As a member of the Canadian military, I have been hearing alot about Olympic security.  A task force has been stood up, specifically for Olympic security.  But is this all smoke and mirrors?

In response to concerns about high-profile event security, Bruce Schneier, an internationally-recognized security expert, has this to say:

This is certainly the conventional wisdom, but is there any actual evidence that it’s true? The 9/11 terrorists could have easily chosen a different date and a major event — sporting or other — to target, but they didn’t. The London and Madrid train bombers could have just as easily chosen more high-profile events to bomb, but they didn’t. The Mumbai terrorists chose an ordinary day and ordinary targets. Aum Shinrikyo chose an ordinary day and ordinary train lines. Timothy McVeigh chose the ordinary Oklahoma City Federal Building. Irish terrorists chose, and Palestinian terrorists continue to choose, ordinary targets. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that ordinary targets are easier targets, but not a lot of it.

So how effective are we being, by emphasizing Olympic security?  Are we concentrating our attention at one “weak point”, opening security holes to be exploited elsewhere?  Or possibly when we stand down from Olympic high-security, will the lull make us a target?

This is an oldie, but it was recently forwarded to me from one of my co-workers.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray and live in it for 6 months straight
2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house on the outside of the walls.
3. Pump 10 inches of nasty, crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean up, and paint the basement “deck gray.”
4. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy bar you can, pay $10 per beer until you’re hammered, then walk home in the freezing cold.
5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawnmower.
6. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays turn your water temperature up to 200 degrees, then on Tuesday and Thursday turn it down to 10 degrees. On Saturdays, and Sundays declare to your entire family that they used too much water during the week, so all showering is secured.
7. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling.
8. Have your next door neighbor come over each day at 5am, and blow a whistle so loud that Helen Keller could hear it and shout “Reveille, Reveille, all hands heave out and trice up”.
9. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in the back yard at 6am and read it to you.
10. Eat the raunchiest Mexican food you can find for three days straight, then lock yourself out of the bathroom for 12 hours, and hang a sign on the door that reads “Secured-contact senior hull techs.”
11. Submit a request form to your father-in-law, asking if it’s ok for you to leave your house before 3pm.
12. Invite 200 of your not-so-closest friends to come over, then board up all the windows and doors to your house for 6 months. After the 6 months is up, take down the boards, wave at your friends and family through the front window of your home…you can’t leave until the next day you have duty.
13. Shower with above-mentioned friends.
14. Make your family qualify to operate all the appliances in your home (i.e. Dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc.).
15. Walk around your car for 4 hours checking the tire pressure every 15 minutes.
16. Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere. This is to ensure your engine is properly “lighted off.”
17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house, and sweep your driveway 3 times a day, whether they need it or not. (hands will remain at cleaning stations for 120 minutes)
18. Repaint your entire house once a month.
19. Cook all of your food blindfolded, groping for any spice and seasoning you can get your hands on.
20. Use eighteen scoops of budget coffee grounds per pot, and allow each pot to sit 5 hours before drinking.
21. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item.
22. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, but only watch CNN and the Weather Channel.
23. Avoid watching TV with the exception of movies which are played in the middle of the night. Have the family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.
24. Have your 5-year-old cousin give you a haircut with goat shears.
25. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.
26. Spend 2 weeks in the red-light districts of Europe, and call it “world travel.”
27. Attempt to spend 5 years working at McDonalds, and NOT get promoted.
28. Ensure that any promotions you do get are from stepping on the dead bodies of your co-workers.
29. Needle gun the aluminum siding on your house after your neighbors have gone to bed.
30. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone,and shout at the top of your lungs that your home is under attack, and order them to man their action stations. (“Bong bong, bong bong, action stations, action stations, bong bong, bong bong”)
31. Make your family menu a week ahead of time and do so without checking the pantry and refrigerator.
32. Post a menu on the refrigerator door informing your family that you are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for at least an hour, when they finally get to the kitchen, tell them that you are out of steak, but you have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they don’t pay attention to the menu any more so they just ask for hot dogs.
33. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan while it is in the oven. Spread icing on real thick to level it off.
34. In the middle of January, place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have you family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4-hour intervals.
35. Lock yourself and your family in your house for 6 weeks. Then tell them that at the end of the 6th week you’re going to take them to Disneyland for “weekend leave.” When the end of the 6th week rolls around, inform them that Disneyland has been canceled due to the fact that they need to get ready for Engineering-certification, and that it will be another week before they can leave the house.
36. In your grim, gray dumpster (refer to #1), with 200 of your not-so-closest friend (cite para. 12) regardless of gender, suffer through PMS!
37. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have you wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep. She should then shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble “Sorry, wrong rack.”
38. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub, move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you shut off the water while you soap down.
39. When there is a thunderstorm in your area, find a wobbly rocking chair and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. have a supply of stale crackers in your shirt pocket.
40. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.
41. For ex-engineering types: leave the lawn mower running in your living room eight hours a day.
42. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
43. Once a week, blow compressed air up your chimney, making sure the wind carries the soot onto your neighbors house. Ignore his complaints.
44. Every other month buy green or red marine primer and put it in a paint sprayer. Spray it over the roof of your house onto your neighbors car. Ignore his complaints.
45. Lock wire the lug nuts on your car.
46. Buy a trash compactor, but use it only once a week. Store the garbage on the other side of your bathtub.
47. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread.
48. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night, jump up and get dressed as fast as you can making sure you button up the top button on your shirt, stuff you pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose.
49. Once a month, take every major appliance apart and put them back together again.
50. Install a fluorescent lamp under the coffee table and then get under it and read books.
51. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through one of them.>
52. Every so often, throw the cat in the pool and shout “Man overboard, starboard side” Then run into the house and sweep all the pots and dishes off the counter. Yell at the wife and kids for not having the kitchen “stowed for sea.”
53. Put on the headphones from your stereo set, but don’t plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck with string. Go stand in front of your stove. Say … to no one in particular “Stove manned and ready” Stand there for three or four hours. And say again to no one in particular “stove secured.” Roll up your headphones and paper cup and place them in a box.

