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We have a three day SAR exercise starting tomorrow morning somewhere near Jackson, MS. The details are still sketchy as to what we’ll be tasked with doing and I’m sure that will change between now and then as well. As always, I’ll try and keep the site updated but I’m not sure what kind of coverage I’ll have down there.

In the meantime, robot hacks are on hold!

The Rovio arrived Monday afternoon. My Mondays are pretty busy so I only had a couple of hours to tinker with Rovio before it was time to call it a night.

After some trial and error I found out that it required a Windows XP machine to configure it unless you reconfigured your network for ad-hoc and used their settings for your IP address. Once the configuration was out of the way, I drove it in and out of it’s cradle a couple of times but never went far since the battery didn’t have time to charge fully.

Cut to this morning. I log in remotely from work to check out how it handles itself across the net and find out that in low light the camera SUCKS. You just about need a Maglight on this thing to see anything. There are a couple of hacks I may try to fix this issue. There are both camera and light hacks. Not sure which route I want to go yet.

I drove it around the house a little and promptly found out it doesn’t like door thresholds or any flooring change of more than a half inch or so. I struggled to get it back into the room where it’s dock was.

I checked back in on it later in the afternoon and found my roommate fighting with a sofa.

I didn’t use the microphone to say anything to him as I didn’t want to spook him with his arms full of a hide-a-bed.

He’s still shuffling stuff around and now there’s a box in front of the Rovio. I may just have to go exploring in a minute…

Boring post today. We get to go play with the S.W.A.T. guys tonight.

What is the deal with spam? When are they going to realize they are losing a battle they can’t win? I had six story comments marked as spam this morning – all from Russia (with love). If you fall for spam, you’re stupid. Do they really think we’re as stupid as the networks portray life in our horrible sitcoms?

On an unrelated note, I will make it to #saucersunday before too long. Or #saucer<insertdayhere>

I know there are more out there, but @swb posted a writeup and video of SocialCamp Memphis in his blog.

Saturday evening had me stumbling around in the woods with a flashlight and a compass. Due to me not knowing the true reason for the Walk, I ended it prematurely for reasons I won’t go into here. Needless to say, I had bad information and it steered me into making a bad decision. For those of you who weren’t following on Twitter, here are a few pics I posted from my phone during the ordeal…

The previous team started at 7:00 PM and didn’t complete the course until after 1:00 AM the next morning. It is very tough and a couple of the guys I taught in Tippah county last week want to take on the “Walk in the Park.” I hope I did a good job teaching them and they remembered what was taught – they will need every bit of it!

I finished up the Map and Compass course for the new Alpha team at our own unit yesterday. Little did I, or anyone, realize that there were only three slides left in my presentation when we called it quits a couple of weeks ago. When it came time to find out where we were on a TOPO map, they did pretty good. They had to shuffle around to get the correct quadrangle section, but once they got the right one they were able to give us coordinates within 100 meters. Not too shabby for people who haven’t been exposed to this stuff yet.

This evening is training at Southaven Police Department again. The cycle never ends!

This time yesterday I was finishing up some leftover projects at work and had nothing set in stone to do today except a Wilderness Navigation course to walk after the sun went down. I wasn’t itching to find something to do, but I was intrigued by seeing these random twitters come across like this one:

bethgsanders: RT @joespake: Social Camp Memphis This Saturday -3/7 – Be there! http://budurl.com/rxax #socialMem

I decided on a whim late last night to register and check it out today. I really need to at least build up my networking here in Memphis and meet up with different people. I expected to see 20 or 30 people at the event. I was slightly off. There were more like 100+ people there!

After signing in, I went downstairs and struck up a conversation with @marythompson, @mikejarrell, @swb and a lady who’s new to the whole social media thing. There was a good mix of experience at the table, from the newbie to the gurus. I got to meet the Tornado Baby today after seeing so many tweets about it!

The introductory session was held in Room #1. It was a simple and quick introduction to the day’s events. Shortly after, everyone split up into one of four rooms to discuss their topic of choice. I chose room #4, “People Connect, Not Technology.” I heard that room #3, “Traditional Media and Social Media” was outstanding, but I stuck to my guns as “People Connect, Not Technology” sounded intriguing.

Sad to say, this wasn’t the best presentation of the day in my opinion. The presenter did an OK job, but the presentation she used was too busy. That, and the constant chirping and dinging of people receiving their Twitter updates was irritating. For future reference, let’s show some respect by muting your laptops and cell phones during presentations.

Session #2 was fantastic. I LOVE panel discussions. This one was “Is Your Twitter Showing?” and discussed different Twitter clients, explained Twitter to the newbies and was a general introduction to Twitter and how to use it effectively. A+ rating on this one!

Session #3 had me slightly entertained.  think a lot of us were caught off guard by the fellow that wanted to use the free tool called Twitter to produce income. I think he was going about it ALL wrong. You don’t use Twitter to make money, you use Twitter to attract people to your money making product or service.

I stuck around until after lunch and the afternoon schedule was completed. I wasn’t impressed with the topics at hand enough to keep me there. I do need to prepare for the “Walk in the Park” later tonight so, home I went!

