Okay here's a cheery post

The wailing must end sometime, I made this video of climbing Thumb Butte with my buddies and 2 of our kids fourteen years after that other Thumb Butte video. I still sound dorky and have found out that a small palm sized camcorders are very shaky. I did have a great time and look forward to my next trip up there.

Climbing Thumb Butte 14 years later

On leave in Arizona, I gathered some of the old gang to climb Thumb Butte 14 years after the videos below were made, pictures can be found here. We all were a little older and slower but we were well able to keep up with the young ones, it was the first time for my son Collin and Larry's son Alec. It took a little bit of work to get my son up there but the results were worth it. Thumb Butte has always been one of my groups rites of passage. It's a mountain that sticks up out of the middle of Prescott Arizona.

Here's the part of gang who were able to make it from the left, Dan, Larry, his son Alec, me, Jason and my son Collin. A beautiful day the will live long in memory, thanks for coming guys.

Us climbing Thumb Butte 14 years later

Pictures can be found here

Getting ready for an Arizona run with the son

Collin are hitting the road tomorrow to go see the family. After the craziness of Comic-Con, I Opted for something a milder, such as converting old 8mm to a digital format and editing some of it to post online.

The result of my day of making movies, the first is a really short clip of when I could still fly, I'm too slow and chunky for such things these days (and I don't have a rope).


The first is a clip of my good buddy Larry and I at Granite Dells in Prescott Arizona doing some rappelling. If you listen long enough you can hear his ditty that he made with one line “Sean Dustman plummeting to his death…" and his shoe falling off twice. He also pulls some tasteless pranks such as screaming about the rope not hitting the ground when I'm on my way down and offering some friendly greetings to the guy from the next video, Dan.


The second clip is an earlier day rappelling with Dan, not as wild but the close up of his knees shaking is pretty funny.


The third is with Dan and my ex wife getting stuck and unstuck in the snow in 1997, I had totally forgot about it till I saw the video, anyway, it shows what I look like without any hair and my favorite old Nissan.

Four days of Comic-Con

And our feet are sore and we’re seeing the world through new eyes. Stepping into Comic-Con is like stepping into a world of alien beings, where the strange is the norm. One crowd stopper was the girl with the M16 leg in the Grind House booth, here’s a picture of me in my Browncoat outfit and her (I wonder if she's a combat vet?) More of her can be found here

Collin liked all of the Halo stuff.

I’m still putting together the video clips and will hopefully post the video tomorrow, more pictures can be found on my fotopage.

Comic-Con 2007 San Diego California

This is one event that I’ve been wanting to go to for years and finally for the past two days I’ve been wallowing in a sea of geekdom. Me and 123,000 of my closest friends moved in mass down to the San Diego convention center to check out what’s what in animation, science fiction, fantasy, horror, movies, video games, toys, publishers and the strange and believe me, there are some very strange things.

After two days of walking around almost all day each day, we think we might have gone over the half way mark. Trying to see the entire convention on a day pass is plainly impossible, glad we had went for the 4 day pass. There is just too much to see, each day we’ve come home loaded down with all sorts of interesting swag.

I met Maddox from The Best Page in the Universe and I got to shake his hand and no, I didn't immediately go and wash mine, I've actually been reading him since 99 or so. I got a Hellboy book autographed by Christopher Golden and a bunch of other free books autographed. We watched the first showing of Marvels movie, Doctor Strange, great show!

I’m still going though information overload or else I would write something more intelligent. Tomorrow I’m looking forward to meeting Kevin J. Anderson and seeing the first episodes of Heroes and Battlestar Galactica but for now, I leave you with the pictures I have posted here.

Toad the Wet Sprocket at the OC Fair

A couple of weeks ago in passing, I entered a contest on the Toad the Wet Sprocket’s myspace page to win concert tickets to see their first show that they’ve performed in over a year at the Orange County fair and last week I got an email from Wahoo’s Fish Taco’s (people who sponsored the prizes) saying that I won.

So last night my son and I drove up there. The last time I saw them in concert was in September of 1996 with Neil Young. Collin was almost 3 and I was stationed at MCAS El Toro and married to his mom. The reason he knows Toad is because I gave him an MP3 player last year that had a bunch of their music on it.

Toad as always been one of my favorite bands, their music resonates somewhere inside of me but its sound has defiled easy description and a most people have never heard of them. I told my coworkers, “I’m going to see Toad the Wet Sprocket!” And every single one of them said “Who?”

Toad the Wet Sprocket’s music is sad and bittersweet, it’s hard to drop them into a genre, they’re a mix of REM, Jar’s of Clay, Nickel Creek and old Jimmy Eat World. Their music invokes loss, love and life mixes everything together into a rush of beauty. Most of their music is about something being wrong but somehow they get it just right. It’s strange that I can get such joy out of such sad music.

Great show guys, you’ve always been able to touch home with me.

Now we're heading down to Comic Con, expect pictures.

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.

Back in the day

My old roommate, James is heading out to Iraq and he left his 8mm camcorder in my care (if I transfered his 8mm to DVD) and I started going though some of my old 8mm tapes and made the following video of me and a couple of friends climbing around Prescott Arizona back in the early 90's.

It's hard to imagine being that young again, I miss those days sometimes.

New X-files Movie?

Yay! According to David Duchovny he's about to get his hands on the script and the movie might be out next year. Yes, I'm a X-files geek from way back in the day, I wonder they're going to have a booth at Comic Con next week?

I'm going with my wife, son and father-in-law, sure to be some great fun, don't worry, there will be pictures.

The 300,000 visitor to Doc in the Box goes to….

... someone from Rochester, Minnesota who came this way from Helen Chen's blog, they only stayed for a second but the second was long enough to put me over the mark. Thanks!

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.

300,000

visits to this blog in the next day or so.

If it were miles, that would be the lifespan of a Toyota.

If it were people, it would be the population of a medium sized city such as Tampa, Toledo or Anaheim.

If I had got a penny for every view it would equal 3,000 dollars and if I only had a nickel..

And for me

today or tomorrow

It's just a 3 that has a lot of zeros at the end:)

Off with it’s top! (Building flight hazard in San Diego)

If you’re a local out here and pay attention to the news, one of the big stories is an office tower built next to Montgomery Field, the city gave the San Diego firm Sunroad Enterprises permission to build it but the FAA said the 12 story building is a flight hazard. There’s a lot of bickering in the local government here about how this happened with lots of finger pointing both ways. Sunroad has agreed to cut 20 feet off a 180 feet of the tower by October.

I really didn’t think much of it, driving by the building, it doesn’t look that big. But a couple of days ago, I was providing coverage for a change of command at the flight line and what do I see across the way?

Actually the only thing I saw on the horizon was that building, you can see by the picture below (and if you click on the image, you can also see why I need a new camera, I'm not kidding, my sensor is all blotched up from too many trips to the sand box). That building is huge, it’s strange that you can’t see anything else that direction considering we’re in the middle of southern California.