Exam Prep Update

Nobody who knows me well will be at all surprised to know that I'm using Excel to organize my study for my second set of exams here in Aberdeen. I made a list of stuff to study, which then expanded a bit. It's remained (mostly) intact since Thursday. I've been using it to keep track of the various things I need to either read for the first time, or review from earlier in the semester. It's been pretty effective.

I probably won't finish everything on the list. The Secondary Study Topics, for example, may get a bit of attention, but I'm focusing on areas of overlap between my two classes, and trying to figure out particular sources that I can be ready to cite. I worked from a similar strategy for last semester's classes, and was fairly successful in Strategic Theory, and did well enough in Strategic Intelligence. I'm feeling pretty confident about GSI, so I've been focusing on materials that cover both GSI and SND, because I'd like to do at least one grade point better in SND than I did in SI last semester. I'm still a bit nervous about SND - Critical Mass is a tough grader - but I'm probably more comfortable with the concepts, and with having appropriate sources to cite, than I was in SI last semester.

I checked the exam timetable again. SND is Friday morning, and GSI is Monday afternoon. I'm pretty confident that I'll be ready.

Gotta say, I'm getting a ton of mileage out of my Kindle during this particular exam prep period. I've been using my laptop, and studying in the SOC, but I've also been taking my Kindle to Starbucks and reading Modern Military Strategy, or a ton of PDFs. As part of my continuing mission to turn my Kindle into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I've also sent some additional "Defeating Tech" PDFs to it, including some Marine Corps doctrinal publications, and the transcripts to the 1981 Reith Lectures for reading while listening to the corresponding mp3s. In all honesty, it's really simple stuff, but I love how I've been able to use the thing as a sort of academic force multiplier. It also saves me lugging my laptop to Starbucks. I continue to lean further and further toward blaming all of the Kindle's shortfalls on the university's network settings.

More updates as they come, but as far as I can tell, I should be more than ready to trounce my peers when it comes time to spend a combined total of six hours destroying my wrist. Booyeah!

The Gear: Defeating Technology, Now With Maps!

I'm starting to believe that the ability to combine my Kindle Fire with PDFs is either the best thing ever, or pure dagnasty evil. A few days ago, I found myself killing time at Starbucks, and within a mere fifteen minutes, I'd downloaded tons of PDF maps. I have to say, when I use a Kindle with PDF maps, I feel like I'm Jack Bauer.

The whole thing started when I found a map of Orkney - this map of Orkney, and this thing about places to stay in Scotland in 2012 and 2013. Since I was hoping to take some time later that day to plan a trip to Oman, that's what I looked for next, and I found this, this, this, and this. That last one isn't particularly good, but the other three are solid gold. I also plan to go to Shetland at some point soon, which led me to this map of Shetland.

Now, that last one is interesting, because when I went back to look at it in the course of writing this blog post, I discovered that the website where I got it has maps of pretty much every individual geographic/political area of Scotland. I mean, just look at this page - I'm pretty sure that it's a straight up moral imperative that all of those Orkney maps wind up on my Kindle, even if I don't actually plan on visiting most of those areas. I also wanted to get a couple of maps of Scotland itself, so the fact that the website in question has an overall map of Scotland is super awesome, and will make a good addition to the Scotrail routes map. Oh, and I'll probably grab the Britrail map for good measure, too - heck, it's a pretty good map of the United Kingdom in general, regardless of whether it's focused on transport or not.

I also figured I'd download a map of Wyoming, my adopted hope state, and I got my actual home state as well. There's another place, one of my old work locations, that's great for maps, but there don't appear to be any PDF maps of it, so I may work on making one of those myself using Wikimapia and PowerPoint.

I've written before on the JTS, Ltd. blog about learning to navigate. On prior road trips, particularly my 2007 and 2010 cross-country road trips, I've used a 2007 MapQuest road atlas (which I loaned to my buddy Laud for nearly three years at one point). I still have that thing, and it may still be sitting in my vehicle back in the States. I'm really critical of reliance on dashboard GPS, and I'm a pretty staunch advocate of people learning how to navigate with an actual map, and perhaps even with a *gasp* compass (or even a handheld GPS). I realize that my mobile phones have the equivalent of foot mobile GPS, and I've used it a couple of times, so I'm not a zealot about the topic or anything - but I still think people ought to be able to navigate on their own, even if they sometimes defer to some of the technological options. I got that MapQuest road atlas in 2007, before tablets took off, so I guess all of this is to say that I find the options that I have from combining traditional maps with technology. Honestly, it sort of makes me feel like I'm pretty much carrying around the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Having the World Factbook app merely underscores that feeling.)

The Gear: Defeating Technology Again

A few weeks ago, I made a point of "defeating technology" by putting a ton of documents and a couple of new books on my Kindle Fire. In so doing, I've hoped to mitigate some of the limitations caused by its inability to access the University network. On Sunday, I went to Starbucks to update my computer's virus software (also a victim of the University's proxy requirement), and did a little bit more work on defeating technology.

