The Reports of my Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Hello from the right coast.  According to the date on my last post, it has been 304 days since I last posted although I thought it had actually been considerably longer.  So what has been happening in the last 43 weeks and 3 days?  Well as noted above, I have moved from the left coast to the right coast (granted that was nearly 2 years ago but I don’t think I ever actually talked about it).  I am no longer at NTC, instead I am now at Fort Meade and loving living in civilization once again.  My hour commute where I would travel 45 miles from one end of the box to the other is now an hour commute where I travel 20 miles.  I am no longer working in tactical signal but am now working on one of the National Cyber Protection Teams (CPT).

So I stopped writing on signal-chief for a variety of reasons.  First, when I first got here at Fort Meade, I had a huge learning curve ahead of me.  I am still signal but working a cyber job which has required a great deal of learning.  Second, with the new job has come a number of obstacles to writing that I have had to navigate.  It makes it harder to write some things but honestly shouldn’t be a huge deal.  Third, when I first created Signal-Chief my ideas was to use it as a place where I could put everything that I saw that got screwed up time and again during a rotation and give the great signal warrant officer community a chance to read it (and hopefully learn from it) before they arrived in the desert.  If you had the “pleasure” of coming through a rotation with me, you know that when you first arrived on the ground I told you several things that were almost guaranteed to show up in your final AAR.  More often than not, you would swear that it wasn’t going to happen to you, and more often than not, you would still see it in the AAR because you unfortunately fell into the same trap that countless units before you did (we call them trends for a reason).   Well once I left NTC, it was really hard to write about trends that I was no longer seeing.

So what has changed?  Well I’ve decided to change the focus of this blog a bit.  Rather than focusing in on just trends I am going to open it up to pretty much anything I want focused primarily on cyber security and other general technology things.  I halfway considered changing the name to cyber-chief but it is actually taken, plus I’m still signal so…..  I still want to show how a lot of this relates to the tactical signal community as best as I can but it won’t always happen.  I am still always on the lookout for guest writers so if you’re interested, drop me a note.