Made and Moved
Yesterday, I got up just before noon1, so I had time to check my inbox before I went on watch. Two messages in general traffic caught my eye:
- POSTING INSTR LS LACQUI2 NE TECH(C) – JR
- RANK CHANGE INSTR LS LACQUI, NE TECH(C)
The first message says that I am being sent to another ship. Unfortunately, I’m going to a ship that’s going to be sailing for a while, with only a few weeks at home between that sail and the one I’m currently on. The next message, however, was far more interesting. “Rank Change Instr” is the official form of saying “promotion”. Yup, I’m moving to a different ship, but at the rank of Master Seaman – two hooks and a maple leaf.
The promotion sort of eased the pain of being away, but not entirely. It will still be painful being away from my family.
I called my wife to tell her the good news/bad news. Let me tell you up front – satellite phones suck ass. Especially when, due to an administrative error somewhere, I only have 6 1/2 minutes of airtime available. Anyway, while dealing with the 1-second time lag3, I was able to tell her about the posting and the promotion. She countered with some good news of her own – we’ve been approved for a larger PMQ. We get an extra bedroom, a basement, and a proper back yard. I can’t complain there 
And the timing couldn’t be better – we get it the weekend after I get home from this sail, so I will be there for the move4 and I will get to spend a bit of time there before I sail again.
Not a regular day at the pool
We’re standing around the pool. Twelve grown men and two grown women in full Navy combat dress1, which is our working uniform. Everyone puts on a belt pouch, from which we withdraw and wear a life jacket. Then, two at a time, we jump into the pool fully dressed.
This is part of the sea survival refresher training. Everyone who serves onboard a ship needs to know what to do in the case that the ship sinks. This is, unfortunately, not as unlikely as we would like. After all, I am in a military ship, and therefore a target for enemy action in addition to the standard hazards of being on the water. Therefore, every three years I (and my shipmates) am required to take the refresher training.
Our morning started with an hour and a half of “death by Powerpoint”. Anyone who has sat through a lecture where the instructor reads directly off the slides can probably relate. Fortunately a few videos broke up the tedium – mostly through laughter at the movies showing their ages.
After our lectures, we moved on to the pool. A bag in the corner of the pool deck contains a 20-man life raft for the second half of the practical training.
First, we all don lifebelts. This is basically a wide belt with a fanny pack-like attachment that contains an inflatable life jacket. This is what we would wear if we had an elevated risk of sinking (eg combat or severe damage). We then opened them and put on the jackets themselves. Two at a time we stepped up to the dive platform, inflated our life jackets, and jumped in.
After each of the first two jumps, we swam to the end of the pool and got back out. Then, we did group rescue – form two lines; each line jumps one at a time, then huddles. One person (in my case, it was me) becomes a “casualty” and needs assistance to make it to the other end of the pool.
Next, the instructor pulled out the pool, throws it into the pool, and inflates it. It’s then inverted, and we practice the way to right the raft. Hard enough to do while we were in the pool – I can’t imagine needing to do it in the ocean in rough weather in the middle of the night. A few of us had difficulties, but we all managed to do it. We then all got into the raft, so we could see just how roomy it is2. We had fifteen people in there and it was pretty tight. The raft is designed for twenty. Ouch.
All-in-all it was a good time. We reviewed3 our sea survival procedures, ensuring the maximum chance of survival if the worst happens to our ship.
The worst part of the training? We were finished before noon, so we were required to go back to work for the afternoon 
Slightly disappointed
As a birthday present to myself, I pre-ordered Portal 2. The release date has changed multiple times in recent history. A countdown implied to many people (including myself) that Portal would be released at 8 this morning. Instead, it counted down to…another countdown.
I had hoped to play a bit of Portal while I’m stuck on the ship for a duty watch tomorrow. Unfortunately, I will have to wait until sometime next week. Guess I need to find some other entertainment for a long, boring day Hopefully Sea Training doesn’t decide to make it more interesting.
Sailing up and down the Island
Here I am, in sunny Vancouver, about halfway through a sailing period. Our FNO class is almost finished, only final exams left to go. For any readers unfamiliar with FNO, I’ll give a quick explanation.
As with many courses, the first phase is done in the classroom. I don’t know how long prospective navigators spend behind a desk, learning how to plan their tracks and courses, learning terminology, learning how to read a chart (Navy map), and whatever they need to learn. After that, I believe, they make a few runs in a simulator.
