You know your Famous when...

...Someone impersonates you on Facebook. The other day, I got a friends request from a someone who shared no friends with me there. So I did the normal thing, sent her an email asking did I know her? Took a look at her profile and saw that she had a post that said, "Jean and Sean Dustman are now friend", huh? I didn't accept her friends request! So I clicked on Sean Dustman and found my picture which was taken in the Coffee Shop at the Hotel St. Michael in Prescott AZ, I was helping a friend with some computer stuff. I didn't realize that I worked at the U.S. Army or studied at California State University, Northridge (if so, I want those credits!) Obviously this evil twin has different tastes then me, his music, blah, books, alright, I admit, I did like the Da Vinci Code and Transformers was cool but who hates the Transformers?

I put a complaint into Facebook last week using the "Report/Block This Person", then clicking on "Fake Profile" and on the draw down menu "Impersonating me or someone I know" and typing in my name. There is a new law in California that Criminalize's Online Impersonations which was really a step at taking out the cyberbullying that goes on online. Not that I feel bullied but it does bother me that someone is using my name and image to pick up on girls (all 8 of his friends are females from the Phillipines). Next thing I know, one of them is going to be coming after me for child support!

This guy doesn't seem to be defrauding anyone like in this story, but if any of my readers her get strange request from me, it probably wasn't and I'm fairly easy to get a hold of even though I haven't been blogging as much lately.

Surgery on my Acer Aspire One

When I picked up the new computer, I noticed reading online that it said you could replace the installed 512 ram chip with a 1 gig module and since that gig module was only 12 bucks on Amazon, how could I go wrong and pressed the one click button. Then I started looking around for directions and ran into this YouTube video and cringed. And started going though the message boards. It was split 50/50 between the people who did it and the ones that were too scared to open up their machines. I was torn till the card showed up in the mail and I couldn't help myself, I'm no mouse when it comes to fixing gadgets (and my percentages for fixing them grow higher each year).

You see, you need to take off 8 screws on the bottom including 2 under the rubber feet, unclip the key board, unplug that, unplug the touch pad, then take out 7 tiny screws and pull off the top faceplate. The mother board is jammed and only held in by the shape of the body and two screws and 2 cables and the wireless card plug. When I got to this part, I discovered that my model was different, I had a regular hard drive that was actually attached to the motherboard and the edge shoved under another metal panel, so had to unplug everything and pry up a corner and pull everything sideways then up leaving the hard drive attached to the motherboard then turned the motherboard over to get to the RAM located on the bottom. RAM is RAM, I popped out the old one and slipped the new one in. Being an ex mechanic, I‘m well versed at taking things apart and putting them back together again, everything went back together smoothly and it turned right on. It took about half an hour, I don’t recommend doing it unless you‘re good with your hands and people call you geek behind your back. After putting it all back together, I’m thinking that I should have videotaped the entire process, oh well, next time.

As far as use of the Aspire goes, this thing is better then sliced bread. I’ve got used to the touchpad and between XP and Vista, XP has it for speed hands down. This boots up in under a minute, with my card, it takes around 2 minutes to get my wireless modem to configure on Vista, this, it’s about 10 seconds and XP hasn't jammed up with Facebook yet. I think Microsoft needs to come out with a patch that strips Vista the crap out of Vista. The netbook runs cool on the lap, I have a 3 cell model it lasted for 2 hours and 10 minutes playing movies, probably more if I had turned off the WiFi. It’s amazing that you can get this much tech for 350 bucks.

Google maps is a peeping Tom

I was at a friends house and google maps caught me in her front yard unloading my wifes car! I've only been there 2 or 3 times, I just wanted to show her how street view worked. Sheesh! What are the chances of that? Maybe big brother is following me around.


View Larger Map

Bout to turn 4

It’s hard to imagine that I’ve placed 4 years of my life on the internet, I wonder how many words that is (the old blogger tracked how many words you wrote, the only problem I have with the new one). Not many bloggers, let alone milbloggers have continued on so long, my secret? I wrote when I felt like it. I have more sites up then most but a majority of the info cross pollinates, they’re just reaching different audiences. I’m like the cable company that offers cable, phone and internet, I have a monopoly on the Doc in the Box corner of cyberspace.

It all started out with my fotopage way back in the dark ages of 2003, I was taking pictures of my Marines going through training and hit a lazy spurt and got tired of making hundreds of copies of the pictures I took every week so I began posting them online for them to get when they wanted to. Lately, I haven’t posted there as much considering I’ve killed 5 cameras over since 2003, one of the cameras was a 1000 dollar model (I could get a laptop that’s 3 times as fast as my current one for that!) I’ll get back in the photo groove once I get a new (good) camera and maybe clear the 9000 picture mark.

Eventually I went to check out what this Myspace was about and copied some of my information from the blog over there and found a new audience of people that I actually knew (most of my analog friends aren’t blog readers unless the blog is on myspace). There isn’t a month that goes by when I don’t get someone from my dark and shadowy past shows up and we connect again. They have great tools for keeping you up to date on people in your immediate circle and I enjoy the heck out of it. Laugh all you want non myspace users, it’s pretty cool, yup, another internet addiction.

