I might still be driving the Saturn, but the Army wouldn’t ship it to Korea. The standard tour here is only a year; they don’t figure it’s worth shipping cars for such a short time. I extended my tour almost immediately on arrival, and gained eligibility to have a car shipped, but it was sold by then.

I almost bought a cheap ancient hoopty, as is traditional for army folks in Korea. For $500, you can get a car good enough to last you your year or two–probably. One of my friends here literally had one of his wheels fall off as he was driving down the highway last week. He was fine. The car was totaled. I was lucky, though: before I went with the hoopty, I happened to see a nice-looking sports car with a For Sale sign in the window. The price was right, and I ended up owning a 1992 Dodge Stealth.

It’s been a good car for Korea, quick and agile enough to blow through traffic while being cheap enough that I wouldn’t be devastated if it got wrecked somehow. Still, when I PCS out of here, I’m going to sell it off and upgrade. I’ve never owned a new car, but I’ve got enough in the bank to plausibly buy one outright. (I’m not particularly interested in buying the biggest car I could afford the loan of; it’d be a bad value proposition and also far too easy to drive beyond my abilities and wreck it.) It’s become a question, now, of what I want to buy, and (after much research) there are three major contenders.

The first option is a Mazda Miata, in its highest trim level, with the convertible hardtop. After throwing in all the options, it’s both the cheapest car I’m looking at and the most luxurious. The issue is power: it only runs a 4-cylinder engine displacing 2 liters, and statistically it’s just not in the same class as the others. Still, every review talks about its wonderful handling and the pure exhilaration of driving it; it also gets many bonus points for being a hardtop convertible. It’s the current leader in my mind for what to buy.

Alternately, I could go for a Nissan 370Z. Its ancestor, the 350Z, was the first car I ever looked at and thought “I really wish I owned that thing.” It’s pure beauty, power, and good reviews. The convertible version is reviewed even better, but costs more than I want to spend. Even as a coupe, it’s a car that looks fast standing still. Of course, the speed isn’t just in its looks; it goes quite nicely. The only real issue is the price: it’s the most expensive of the three. If my budget were 25% higher, there’s no question: I’d get this car as a convertible. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The last option is to go pure musclecar and buy a Ford Mustang GT. Here, the convertible version got markedly worse reviews than the coupe, so that’s not really an option. On the other hand, this is by a large margin the most powerful (and heaviest) of the cars I’m looking at. I honestly do not know how atavistic the thrill is of laying down twin rubber streaks on takeoff, and how it balances against the budget for tires; it’s one of the things I want to find out in a test drive. This car really has only two niggling and strange cons. The first is simple: I’d prefer a convertible. The second is that, of these three cars, this is the only one that actually makes me worry about driving within the car’s capabilities but not within mine and killing myself by accident.

If I worry about pushing too hard in the high end and dying, why bother with a sports car at all? It’s simple: they are fun. They are adrenaline in a shiny metal body; sexiness on wheels. They are enablers of joy: there is simply nothing like darting through medium-light traffic at twice its average speed, planning your movements three lane-changes ahead. There is much about driving in Korea that I’ll gladly forget the moment I leave, but I suspect that the sensation of freedom when the traffic finally opens up and the next obstacle is a speed camera 5 miles ahead is one I’ll treasure for a long time. I would never have experienced that in a hoopty; my ancient, base-model sports car is the only reason I have had that feeling. I can’t help but look forward to knowing what it will be like in a car that is modern and even more capable than what I have now.

Naturally, the day arrives and there is rain. This isn’t just any rain, though: it’s a downpour. Torrential in volume, ferocious in intensity, seemingly endless in duration. This has led to some amusing scenes.

The BN HQ parking lot, for example, is filled to capacity. At its only entrance, a large sign warns “Parking Lot Subject to Flooding. NO OVERNIGHT PARKING.” An inch of water is streaming down the tarmac at the entrance.

In front of the community center, in the normal parking lot, there’s a raised stage and some enormous speakers connected to what looks like a pile of very expensive audio equipment. In front of this are about a hundred folding metal chairs. It’s all deserted, with the electronics entarped in plastic wrap.

