I Put on my Red Dress

Hello world, it's been so long since I wrote on this blog.
Anyway, been feeling a lot rebellious.  It's another year and yet again I am spurred to fight with all my heart.  Feels like things have come full circle in many ways.  Plebe year it felt like running into a wall of bricks.  I still remember struggling on the BEAST Barracks rucks.  I was so out of breath.  I remember a female chaplain telling me (kindly) to calm down.  On our first ruck on the ski slope I felt tight-chested and then like I couldn't breathe.  I had to catch my breath.  Then and several times in between I've been plagued with self-doubt in between personal victories.  Am I suited to this profession?  Is my weakness at bearing heavy loads something that makes me unfit for this privilege of officership?  I sometimes forget how small I am in comparison with a lot of my peers here.

Tonight was Branch Night.  A branch in the army is defined as:  "a particular area of expertise" according to Wikipedia.  And we all know that Wikipedia is the absolute in common knowledge.  At any rate, my branch, in which I'm expected to be technically and tactically proficient is:  Transportation.  The me from a year ago would probably be aghast.  The me of today is more patient, though just as proud.

And speaking of things I never thought would be true.  Does anyone else wish there were more warnings on the privacy sacrifices made by using popular technology?  I mean, a lot of these friendly apps from Android linking with Facebook and seemingly innocent shares of information are a bit scary.  Here's a real quote from the Guardian Project of Android.

"The ability for a group of people to passively track each others locations in a secure manner has quickly risen to the top of the must-have list. Consider a team member traveling to another country or remote region with the support team being able to easily, but securely, ping their device at any time to determine their current location."

The website actually offers some great solutions to privacy intrusion, but this goes back to the real issue of how much protection of your information do you actually need to go to lengths to?  Where is there "reasonable expectation of privacy" in the techonologically-enabled world?  Thought the below video was pretty funny and the dystopia we all seek to avoid.  I don't believe in anything like Terminator or Matrix... but something along the lines of 1984 seems all too possible.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/25/moveon-ad-dystopic-republicorp-2010_n_773689.html