Blow Up, Cool Down, Stand Up

Greetings!

Six months of silence on this blog has some people thinking the effort has been abandoned (and still others thinking that a certain General's secret hit squad had taken out another opponent). But, that is not the case. CAPTek, as a place for public discourse on the use of technology in the Civil Air Patrol was just taking a long, deep breath.

Why you ask? After the introductory post in December 2006, the intention was to release a new blog post at least every other week after the first of the year. But, then January turned out to be a surprisingly busy CAP month. In the course of dedicating (waaaay too much) time to the organization, there were several interactions with NHQ which lead to a blow up.

It was the same old stuff that always gets to all of us. Stuff like training in Mission Base Staff on WMIRS sortie tracking the Friday night before the big Saturday SAREX operations, and then the next day having a new (and broken) interface being released with no prior or post notice to members regarding the changes (Yes, effective change management will be a later blog post). Or, spending three hours trying to get OpsQuals validations to actually work. You know, the same old complaints.

Well, I realized that over the course of a few weeks I had moved from a very good "we can make positive change" attitude, to a very bad "let's get them all fired" attitude. The final nail in my bad attitude coffin was the umpteenth email to an address listed on www.cap.gov's "Contact Us" page which bounced. I had spent numerous hours over the past year corresponding with national... just to get the email addresses fixed. And on January 11, after the 4th round of notification to NHQ, there were still 6 bad email addresses.

So, I wrote up a long and cheeky blog post ranting about "If there honestly isn't enough technology talent at NHQ to keep email addresses updated, why should I think that there is enough to keep my name, contact information, and social security number secure?"

Luckily, before posting I realized that, although the facts were true and the frustration justified, the motives behind my actions were just plain piss poor.

And so I made a decision. For six months, I'll keep collecting notes on blog posts I want to do, but I will not post anything until I'm certain my attitude has changed. A few days after that decision, a NHQ staffer finally took action on correcting the email addresses.

The six months have elapsed and my attitude is back into the positive. I've got a huge stack of blog post ideas saved up, and they are going to come your way regularly.

First up is a series on Civil Air Patrol's web presence. The three part series will be rather high level, and avoid some of the nit-picky things that I'll save for three line posts later (like complaints about nationalcommander.com and capchannel.com).

Thanks for sticking around this long! Please feel free to share the captek.blogspot.com link with other interested CAP members, and subscribe to the news feed!

All my best,



KidMystic