Surrounding that are a dozen or so small awnings for the various services, groups, and businesses that want to make a good impression on the soldiers here. Most are simply deserted. Others are manned by one or two lonely-looking but dedicated people. The only one with any customers at all is selling $1 beers, $1 hotdogs, and free popcorn. There’s an air of mirth around that one, as though everyone suspects that they are being ridiculous. Periodically someone pokes the awning, pushing a solid sheet of water off the edge.

I like the rain, and I don’t like crowds. I probably should feel bad that this is how the summerfest is turning out, but honestly it is just amusing.

Still, it always pays to do your research. I got a headstart here because Jeff Atwood, whose design sense and instincts I trust, already researched an excellent combination of the three major components: motherboard, processor, and memory.

I could do the same thing as him and simply upgrade my current machine. However, that means discarding several hundred dollars of hardware that, though four years old, still works just fine. That appalls my sense of economy. There’s always room in my house for a spare computer; most likely, this will end up as an Ubuntu box a few times more powerful than my laptop for use as a development platform.

Instead of upgrading, then, I’m going to construct a new machine entirely. What’s a computer made of? Well, in the order in which you choose the parts, it’s made of a case, motherboard, processor, memory, graphics card, hard drive(s), optical drive, and power supply. If you’re planning on overclocking, you’ll also want some coolers.

Given that I’m stealing the choices for items 2-4 and the cooler straight from Jeff, my first actual choice is as to the case. The first one I looked at was the Antec Skeleton. It’s got an interesting look, and the open air design promises both excellent heat dissipation and automatic dust removal. However, it had two strikes against it: all the reviews said the cables were just too short for anyone not experienced in their routing, and it was expensive.

Instead, I’m going with the Antec 300. It’s a plain black box, with plenty of ventilation and an unassuming face. That’s exactly what I want in a computer case: an unobtrusive design with no external moving parts, no fancy moulding to mess up the lines, no transparent panels or LEDs to show off the internals.

Before I start talking about the GCU, I need to talk about my monitor. It’s an entry-level LCD I bought on my return from Japan; it had turned out cheaper to sell the one I had there and then buy a new one in the US than to ship the old one. It was nice for the price, but it just doesn’t compare to the monitors that are available now. I’ve more than once had someone come in to my room, see my setup, and remark that they were startled that I didn’t have a fancier monitor. Finally, I decided to buy one. I’m going for a Samsung T260HD. It’s bigger, brighter, and has a much better contrast ratio than my old monitor. Also, its native resolution is 1920×1200.

Once you know what resolution you’re targeting, you can start looking at video cards. Those are the sort of beast where you can spend as much or as little as you want; either way, you get what you paid for in terms of quality at a given resolution. Luckily, there are sites and lists out there to help make the scale clear. I just scrolled down the list until I got to “Excellent performance at 1920×1200,” and had my choice: a Radeon HD 5850.

Next up are the hard drives. I have to admit that SSDs are appealing to me for their raw speed, even if they’re still way too expensive to use as the only internal drive. I currently have a two-disc RAID-0 setup, which is nice, but it can be improved upon. Again, I’m taking my cue from Jeff’s recommendation for one. However, that’s both barely sized to keep the essentials I want to blaze, and an absurd price per gigabyte. I’m adding in a Western Digital Caviar Blue 640 GB drive for internal storage, which has the best review score per price per gigabyte that I’ve seen. Added together, I’ve got three quarters of a terabyte internal at an overall cost of $0.65 per gigabyte.

Optical drives, unless you choose BluRay, are a mature technology. I just wanted something cheap, fast, and well-reviewed. Right now that’s a MSI DVD-RW drive so generic it doesn’t even have its own name.

Now that all the internals are chosen, it’s time to buy a power supply. I used to do this the hard way: tracking down the expected consumptions of the various parts I’d chosen, adding them up, adding a fudge factor, and going from there. These days, there’s an app for that. It told me I needed 472 watts. I had a few other considerations: I wanted something modular, so I wouldn’t have excess cabling inside the case, and I wanted something with an 80+ stamp so that I wouldn’t be paying through the nose for electricity. When you put those requirements together, what you get is the OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W.

