War

Graduate Nerf Wars

December 29, 2011 by rickety 4 Comments

A friendly photograph before we started shooting each other

Rachel graduated with her Bachelors degree in Child & Family Studies and Derek with his M.B.A. To celebrate we ate out, waged Nerf War, and finished with cake. So on Wednesday it was off to Cafe Rio and then to Jake and Rachel’s basement.

We divided into two teams with total annihilation of the opposing team the goal. A player was considered killed when he or she was hit in the head with a Nerf bullet. Each team had LED rings in their team color for identification.

I spent most of my time as a Nerf War correspondent, taking photographs on the front lines. Yes, it was a war out there…

Adelaide

Aurora

Dan

Derek

Jake

Jill

Megan

Paul

Rachel

Steven

In the end we all ate a Congratulations Grads cake

Precision Smokestack Targeting

June 17, 2011 by rickety Leave a Comment

Once in awhile I read an amusing quote. There was one recently in an article by The Wall Street Journal reporting on the Pentagon’s first cyber strategy. Part of the plan warns nations of the consequences of attacking the U.S. by hacking computer systems. Hackers, supported by national governments, pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.

An unidentified U.S. military official said:

“If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.”

Previous attacks have originated from Russia and China but often both the perpetrator and impact are unclear.

My Work at the Department of Defense

November 3, 2008 by rickety 7 Comments

I don’t normally write about my work but on finding some old rickety photographs over the week-end I thought you would be interested in the stories behind them. Back in 1995 drug runners were getting the upper hand. They even had navigational charts with the current locations of United States Navy and Coast Guard patrol boats. The Department of Defense decided a new approach was needed. A secret program to inject a little terror into the drug runners and disrupt their operations was begun. I was chosen to lead the program because as a federal civilian employee with a lot of “use or lose” annual leave it would just be assumed that I was on vacation if I was not at my desk.

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