The next phase is the part that concerns my shipmates and me. In order to be a fully-qualified navigator, the students need to take a real ship out for a series of navigation runs. For this course, the ship of choice was HMCS Winnipeg, the one to which I was posted at the beginning of the year.
The first two weeks of the FNO practical are practice weeks. One student will navigate north, and into an anchorage area. Then the next will take over, and navigate, and into a harbour. The next will take us north, and alongside a buoy. And so on. Night and day runs. Transits. To and from buoys, anchorages, and harbours. Narrow and wide passages. Between small islands. All under the watchful eye of their instructor as well as my ship’s captain and senior navigator. No pressure, of course…
Next week is final exams. They will be given a new area of water to navigate, and be required to take the lessons they learned during the practices and apply them to the nav passages. Afterwards, the examiners will have a conference to determine what was done well, what needed improvement, and what was beyond recovery. Marks will be awarded as appropriate, and we will hopefully have a new batch of fully-qualified navigators.
Home from sea
After a month of sailing, I’m home. For a bit.
Work-ups weren’t as bad as I had feared; they mostly wanted to train the helicopter crew, so it went fairly easily for the rest of us. Not to say that they didn’t give us at least one attack per day, but they weren’t as bad as on a major work-up.
The next phase of our sail was support for a submarine commander course. Basically, the submarine commander trainees need to learn how to hide from an anti-submarine ship. We were the ship. The mainstay of the week was TCM‘s. We go up to high speed, take a sharp left, followed by a sharp right. Repeat in a fairly random pattern designed to make the torpedo over- or under-shoot us until it runs out of fuel. If they happen during your sleep cycle, you tend to get thrown out of your bunk quite a bit. For this reason, the ship designers installed seatbelts on each bed, allowing us to stay comfortably-ish asleep-ish, or at least get some rest.
All that was left after that was the transit home, which was fairly uneventful. A couple minor exercises, but nothing on the scale of a full work-up drill.
Now, here I am home
Work-ups
Every organization has certain skills that need to be maintained. In some cases, these skills are the day-to-day workings of the job; just by showing up to work and doing your job, you keep your skills up-to-date. Sometimes, an extra course is required, or a professional development activity where you learn the new changes that will affect your job.
Some skills, however, are not part of day-to-day business. What do you do if there’s a fire? An earthquake? A missile hits your office?
Seem a bit far-fetched? Maybe for most civilian jobs. However, as I have mentioned previously, I am a member of the Canadian Navy. There is a chance that a missile will, at some point, be aimed at my workplace. It probably won’t be any time soon, but who can say what the political climate will bring ten or twenty years from now?
Even with the many emergencies that can hit a warship at sea, it doesn’t make sense to practice for everything all the time. The crew would get worn down, and regular work wouldn’t happen. Instead, we practice the major ones (generally fire and flood) on a regular basis. Generally, soon after we leave harbour we perform a Man Overboard exercise, which doubles as a manning check; part of the drill for Man Overboard is to verify that everybody is onboard. However, even with these exercises, it is generally the ship’s staff running the drill, so our bosses know what to expect and when to expect it.
Enter work-ups. This is a series of exercises, during a set period of time, in which we drill hard. A group of instructors from the Sea Training Division come onboard. Along with them, they bring smoke machines, thunder-flashes, and other devices to simulate emergency situations. Experts in the equipment know how to “break” systems without causing real damage, allowing us to work around simulated combat damage.
For two weeks, we will be at “war”. Any time, we can wake up to the sound of the general alarm, which gives us six minutes to get from our bed to the appropriate position on the ship, ready to put out fires, patch around damage, and return fire on the “enemy”. Many of us will probably “die” during that time; in fact, if the ship were to receive the amount of simulated damage for real, we probably wouldn’t make it home. This is intentional – there is no way to disguise from the crew the fact that we are not in real combat.
There are certain levels of stress that can’t be simulated, because everybody knows that they will get to go home to see their families; the worry of dying isn’t present in a training environment. Instead, we are overloaded and overstressed; constant exercises will ensure that we are kept on edge. It is a different kind of stress than real-world combat would provide, but by stressing the crew during exercise, we will ensure our capability if our training is required in the real world.
As Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit once said:
The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.
This is the guiding principle of work-ups, and something I will strive to remember when I’m pulled out of my rack at oh-dark-stupid to fight another smoke-machine fire.
PGP for the new year
If you have exchanged emails with me, you may have noticed an attachment called “signature.asc” to many of my messages. This is a PGP signature, which basically proves that I wrote the message.