There’s one more thing a computer needs: an OS. I suppose I could just throw in my customized XP image, but it doesn’t support all that RAM. Beside, it’d be a shame to put a 32 bit OS into all that 64 bit hardware. I’m just going to bite the bullet and get Windows 7 Professional. The main reason for the Pro upgrade is to get XP mode, because that’s too cool a feature to miss. Full, automatic virtualization of XPSP3 ensures that there is no such thing as compatibility issues.

Now that the parts are chosen, it’s time for some sanity checks. Does the CPU cooler fit in the case? Do the CPU and MB agree on their interface (FCLGA1366)? Do the drives and MB agree on interface (SATA II)? Do the GPU and MB agree on interface (PCIe)? Does the PSU have at least 500W and two PCIe 6-pin connectors per the GPU requirement? Do the GPU and monitor share an output format? Do all the components including the OS agree on architecture (64 bit)?

As it turns out, the answer to all these questions is “yes.” Now, it’s just time to order. The full parts list follows:
Monitor: SAMSUNG T260HD
Case: antec 300
PSU: OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W
MB: ASRock X58 Extreme
CPU: Intel Core i7-960 3.2 GHz CPU (to be overclocked to 4.0 GHz)
Cooler: XIGMATEK HDT-S1283
GCU: sapphire radeon hd 5850
Memory: Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 2000 x3
Boot Drive: crucial 128gb ssd
Storage Drive: wd caviar blue 640gb
Optical Drive: msi black sata dvd
OS: windows 7 professional 64 bit oem

$ 2800 later, my new computer is on its way. More to follow as I get it going, then review my impressions. As for now, I’m just trying to ward off sticker shock. It’s the most I’ve ever spent at one time for a computer. It’s by far the most powerful one I’ve ever owned, and I’m going to overclock it to the point of being ridiculous, but still. This computer is more expensive than my car, more expensive than my motorcycle, more expensive than my camera and xbox and rock band put together.

It should be worth it.

It was a deal too good to refuse.

There are some hassles associated with motorcycle ownership, at least around Fort Rucker. Every month or two, there is a mandatory motorcycle inspection; you have to spend an hour for someone to look over the thing, dip the oil stick, measure the tread depth, then send you on your way. I’ll probably have to retake the Motorcycle Safety Foundation basic riding course, as I have no idea where the certificate is from the first time I took it. Base policy requires that I wear a reflective belt over my reflective motorcycle jacket; otherwise in the event I am injured riding they may make me pay for any resultant medical care.

Even so, there are also advantages: the military gives motorcycles better parking spaces than even handicapped people get, and commanders all up the chain officially support motorcycle use: last month, my company commander gave anyone with a motorcycle a Friday off in order to participate in an organized ride. Beyond that, it is nice to have to fill up the tank only every second week, and then to spend only $10 on it.

The best reason is the simplest, though: motorcycles are fun.

For those interested in the bike itself, it is a 2007 Buell XB9R Firebolt.

The bill is in plaintext. It’s maybe a page long. It’s got some interesting parts to it. Try section 8.

Presumably the plan isn’t to just take the money and burn it all in the form of $1 bills, warming all of North America, preventing people from needing to spend any on heating this winter, so that they can spend the money on something more economically stimulating. If it was decided to do exactly that, though, there would be no legal recourse.

Get on the phone with your representative, today. Take the half hour or whatever and call them. A bailout is bad policy in general, and this one is so stupidly implemented it is hard to imagine something worse. We cannot let this just happen to us.

(For a more in-depth argument against this, look here.)

Can even Joss Whedon tell a grand story in half an hour? No, but luckily, he didn’t even try to. Instead, it’s an unexpectedly funny musical about an aspiring supervillain, his jerk of a nemesis, and the girl they both want.

I recommend it. If it is currently midnight of 20 July 2008 or earlier, click through and watch it right now. Otherwise, skip lunch tomorrow and spend the $4 on this series instead. You won’t regret it.

