http://www.armyof1in10.net/. I have a way of linking this blog to that domain, so the current address to this particular blog will no longer be valid once I make the move.

I will also be adding another theme or two to the site for people to choose from. There aren’t a crap-load of themes offered (like other blog hosts do) for a couple of reasons:

• There are certain features that I hard-code into each theme so that everyone has these features available for use
• The more themes that there are in the system, the longer the Presentation page takes to load

As time goes by, there will be more and more themes available, but each has to go through an editing and testing phase. This takes time, and I’m only one person. I’m also very picky about the themes that are made available — I don’t want to offer crappy themes that look awful and/or don’t work very well.

I also intend to add more features to the site, and I have a few in mind but they need to mature a little more before they can be offered for use on here. I am, of course, open to suggestions for new features for the site. Let me know!

You might be wondering now that Serving in Unsilence has been launched, what’s in store for An Army of 1 in 10? I mean, it obviously wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to launch a blog host and then continue to run my own personal blog on a separate installation, would it?

Well, I do intend to move this blog over to SIU, and it’s going to happen this weekend. If you visit SIU, you’ll notice that I already have a blog there, and practically all of my posts have been imported. The move won’t break any links to this blog though, because I will set it up so that the domain points to the new blog. It will mean that my armyof1in10.net email address will no longer work, however. The new email address will be anonymous [at] unsilence [dot] com, so please update your address books.

Before I flip the switch on the DNS, I need to make sure that all of the users who have registered here are imported into my new blog so that no one has to re-register (I hope!). So it’ll be a day or two before it actually happens.