One day I discovered YouTube and suddenly had a place to upload the numerous videos I put together over the years. Marine Vs Camel Spider has received more hits then everything else I have put on the internet, 500 thousand plus and the comment section has taken on a life of it’s own. Even with all of the attention, it’s just a side effort when I have time, a place to put the funny little bits about my life here and there.

But all of my online efforts circle around the Doc in the Box. Here I have laid out the mundane, the funny, the boredom and definitely over the last year the pain for the entire world to see. I’ve made lifelong friends that I’ve almost known since day one and this blog has literally taken me around the world. I’ve gone to meet ups everyplace that I’ve gone, from home in Prescott to the other side of the word in Iraq, Kuwait and Thailand.

Occasionally I get offers for people to host this and move over to another service but why would I need to? (thanks for the offers though) The machine isn’t broken and does everything that I’ve ever asked it to, I’ve had maybe a week out of 4 years of blogging of down time. I’ve grown up here and I can’t really imagine moving to different digs with other rules and having to tell all of the people that link me to change their addresses would take forever, sounds like taxes with a pen and paper. Plus its totally free, out of all of my internet ventures the only thing I pay for is the premium haloscan. This place fits me like a favorite pair of jeans.

I’m sure there are people out there who wished they were getting a more impressive product in this milblog but face it, I’m a low pressure dude and most of my military job involves the murder of trees, sticking unwilling Marines with needles and sometimes the pulling of some diabolical prank. Not the stuff great epics are made of unless you wanted a blog version of MASH.

Thanks for support over the last 4 past years (in two weeks anyway) and here’s to the next 4 years.

KCET Milblogger Podcast

A couple of months ago, KCET’s Juan Devis, left a comment on my blog, he’s the producer of KCET/PBS Television’s New Media division of Southern California. He does a show called Web Stories “KCET’s multimedia webzine exploring the stories , culture, and attitudes of the people who live here”. This months project was on how new media technologies had changed how the war was being covered. The focus was on the local Southern California Milbloggers and the stories we had to tell.

He was requesting an interview for a podcast, so one afternoon, with approval from the PAO, he and I had a talk that lasted for a half hour or so and the fruits of that conversation can be found here.

Juan also got interviews from Lex, Army Girl and Colby Buzzell.

On that page, Holly Willis writes about Milblogs and compares and contrasts the difference between Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” about the Vietnam war and the phenomenon of Milblogging. One of the clearest essay’s I’ve seen on the subject, definitely a smart lady.

DITB mentioned in an Armed Forces Journal piece

Called “Web tangle”, a good article and they mentioned me in good terms.

I wrote a post about how the blocking of certain high bandwidth websites affected us from the front. Here’s the quote they used.

“Sean Dustman at Doc in the Box (http://docinthebox.blogspot.com) observes, "Out
of my 3 tours, there was a maybe a month of time when we were able to get to
these sites from work before it was cut off to our entire base. So we went to
the internet cafe if we wanted to upload pictures and blog posts. ... Know what
happened for that month we could visit those websites [from work]? It slowed
everything ... to a crawl, pages wouldn't load and there were people who wanted
to get official work done and it took forever or the .mil sites would time
out."”

And I still stand by it. While it would have been nice to be able to visit these sites from the comfort of my own office, we just don’t have the bandwidth on the government network.

Then there’s the security aspect, if you’ve been on myspace long enough, how many people do you see that have had their profiles hacked or fished? There’s some dirty code going on out there and the internet is full of such brier patches.

Also quoted was Cpl M from A Soldier’s Perspective where I also got the hat tip about the article, thanks for the ping.

New Driving Fines for 2007

Has everyone got this email forwarded to them? I even got it forwarded to me by official military channels. As with any email forward I get looks to be taking over the world, I like to fact check it. Usually the first stop is Snopes where they say it's totally false. The original email is below and here’s the link to what Snopes says and this is the link to the real laws from the DMV website that go into affect on the 1st of July 2007, I've added my comments in the red italics.

Since I don't like the idea of people driving slower then they already are, I'm sharing it with all of my readers. Remember, fact check before you forward!

1. Carpool lane - 1st time $1068.50 starting 7/1/07 (The $271 posted on the highway is old). Don't do it again because 2nd time is going to be double. 3rd time triple, and 4th time license suspended. (The real fines are $376-386 depending on the country, I wonder if the guy who wrote this is even from California? Figures from SFGate article)

2. Incorrect lane change - $380. Don't cross the lane on solid lines or intersections. (inflated over the real (another one not mentioned and also inflated)

3. Block intersection - $485 (not mentioned)

4. Driving on the shoulder - $450 (not mentioned either)

5. Cell phone use in the construction zone. - Double fine as of 07/01/07. Cell phone use must be "hands free" while driving. (just states that hands free devices will be used by 1 Jul 08, no fines stated)

6. Passengers over 18 not in their seatbelts - both passengers and drivers get tickets (not mentioned but what was mentioned was driver and passenger would get fined if they knowingly let someone ride in the trunk).

7. Speeders can only drive 3 miles above the limit (nothing said about this).

8. DUI = JAIL (Stays on your driving record for 10 years!) (it says that there is an increase of the mandatory driver license suspension of 10 months if you get a DUI with a alcohol concentration of .20% or greater and if you are under 21 you get a fined for BAC over .01%)

9. As of 07/01/07 cell phone use must be "hands free" while driving. Ticket is $285. They will be looking for this like crazy - easy money for police department (look at number 5)