People tend to like software that is easy and intuitive. The vast success of the iPod and iPhone speak to that. The Army’s paid a ton of money over the years for a variety of custom software systems which, as a rule, have some technically impressive things going on in the back end, but are nearly impossible to use due to the atrocious user interface. Generals can issue doctrine stating that the Army software is the official way of getting things done, but no soldier is going to be reprimanded if his commander can see that the task is being accomplished more efficiently using something else.

I suspect that the Army could recoup some of its investment by opening up the source code to its software systems, even if only to soldiers. There are enough of us that some percentage are pretty much guaranteed to know how to code, and incentive to substantially improve Army software even if only to get bonus points at the next promotion board. However, there’d need to be a technically literate person fairly high in the chain of command for that to happen, and I’m not too optimistic that that’ll happen anytime in the near future.

That conclusion was the one he’d been advocating from the start. It was enough to get me to create an account at an online poker site and try my hand at the fake-money games which you can play for free. As expected, I started by losing horribly. However, it wasn’t long before I was actually increasing my fake-money bankroll. My plan was to continue to practice on fake money until I’d built up a sum significant enough to convince myself that the winnings weren’t just statistical noise; that I was in fact winning at poker. My friend would have none of this: he noted that I was starting to make money, and sent ten real dollars into my account to use at the penny blind tables.

That was two days ago. As of right now, I have something over $20 in my account–it took me a lot less time than I expected to double my money. I’m not making nearly the amount of money that my friend does, but he’s been playing for years, and is willing to put far more money on the line. Once I double it again, I’ll pay him back his seed cash; my bankroll should be self-sustaining by that point.

It’s fair to say that I’ve picked up a new hobby. I’ve been playing games combining various amounts of strategy and luck for the majority of my life, now, but I’ve avoided card games in the past. When played without stakes, they were simply uninteresting; when played for money, I always developed atrociously high burn rates. This variant of poker–no limit texas holdem–avoids both pitfalls. I can’t claim yet to be a good player yet, but I expect eventually to be. Even on the lowest-stakes tables, taking real money that I could take out and go buy lunch with carries a thrill that few other games can match.

Actually, flying at cruise speed and altitude is significantly easier than near-ground hover operations, which was the other thing the instructors were supposed to give us all a taste of this morning. Unfortunately for us, the surface winds were gusting at 15-25 knots. Technically speaking, as the effective translational lift for our helicopters kicks in at around 20 knots or so, this meant that with each gust of wind came a wild surge upwards and away from the wind. At the peak of this surge, our rotors would come out of ground effect at almost the exact same moment that we picked up enough velocity from the gust to cancel out the ETL. Losing both sources of lift simultaneously sent us plummeting towards the ground, hauling on the collective. In practical terms, this meant that instead of practicing sedate hovers three feet off the ground at no more than a walking pace, we were instead fluttering about like dry leaves in a fall windstorm. This may have been because all of us are flight noobs, but the IPs were unanimous in insisting that it really was bad weather for a first flight.

Fun money facts! In my hour of flight today, I personally burned about $100 of jet fuel, incurred probably five times that between scheduled maintenance and the salary of the IP, and earned under $20. That’s fine; the real payment for any aviator is the flight itself.

An engineer from Bell emailed me back; apparently, the reason the Army didn’t give us any equations for flight planning was that Bell doesn’t generally provide any to the Army or any other end user. I can still hope for backchannel release of the equations–it seems likely to me that the equations themselves would be generally applicable to rotor-wing aviation, and that only the particular constants are specific to the model of helicopter–but it’s a much slimmer possibility than it was before. It looks like manual chart-reading will remain a major pastime in my future.

I feel more like Peter Pan than I ever have in my life: all it took was a whim, a happy thought, 20 months, and a little bit of effort, and I’m flying! Also, I spend my time surrounded by lost boys who had the same idea. Give it just a bit of time, and I’m sure I’ll be flitting around doing perpetual battle with Osama bin Hook.

