Hurricane Isabel blew through a week ago last Thursday, but not through Raleigh, really. Thank goodness. The fire department had spent time preparing, even had the generator up and running when the power went out. The computers up there didn't like the generator power, but the radios and the TV were fine, and what more can you really ask for??
REDS team was poised to deploy for the coast, but didn't get called up, which I believe means things weren't as bad there as could have been. I know someone who lives near the coast, and evacuated to their house in Apex. The house on the coast never lost power, while the house in Apex was down for 9 hours. Go figure.
Got an offer on the table for someone to quit smoking. Hope she takes me up on it.
The fire department had a live burn trailer in Tuesday night. A little warm in there, and pulling hose in and out kicked my butt. Getting up to swim at 5:15 that morning probably didn't help.
I took up swimming as my new form of excercise. Can't run because of the knees, but swimming definitely fits the bill. Working on getting the stamina up again, that'll take a while. Hopefully it won't take the 14 years it took for me to get into this mess!
Public Safety day in the neighborhood tomorrow, Rach is running it. Should be fun, bring the big red truck out.
Coming up on the end of the quarter at work. Busy busy busy
What can be said on a day like today? The radio alone can bring tears to your eyes, remembering that day two years ago.
This has of course become a very personal day for Firefighters and other Emergency Services workers. At no other time in history has it been made so apparent to the public the risks gladly taken every day by emergency services workers, "just doing what they do" (Alan Jackson). It's one of the reasons I got back into the fire service, to be a small part of making sure that there's always someone ready to go into that building to take care of those trying to get out.
There's a lot of courage still being shown today by Emergency Services workers just doing their jobs, military personnel doing the same thing. They all deserve our support.
But don't forget the others showing courage as well. Everyone who got up and walked into work the next day, everyone who got on a plane when they flew again, everyone who strived to overcome the huge gap left in businesses and lives by the people we lost, they're all heros.
Let's never forget the people on flight 93, who took a vote, then took their plane back.
OK, here's a new one for me. I wanted to set up NTP services on my computer here at work, and couldn't remember where to find that nifty little utility I wrote about last time. So, I went to my own blog to find the link. Seems like something is wrong with that.
This weekend I accomplished all my dives for Open Water Diver certification. The swim test was fun, but no big deal. Next step is Emergency Rescue Diver. The ERD swim test is twice as long, a few other tests make it sound like this is going to be a bit of work.
Saturday Brandon is going to be joining me at REDS training. We'll be doing search and rescue, with the canines. He's real excited about being a "victim" for the search.
OK, so here I am, trying to finalize my new setup, and decide that I really want the NTP stuff to work. So, to get a 37 second correction to the time on my Windows box, I set up 2 NTP servers (1 to test), track down public ntp servers, (which you can find here), and finding clients for my Win2000 system. A really nice, easy to set up client can be found here.
So, I spent about 2 hours to get a 37 second correction to my clocks. Does that seem to make sense? I didn't think so. But, it was fun.
This all started out when I was looking at setting up an apache server on my new system so I'd have a test bed for modifying my web site. If you think I don't blog often, this is pathetic. Check out www.cyberschneider.com, but don't expect to be impressed. It hasn't been updated for a year. My wife is asking how she can do it, and I'm going to have to figure that out.
What else is going on? Brandon starts Karate tomorrow. Wendy went away for the weekend (Where are you?). I'm wishing I had another day off, but since I get on a plane tomorrow, guess I have to get motivated.
I'm hoping to set up postnuke as a replacement or a very large engine behind the scenes for the web site. Haven't had much luck there!
Perhaps tonight I'll get to the fire meeting, but don't know for sure because it's a holiday!
Hmm... Maybe today I put a link to the blog on the web site. There's an idea!
Argh. Thought I lost this. IE decided to barf every time I tried to save! still there though, the world is good.
RangerRick, who hosts my site, moved to a new server recently. Man, is it FAST! Thanks!