The two stragglers the last time around were Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1906) by C.E. Callwell (HTML/PDF) and NAVMC 2890/FMFRP 12-15 Small Wars Manual (link, link). These were slightly too big to E-mail to the E-mail address provided by Amazon for sending documents to a Kindle (such a cool feature!), so while I was at Starbucks I found links to both and downloaded them. There doesn't appear to be any way to move the PDF files from the "downloads" section within the Kindle web browser, into the "Docs" section, but the important thing is having them available in the first place. I also downloaded the most recent National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and National Military Strategy in preparation for the mid-term (I totally spaced the Quadrennial Defense Review, but I'll be back there soon enough). For SND, I downloaded the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, and read the executive summary section on Sunday night and Monday morning prior to seminar.

The other thing I figured out how to do was download video content that I'd already purchased on Amazon to my Kindle. Since tablets are optimized for wifi use, they tend to default toward streaming content from the cloud. (I'm not a big fan of cloud computing and/or content storage for security reasons, for content control reasons, and because I think it's more about DRM than improving the user experience. Then again, I'm a longtime student of ancient history, and I've read Nineteen_Eighty-Four, so I'm probably more paranoid than most about preserving independent copies of media.) Anyway, without frequent wifi capability, streaming from the cloud doesn't exactly meet my needs, so I was thrilled to mess around and discover that I could download the content I'd purchased directly to my Kindle. On Sunday, I downloaded all six episodes of Secret Girlfriend, a hilarious and tragically short-lived Comedy Central show that my buddy Caleb introduced me to back in 2010 or so. I imagine I may have some occasion to watch it while I'm sitting on a train or an airplane or something.

Adapt and overcome. Fight smart, then fight hard. It's a great piece of kit, and I'm glad the folks who designed it saw fit to program enough functionality into it to allow a guy like me to overcome an otherwise serious limitation.

The Gear: Wherein Technology is Defeated

I've mentioned several times that the biggest drawback of my Kindle Fire is that it can't connect to the University's network. As I mentioned a few days ago, my solution to this is to adapt and overcome. My Kindle has turned out to be a great piece of kit, and I figured it was worth some effort to get more use out of it.

Last week, I mentioned downloading some more apps. I decided that I wanted to try to get some more data on there as well, in addition to a couple of new books. I spent about a day and a half preparing. I made a list of categories, then listed specific resources in each category that I wanted on my Kindle, and then consolidated them. Some of them required downloading, and some of them required conversion from plaintext to PDF. My final categories were Strategy, Counterinsurgency, History, Books, and Security.

In Strategy, I assembled some classics (Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Thucydides), some contemporary stuff (Colin S. Gray), and some nuclear strategists (Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie). This covers strategy in general, as well as one of my current courses that I'll discuss in more detail soon. Wohlstetter's The Delicate Balance of Terror was required reading for the second week of said course, so I'm glad that I got it onto my Kindle with a few days to spare so that I can finish reading it.

For Counterinsurgency, which has become a core component of my studies here in Aberdeen, I elected to include a number of military field manuals, as well as some of the classics: C.E. Callwell, T.E. Lawrence, and David Galula. The PDF files for Callwell and the Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual ended up being too big to send via E-mail, so I'm going to have to download those directly to my Kindle at some point.

History was easy: the Orkneyinga Saga, and Caesar's The Gallic Wars. Every now and again, there's such a thing as reading for fun.

I'd been wanting to get a couple of books for a while. I've been meaning to read The Devil's Sandbox since 2006, which is right around the time when it came out. I read Imperial Grunts in 2007, enjoyed it, and think I may be able to make use of it at some point, so I got a digital copy of it since my hard copy is back in the States. One of the great things about a digital copy is that it's its own index: you can do word searches and find particular sections or topics.

Finally, I wanted to put some of the open source military policy documents for a variety of risk management topics on my Kindle as well. Topics range from physical security, to industrial security, to information security, to foreign disclosure, to export control. In theory, these are all meant to be reference documents; in reality, I've read through a couple of them, and want to read several of them in detail, particularly the stuff on physical security for my eventual exam to get my PSP certification.

My original plan was to E-mail all of the files to myself, and then download them through the web from Starbucks. It wasn't the best solution, but I figured it would work out alright. As it turns out, Amazon actually assigns an E-mail address to each of your Kindle devices for the specific purpose of sending documents to yourself. I had to go in and jockey with the settings on Amazon's website (you have to add the address you'll be sending it from so that it's an "approved" address - a spam prevention feature?), but once that was sorted out it ended up being pretty easy. With this successful test under my belt, I'll probably add a few more categories - for example, a number of items about Oman for my potential dissertation, and a few Arabic language resources. I like to think of it as working smart, not hard.

Oh, yeah, and I got Deer Hunter Reloaded, too. It's pretty good.