Around the end of January, seven months into my stay, I started thinking seriously about whether or not I should renew the contract. I wasn’t worried at all about whether corporate would decide to retain me; both the area head teacher and the parents who came in during open-house week had given me very positive reviews. I couldn’t complain about the compensation; I was paid a full time salary for less than 20 hours of work weekly, and it was enough that I was saving about a third of it in an average month. I got along well enough with my coworkers, liked my students, and loved living in Japan.

The only real problem was my job itself: teaching. I dated a woman for a year and a half who was training to be a teacher, but that was as close as I ever got to formal qualifications for the job. Over the course of my stay in Japan, I learned enough to perform adequately, but the the job just wasn’t fun. I don’t know if, with the proper training, I could have been a dynamic teacher investing a lot into creating unique lesson plans and working to truly develop my students; I do know that without that training, I was just teaching straight from the book and desperately inventing tactics on the fly to try to keep the students engaged. Despite the feedback from the parents and the area teacher, I felt underqualified; despite the assurances of my coworkers and my adult students that I was doing well, I couldn’t help but notice that every few months a student would leave, and it took a lot longer for new students to enroll. A decline in the customer base, no matter how gradual, is a bad thing for any business. It was hard to escape the conclusion that, as the only actual teacher in that school, I had something to do with that decline.

Once the time came to notify corporate, I had decided not to stay at that job another year. I would attempt to stay in Japan if possible–there aren’t very many options for people of limited Japanese ability there which aren’t teaching English–and I would also look into other options in the US. On 15 April, I sent an email to the Army on a whim asking if they had any options for a direct path to flying helicopters. Flying helicopters sounded like it might be cool; I actually expected them to say that no, I could enlist in the hopes of earning flight but there could be no guarantees. I was startled and pleased when, two days later, they told me that I could get a guaranteed pilot slot if I was willing to become a Warrant Officer.

Exactly one week after I sent that email, my immediate boss died. A month after that, I was informed that his heir was going to shut down the business at the end of July. Technically, my contract expired a month earlier, but I wasn’t going to stick the bereaved with the responsibility of finding a replacement teacher for a single month. All of a sudden, there was a definite end point in sight. I found myself scheduling a return flight, and making decisions as to how to dispose of my stuff. My experience moving to Japan taught me that the less I tried to bring back, the happier I would be. I ended up selling my bicycle to a tiny Japanese woman who could barely reach the pedals; one of my adult students volunteered to interpret at a pawn shop so I could sell those miscellaneous things I didn’t think worth the price of shipping home.

In the meantime, the only fruitful job leads were to be English-speaking tech support in Japan, or to go with the Army to fly. There was no question about which was the better deal; while I wanted to remain in Japan, it wasn’t a higher priority than the opportunity to become a pilot. The decision to leave, when it came, hardly felt like a decision at all. It was just the natural course of things; I follow interesting opportunities the way water follows the lowest path. I had about as much choice as the water does.

People react to endings in various ways. When my students found out that the business was closing, some of them quit immediately. Some, including all of the adults, decided to stick it out through the end. Some stayed exactly long enough to determine which other English school in the area they preferred, at which point they transferred without any duplication of service. For my own part, it was an intensely bittersweet feeling to realize that there would be nobody to train up as a replacement; that shortly after I left, there would be nothing left of the business but memories. Despite my lack of training, I was doing my best to teach well and improve the school in whatever ways I could think of; all of that effort, in the end, turned out not to mean very much at all.

With one chapter of my life closing, I turned almost instinctually to the next one. I counted down the days and hours to various final events in Japan. Even as I said any number of fond goodbyes, I was already thinking of the upcoming hellos. I’m not a real fan of the emotion of loss; perhaps that’s why I concentrated so very hard at that time on looking forward to upcoming adventures.

As it turns out, moving internationally is a lot easier the second time, despite all the TSA’s efforts to ensure that every year flying is more annoying than it was the year before. I shipped the majority of my luggage to the airport in advance, I took some final photos of the area where I lived, and I cleaned the place. The morning of my departure was beautiful: sunny, cool, scattered clouds. Somehow, 16 months after the fact, I can’t remember the bus ride, or the trains, or the flight. All I remember is locking up my apartment for the last time, checking carefully to ensure I hadn’t left anything behind. I adjusted my backpack, and then I moved out.