Unfortunately, although I use PGP on all my emails, it is not much good unless my correspondents also use PGP. The reason is simple – if you don’t have PGP, you don’t have the capability to interpret the signature file, meaning the file is just so much extra junk. Also, if you and I both have PGP, emails between us can be encrypted, making them unreadable by third parties.
However, just having the PGP program doesn’t mean that you can prove that the message came from me. Anyone in the world can create a PGP key file with my name and email address attached – that doesn’t make it me. You need to prove that the key is also mine. There is a system called the Web of Trust, which ensures that, even if you have never met a user, there is probably a link between you and them, which can be used to prove the identity of both parties.
The web of trust needs physical links between people, meaning that you need to physically meet and verify users. This is the hard part, and the part that I am looking for help with. Although I am located in Victoria, BC (and will gladly exchange keys with anyone in the area), I am also a member of the Canadian navy. This means that I tend to travel quite a bit. As I reach other countries, I intend to trade keys with local PGP users, if at all possible. Unfortunately, OPSEC prohibits me from posting my travel schedule anywhere public, which means that I can’t announce when I will be in a different location.
If I will be at a location for any extended time, I will announce it on my PGP page; however, most of my visits will be only one or two days, so there won’t be much use of the page updates in most cases. However, I will also announce on my blog when I have arrived in a new location, along with a reminder of my key-signing availability.
If you don’t use PGP, make it one of your New-year resolutions to start. If you do use it, use the new year to expand your key signatures.
Happy New Year.
Santa was good
Christmas has come and gone for another year. Santa was good to our family. My son went through some surgery, and was running around happy that night. I came home the next night, and gave my step-daughter a surprise (she wasn’t expecting me for another couple days). Both of these happened a week before Christmas.
On Christmas morning, like many families, we tore apart the wrapping paper on the boxes under the tree. The kids made out like bandits. The wife and I spent a couple hours unpackaging and assembling toys. Fun was had by all.
My main present was a Sony Reader PRS350. I’d love to say that I made this decision based on extensive review of the alternatives, but honestly it was due to availability – the Canex carries it, allowing me to use the military credit plan. Still, it has so far been worth it (I used it in Halifax before I came home).
Why do I want an E-book reader? I’m in the navy. I spend time away from home, with limited storage space for reading material. Here’s a quick comparison of my methods for carrying reading material:
On the left, Tolkien’s 7-volume Lord of the Rings (including appendices). On the right, my e-book reader containing the same text, as well as the several tech manuals, a few classics, and some newspapers. Two weeks of battery life (easily recharged while I’m working), and approximately 25,000 average-sized books means that I don’t have to worry about how many books I can put in my locker.
How was your tree?
Camera Complications
Christmas is coming. The Fat Man‘s visit is guaranteed to bring smiles to the faces of children everywhere. And smiling children need cameras.
Melissa and I have had a few cameras since we’ve been together; however, they have always been cheap models, very prone to breakage. Add a toddler with a greater reach than we realized, and you no longer have a camera.
After looking at a few cameras at the Canex, we finally settled on the Samsung ST5000. So far, we have no cause to be disappointed.
The size of the camera makes for easy portability, although I am a bit worried about damage to the touch screen; I am tempted to go looking for a camera case, something I haven’t used in a while. Of course, this could also be a reason for my previous cameras’ lack of longevity.
Nothing is perfect, however, and the ST5000 is no exception. I have a few minor gripes, but nothing major. Major features (also listed below) influenced our decision to get this camera.
read more…
Attempting Repairs
We have two laptops at our house – one old, one new. The old one decided to die while I was in Halifax with the new one. It is, of course, out of warranty; further, it has been discontinued by the manufacturer. Support documentation, once available on Toshiba’s website, is either removed or hidden so well that I can’t find it.
Unfortunately, the only way I can currently repair it is using my recovery CD. This CD, however, will not allow me to perform an operating system repair. No, instead either Toshiba or Microsoft (or both) decided that, should my operating system decide to shit the bed, I need to erase my hard drive and start over.
Yup, not only did my OS die; now I have to erase all my data and start from scratch.
Officially.
Instead, I realized – hey, I’m out of warranty! Which means I’m going to perform some surgery, extract my hard drive, and back up any important files to the other computer using an external enclosure. I haven’t decided yet whether I will reinstall Windows on this machine after I have finished, or if I will switch to Ubuntu. Both directions have their appeals; either way, though, it looks like I’ll be starting from scratch to resurrect this machine this Christmas.
Anyone have suggestions for alternate recovery methods? I still need to get an enclosure, so I won’t be doing this for a few days yet.