You may have noticed that my NaNoWriMo counts have stopped increasing.  This is due to a few reasons, all of which happened at roughly the same time.

• I write on the computers at work and at home.  I transfer back and forth using email.  I spent a day writing to a file that I had emailed home from work.  Unfortunately, it was in the temp folder from when I opened it from my email client.  Net result – a full weekend day’s work lost.
• My family has been sick.  Not convieniently all at once.  One person recovers just as the next gets sick.  That has left me with no time for writing.

The net result is that this year’s attempt at NaNoWriMo has been aborted.  I will continue to work on my novel, but will now work on quality rather than quantity, and be able to make a presentable work rather than a word-count-padded one.

I gave up with handwriting my novel.  I spent yesterday’s time typing in what I already had, putting in a bit of padding along the way.  I went up by 108, which isn’t bad considering that I took out a 123-word introduction that no longer fit the direction the story was going.

My count is now at 7446, which is approximately where I should have been three and a half days ago.  Time to play a bit of catchup.

Well, I’ve managed to lose my head start.  After a good first day, which gave me a head start of 501 words, my NaNoWriMo project is now sitting at a 1244-word deficit.  Which basically means that I’m barely past yesterday’s goal, let alone at today’s.

More fun was offered in the form of an H1N1 vaccination today.  My arm is still stiff from that, but I can’t even convince myself that it’s a reason for my falling behind on NaNo.

Guess I’m going to need a productive weekend.

I spent the day today in the damage control school, learning how to use our new breathing apparatus.  As always when I wear an air pack, my shoulders are now killing me.

Anyway, I got a bit of writing done during lunch.  495 words (about a page and a half, handwritten), which brings me up to a running total of 4106.  Unfortunately, that leaves me 896 words behind my daily milestone

Guess I know what I’m doing when the kids go to bed tonight.

This Sunday marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo 2009.  This gives participants 30 days to write 50,000 words, approximately 1667 words per day.  I intend to do this without computer assistance.  50,000 words, by hand, on notebooks.

Why would I do this?  Because I’m crazy.  Actually, because I want to be able to work on it during breaks at work, which is very difficult when my writing is at home.  Emailing it back and forth is probably just going to cause confusion, in addition to excluding transit time in my writing periods.

It just so happens that I am duty twice during November, giving me lots of time with not much else to do than write.  And luckily for me, the first day of duty is also the first day of NaNo, which should give me a half-decent head start.

Let the madness begin.

I have digital cable at home, which requires the use of a cable box.  One of the joys of the cable box, as provided by Shaw, is the lack of local control.

Yup, that’s right.  If we lose the remote, there’s no way to change the channel.

On Wednesday, I will have a one-year-old son.  His current favorite game is hide-and-seek.  But he doesn’t hide himself.  He hides other things.  Toys.  Soothers.  Spoons.  Phones.  Remote controls.

The toys we can deal without.  Soothers we’re trying to get him out of anyway.  Spoons we have a-plenty.

The phones have a pager on them.  I press a button on the base, and the phone beeps loudly.  Why isn’t there such a feature on the remote?  Instead, I’m stuck searching for a remote control while Treehouse or YTV is running.

There are parts of my job that I’m not allowed to talk about.  Sometimes it makes it into the news.

We were already at sea, but since we were the duty ship, we would have been recalled.  Just got back today from the training that was originally scheduled.

I didn’t even know you could do this, but a Peter Katz, a researcher in London, has proven that movie suspense is just as terrifying as movie horror.  Seems he plugged a movie viewer into an MRI as she watched his new movie, Pop Skull, and watched her fear indicators spike.

He claims that this will improve movie making, as producers can find out exactly where his test audience loses interest.  But I’m pretty sure this isn’t a good use of a declining stockpile of medical isotopes.