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There were a few movies coming out this year that I was really looking forward to seeing. The latest Indiana Jones flick being one of them. Yeah, Mom already spilled the beans on the alien spoiler, so I’m not as disappointed about missing that one. Renting the aging Indy when I get back to the States will be just fine.

However, while knowing the time frame in which I was going to be residing in Iraq, initially seeing the release date of the new Batman movie when I first saw the preview last year, I was quite disgusted. I’ve been highly anticipating the next title since 2005, after seeing Batman Begins and watching as Batman flipped the Joker’s calling card in the last scene. I’m not normally a big fan of the comic-made-movie flicks, but Batman Begins was a damn good epic. It was well thought out, well made, well acted by a great cast and the story contained a lot of universal elements that I think a lot of guys can identify with. Many may disagree, but surprisingly enough (even to me) that flick is definitely on my top favorites, up there with the likes of The Gladiator, Braveheart, and 300. So you can imagine, it really hurt to find out that I was going to be in Iraq when Dark Knight was going to be released in theaters.

Turns out the whole country has been highly anticipating this movie. Good to know I’m not the only weirdo. The other good news about that is with this movie breaking box office records already, it should still be in theaters when I get back stateside in September.

But what has been most intriguing to me is all the talk of Heath Ledger and his last performance as the infamous Joker, and that’s what spurred me to write this post. If you’ve now seen Dark Knight, let me know what you thought of the character. Please… no spoilers!!! Give me something to look forward to when I get back from this hellhole.

It’s Sir Michael Caine’s opinion that Heath Ledger beat the odds and topped Jack Nicholson’s Joker from Batman (1989): “Jack was like a clown figure, benign but wicked, maybe a killer old uncle. He could be funny and make you laugh. Heath’s gone in a completely different direction to Jack, he’s like a really scary psychopath. He’s a lovely guy and his Joker is going to be a hell of a revelation in this picture.” Caine bases this belief on a scene where the Joker pays a visit to Wayne Manor. He’d never met Ledger before, so when Ledger arrived and performed he gave Caine such a fright he forgot his lines.   -Trivia for The Dark Knight (2008), imdb.com

So I got to meet the infamous Lt. Dan the other night (Click on the thumbnail to see a fullsize pic). Great guy. Very laid back and personable. Every time I thanked him for coming out, he thanked me for what I’m doing. Mr. Sinise earned my total respect. …and let’s not forget, he’s an exceptional actor too.

I have more pics of Gary Sinise and I, along with all my pics from this deployment in an album HERE.

Also, Mr. Chuck Simmins asked that I write a post for his news blog, America’s North Shore Journal, about my visit with Gary Sinise. See my guest post by clicking HERE.

With all the crap I go through out here in God-forsaken Iraq, I’m happy to say that I now have 3 things to look forward to, and the thoughts of these 3 things keep me going through the day-to-day :

1. I only have 6 more months left in active duty Marine Corps.
2. I have an incredible woman waiting for me back in Florida when I get out.
3. And now I have the new GI Bill to look forward to when I get out which will guarantee a full ride to the most expensive state university in my state, pay for books, and provide a monthly living stipend equal to that of a married E-5 in the active duty military.

Now, of course the most important listed here is the incredible woman who will have been waiting almost 2 years for me when I get out at the end of this year, but that wonderful story isn’t for a blog.

The story here is the new GI Bill. Ok, it’s technically not law yet, but if you’ve been following the story in the last few months, you’d know that the chances of the President signing it into law here within the next couple weeks are really good, in fact, expected. In case you haven’t heard of this new GI Bill and how it came about, I’ll sum it up for you real quick.

• Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, introduced the Senate bill in 2007.
• The “New GI Bill” gained a lot of momentum and public attention from veteran groups like the IAVA.
• The bill passed in both the House and the Senate with bipartisan support in May 2008.
• The DOD spoke out against the bill saying it was going to hurt military retention.
• The President sided with the DOD and promised to veto the bill.
• A bipartisan deal was brokered and the bill passed as an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2008, commonly referred to as the war funding bill.
• The war funding bill (along with the attached GI Bill amendment) passed Congress last week with a landslide vote (Senate 92-6).
• The bill has been presented to the President’s desk for his signature and is expected to be signed by July 4th.

Now, I’m not here to debate the new GI Bill and whether it’s going to hurt retention, help recruitment, so on and so on. I’m just going to say this:

I joined the Marine Corps purely out of a sense of duty to my country during a time of war. I have no regrets. I’m proud of what I did. I know I did the right thing. But if this new GI Bill didn’t have a chance of going through, it would very easily feel like I took 4 years worth of back stepping in my life as I would go back home and struggle to start a new life with a woman, try to find a job again, and maybe go back to school if everything else permits with time and money.

This new GI Bill is going to give me a good jump start back into a normal life and gives me a sense of gratitude from the country I gave to. Am I saying that you sacrifice for others in order to get gratitude from them? No. You do it because you know it’s the right thing. But it sure as hell feels good when they do show gratitude! Doesn’t it?

That’s all I’m saying here about the new GI Bill. But this is just one man’s story and the humble opinion of a Marine in Iraq.

Some of you reading this may have time in the military and have a lot of questions about this new GI Bill. This page on Military.com gives a good overview about the bill and has answered most questions I’ve had:

New GI Bill Overview

Besides an absence of spam in your inbox, here’s another big reason to love facebook: Open Source. In this video, Dan Farber of CNET interviews Jonathan Heilger, VP of tech ops at Facebook, and Heilger tells us that they use mostly all open source technology for their infrastructure - Apache, PHP, MySQL, memcached - and not only are they big proponents of open source, but they are also contributers.

I’m looking for a facebook widget to put in my sidebar here.  If anyone out there knows how to do this, let me know.  Until then, just do a search for me and we can be facebook friends. 

Well I wanted to blog from the first day of when our training initially started for Deployment Deuce, but obviously that didn’t happen. Besides time not permitting, I wasn’t yet familiar with how to set this thing up. So now that I’m out here in The Great Suck, if I’m not running out to one of the class yards to fix a computer that some Marine was too rough with, I’m sitting at my desk finding things to learn, which is great. We’ve been out here for about a month now. Things are settling down now, but when we first got out here and took over, it was chaos, pure chaos. Helping to maintain the database, the network and all of the equipment for all of Supply/Storage makes me sorta like the Geek on Call… Marine Corps style. It’s weird. They call us the Blue Room and as of now it consists of a civilian and I working days and my only Marine on the night shift. I have my own little Polaris because my network covers a large area of the base and when they call me with an issue, I hop in the “Stump Jumper” and putter on down there to try to fix what ever frail equipment the destructive forces have maimed and mutilated. Marines and computer equipment just don’t marry well… at all. Not even the Panasonic Toughbook is tough enough. We have one of those left and it’s on it’s last leg with missing keys and parts hanging off that probably shouldn’t be. So you can imagine, I have my work cut out for me.

At this point, we have pretty much put out all the fires, and now we’re coming up with our own projects. For a while there, I was reminded of my bar tending days when I’d be 8 deep at the bar all screaming for the most ridiculous and time consuming drink to make: frozen strawberry daiquiris. These Marines here were all screaming at us for “strawberry daiquiris” and I just didn’t have time for them all. Then every morning we’d have section head meetings and guess who all the requests and questions were directed to. That’s right, this guy, the NCOIC of the Geek Squad. Well, as I said, it’s much better now so maybe we can start taking on some projects to get this network and all its equipment runner more smoothly.