I would have loved to attend some of the talks that were taking place at the same time I was in another session. “Traditional Media and Social Media,” “Alternate Reality Games – A new way of thinking about social media,” and “Social Successes at LeBonheur” would have kept me for the rest of the afternoon since I wasn’t able to attend them.

By the way, if there are any typos in this article I blame them solely on this iBook. The “M”, “N” and “D” double type a LOT on this crazy machine. Oh, and the delete/backspace key is on a delay or something. Irritating.

At any rate, I would attend again and wouldn’t mind getting together a small group for social brainstorming on a semi-regular basis. I would love to get enough input to come up with a unique social interactivity method for Search and Rescue. We’ll see. I’m off to go play in the woods at 7:00 PM.

I received a completely random email last night, but it was an awesome random email! In a nutshell, someone found my Twitter account by watching the Twitter firehose (the “Everyone” button) and through my Twitter account page found Team140.com, where they found a link to the Memphis FD live radio feed. On the Memphis FD radio feed there was a link to someone else’s Twitter account – someone who the person that emailed me lost touch with several years ago. I don’t know either party involved, but it put a smile on my face to know that my site somehow managed to reunite a couple of old friends!

Also, if you haven’t read it yet, my first article on thereformed.org is up, so go check it out! – Using Technology in the Wilderness to Save Lives

Once registration was completed and people were settling in, we decided to spice things up. Sergeant Thibodeaux split everyone up into 7 groups. He and Sgt. Cavallo made sure that each group did not have people from the same organization in it. We wanted to make sure they understood what it meant to be dropped into a large scale event where you will work hand in hand with someone you’ve never met before.

While Sgt. Thibodeax and Cavallo were teaching tracking, Privates Crafton and Showes helped me set up the Map and Compass course. I set up two courses for the students to choose from – an easy one and an advanced one. Each course is made up of eight surveyor flags in a 200’ circle. They have to find the flags by following their compass at the headings I gave them. The easy course had 5 of it’s 8 flags out in the field and the advanced course only had two of it’s flags in the field. The nearest flag in this photo is about 30 feet past the dead tree just to the left of the guy in the grey jacket. The courses also overlapped each other to add to the confusion.

Lt. Holley and Sgt. Cavallo refer to their tracking class as “How to Track a Tick Across Pavement.” They have taught classes to guards at State Penitentiaries on tracking escapees. Guards that have taken the class that were involved in tracking escapees have attributed the success of their captures to the tracking course.

Part of the Ropes and Rigging course is patient packaging using a Stokes Basket. A Stokes Basket is used in difficult terrain as it has sides that allow the basket to be turned up at an angle without dropping the patient! Also, once the patient has been strapped in with the webbing, you can roll the basket upside down and the patient will be held in. You can also stand the basket up and the patient will not slide down or out of the basket.

Union County Urban Search and Rescue brought their Response Trailer to act as the Command Post for the Mock Search. As soon as the sun went down we began the search and shortly afterward, the snow joined us. Our actors in the mock search:

We had the following actors:
•    Missing Victim #1 (male)
•    Missing Victim #2 (female)
•    Inebriated witness
•    Distraught friend of victims
•    Angry citizen (wondering why EVERYONE isn’t searching)
•    Missing Victim’s father (Has Dementia)

The actors in this search were fantastic! I did capture some video from the staging area of the people playing their roles. The victims were a few hundred feet from the road in a ditch and Victim #1 had a broken leg. The inebriated witness walked (stumbled) up on the command center and started feeding information to the investigators. Shortly after that, the distraught friend shows up to help find his friends and says there are about 15 or 20 of his friends that will be on their way to help after they finish drinking at the bar.

While the distraught friend is trying to convince the search team to let him help, the angry citizen steps in to defend the distraught friend by pointing out search teams that are on standby and cussing them out for not doing anything and “standing around next to the fire while these helpless people are freezing in the snow!”

One of the victim’s father is located and brought to the scene and interviewed. He has dementia and attempts to exit the building at any chance given. As you can imagine, once the ball was rolling – hilarity ensued!

The search started at nightfall and we wound it down and headed to our hotels just after midnight.

I’m not a fan of riding in the paddy wagon so I drove my truck. It’s a good thing too as I had to make a couple of last minute emergency runs to locate supplies while the van was tied up doing other stuff. When I saw the snow on my truck yesterday morning I just KNEW the compass course I set up the day before was going to be an awesome challenge.

It’s sort of hard for me to teach a class AND take pictures of myself at the same time, so yesterday morning is pretty sparse when it comes to pictures. I did manage to get a few photos of the students trying to find their way through the compass course though. I think they did very well considering this course has always been set up in a field with no obstacles. I was the looney toon who thought it would be a nice little challenge to put trees and waist high briars in their way!

We finished up the weekend with a debriefing and critique of the mock search. The search went very well and the Command Staff exceeded our expectations. The strike teams made a few mistakes here and there but nothing that would have compromised the search. That’s what training is for – so you can learn from your mistakes!

It was an all-out weekend for us. We arrived at the facility on Friday afternoon around 3:30pm and left for our hotel at midnight. Saturday we got started at 7am and got to our hotel at 3am Sunday. Sunday we got moving at 8:30 and shut down camp at 3:30pm.

I have to apologize for the photos being out of order. For some reason they are being rather cranky. You get the idea though!