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Career & Productivity

This category combines practical career advice, proven productivity systems, strategies for ongoing skill development, and thought-provoking industry commentary into a single resource for tech and engineering professionals. You’ll find guidance on navigating your career path, techniques for optimizing workflows and staying focused, methods for continuously learning new technologies, and critical analysis of broader trends shaping today’s workforce—all designed to help you grow, stay productive, and remain ahead of the curve.

OFX for USAA via Ruby

My wife and I have been through roughly 10-15 different budget/financial tracking systems. We started with every penny in MS Money, used several different spreadsheets, spent several years in Mint and have pretty much dropped all of that for a top-down strategy that has us budgeting savings, non-discretionary spending, and a rainy day buffer and […] read more

Information Dieting Plans

Read not the Times; read the Eternities. Henry David Thoreau I’ve always struggled with how I process, manage and output information. I am basically an information junk food addict. I love consuming new and shiny bits of history, philosophy or modern commentary. A teaching company course catalogue is like a smorgasbord to a junk food […] read more

Defense Acquisition Certification

Here is a post that I hope is helpful to others out there who can be paralyzed from taking action to getting professional acquisition certifications. What is the official name and background of this program? The official name is the Acquisition Professional Development Program. The Acquisition Professional Development Program (APDP) promotes the development and sustainment […] read more

IMA equations

Here are some of the questions I had when starting as an IMA. How do you schedule IDTs? You have to be on a .mil domain or else you need to use arrows-r. utaps Who pays? IDTs and the 2-week annual tour are centrally funded. What are my work requirements? I am cat A with […] read more

Wind speed calculation

I want to know the impact of wind on endurance. So we have something like this: This gives us 8 cases of wind direction: From this we can infer that going to the center from one of the 8 directions. So an overall flight path would look like this: If each grid cell is a […] read more

Arc versus Active Duty

test google.load(‘visualization’, ‘1’, {packages: [‘geomap’]}); function drawVisualization() { var data = new google.visualization.DataTable(); data.addRows(51); data.addColumn(‘string’, ‘State’); data.addColumn(‘number’, ‘Military’); data.setValue(0,0,’US-AK’); data.setValue(0,1,108); data.setValue(1,0,’US-AL’); data.setValue(1,1,172); data.setValue(2,0,’US-CA’); data.setValue(2,1,639); data.setValue(3,0,’US-CO’); data.setValue(3,1,384); data.setValue(4,0,’US-DE’); data.setValue(4,1,66); data.setValue(5,0,’US-FL’); data.setValue(5,1,322); data.setValue(6,0,’US-GA’); data.setValue(6,1,441); data.setValue(7,0,’US-HI’); data.setValue(7,1,434); data.setValue(8,0,’US-ID’); data.setValue(8,1,48); data.setValue(9,0,’US-IL’); data.setValue(9,1,248); data.setValue(10,0,’US-KS’); data.setValue(10,1,218); data.setValue(11,0,’US-LA’); data.setValue(11,1,243); data.setValue(12,0,’US-MA’); data.setValue(12,1,306); data.setValue(13,0,’US-MD’); data.setValue(13,1,59); data.setValue(14,0,’US-ME’); data.setValue(14,1,242); data.setValue(15,0,’US-MN’); data.setValue(15,1,118); data.setValue(16,0,’US-MO’); data.setValue(16,1,123); data.setValue(17,0,’US-NC’); data.setValue(17,1,206); data.setValue(18,0,’US-NY’); […] read more

All Air National Guard Forces

google.load(‘visualization’, ‘1’, {packages: [‘geomap’]}); function drawVisualization() { var data = new google.visualization.DataTable(); data.addRows(51); data.addColumn(‘string’, ‘Country’); data.addColumn(‘number’, ‘Guard Authorizations’); data.setValue(0,0,’US-AK’); data.setValue(0,1,723); data.setValue(1,0,’US-AL’); data.setValue(1,1,759); data.setValue(2,0,’US-AR’); data.setValue(2,1,658); data.setValue(3,0,’US-AZ’); data.setValue(3,1,762); data.setValue(4,0,’US-CA’); data.setValue(4,1,1627); data.setValue(5,0,’US-CO’); data.setValue(5,1,464); data.setValue(6,0,’US-CT’); data.setValue(6,1,442); data.setValue(7,0,’US-DC’); data.setValue(7,1,49); data.setValue(8,0,’US-DE’); data.setValue(8,1,374); data.setValue(9,0,’US-FL’); data.setValue(9,1,703); data.setValue(10,0,’US-GA’); data.setValue(10,1,937); data.setValue(11,0,’US-HI’); data.setValue(11,1,735); data.setValue(12,0,’US-IA’); data.setValue(12,1,670); data.setValue(13,0,’US-ID’); data.setValue(13,1,394); data.setValue(14,0,’US-IL’); data.setValue(14,1,1120); data.setValue(15,0,’US-IN’); data.setValue(15,1,635); data.setValue(16,0,’US-KS’); data.setValue(16,1,746); data.setValue(17,0,’US-KY’); data.setValue(17,1,435); data.setValue(18,0,’US-LA’); […] read more

ARC and Active Basing

This is just an attempt to understand where bases are and by which component. Total Locations google.load(‘visualization’, ‘1’, {packages: [‘geomap’]}); function drawVisualization() { var data = new google.visualization.DataTable(); data.addRows(120); data.addColumn(‘string’, ‘City’); data.addColumn(‘number’, ‘Auths’); data.setValue(0,0,’ABSTON, AL’); data.setValue(0,1,50); data.setValue(1,0,’ALCOA, TN’); data.setValue(1,1,276); data.setValue(2,0,’ANDREWS, MD’); data.setValue(2,1,18); data.setValue(3,0,’AURORA, CO’); data.setValue(3,1,3); data.setValue(4,0,’BARKING SANDS, HI’); data.setValue(4,1,138); data.setValue(5,0,’BEALE, CA’); data.setValue(5,1,82); data.setValue(6,0,’BOISE AIR TERMINAL, […] read more