After a week of my blog being offline (you may have noticed the error page), it’s back on the Internets.  I had a disagreement with my hosting company, but it’s all settled now, and I’m good to go.  We’ll now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Happy Father’s Day everyone!

My dad is a remarkable man.  He is the father of two, and a devoted husband.  He is also retired Army officer of 23 years.  His encouragement and guidance have helped me determine and soon achieve my goal of becoming a member of the United States Coast Guard, as well as most other achievements in my life.  I am proud that he is my father, and can only hope to be as fine a man, officer, and citizen of this country and world as he is.  Thank you, dad.  Happy Father’s Day.

So usually I try to avoid writing these posts because I generally regard them as filler, but I thought it might be appropriate this week. We have some unique events going on over the next couple of days that I felt would be worthy of some introduction prior to my post-event write-ups that will follow (man, it’s just hyphen city back there, isn’t it?).

Tomorrow is Emory Rice day, which is our annual field day at the end of the year. The day starts off with a marching competition between the companies. Each freshman platoon in the regiment represents their competition, just as we did for Recognition back in September. This time is a little different however, because we will be marched by the upcoming company commander for our company, providing them with their first real experience in publicly leading the company as an officer. The afternoon is filled with activities aimed at providing us with some fun near the end of the year, such as an obstacle course done by ROTC and a rock wall. All activities are done by company, and are worth points towards Honor Company. I’ll explain Honor Company in a later post, so stay tuned for that.

Wednesday afternoon is Change of Command. Now that Coasties are over and we’re only weeks away from the end of the year, it’s time for this year’s graduating seniors to step down from their officer positions and hand the reigns over to the upcoming officers for next year. There’s a formal ceremony that will be held Wednesday afternoon on the Parade Field. Since I haven’t seen a Change of Command at MMA before, I’m not really sure the details of the ceremony. Since I’ll most likely have to be in formation for the duration of it I won’t be able to take pictures, but I’ll try to get some pictures to post from someone here at MMA (if there’s anybody reading this who’ll be here and would like to share their photos-maybe the Admissions office-I’d appreciate it, shoot me an e-mail).

Not much else to report from Taylor’s Point, except that the weather’s getting too nice for us to be indoors. I vote that classes start being held outside, who’s with me?

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today, and headed for such a bright future, if it hadn’t been for my mom. She’s the most loving, compassionate, and generally amazing person I know. I can only hope than anybody reading this has a mother as fantastic as mine is.

Mass Maritime is hosting an open house tomorrow, for both prospective cadets and accepted students.  I’ll be working at the open house, so if you plan to attend please feel free to come find me and say hi.

Just thought I’d put that out there.

On Friday I was featured as a CG Blog Find on AN UNOFFICIAL COAST GUARD BLOG.  I haven’t featured this site myself on my blog, but they’ve been in my blogroll for a while.  If you haven’t visited there, definitely check it out.  It’s chock-full of great information about current Coast Guard news, information, and editorials.

Thank you to Joe Coastie and CGBlog.org for featuring me!

This past week I talked with Peter Mello over Skype for a feature on the Messing About In Ships podcast which he and Capt. John Konrad co-host.  It ended up being more than a half hour, and is included in full in the latest MAIS podcast episode!

If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find it here.

We had a helicopter land on the parade field today, and do some low altitude flying over the campus. It was doing surveying and research for a new experimental low-power RADAR system to integrate with the wind turbine. The system is intended to automatically control the aviation indicator lights on the top of the windmill, so that they can be turned on and off depending on whether aircraft are in the area.

I got some pictures and videos of the helicopter:

Definitely the excitement for the week. It made it even better that it was wicked nice outside, so I had a good excuse to be outside instead of in my room doing schoolwork

Today was the Welcome Aboard event at the Academy. This is a day specifically for high school seniors who have been accepted into next year’s freshman class. It allows them to get a more in-depth sense of some of the things MMA has to offer, such as firefighting, cold water survival, small boat handling, and basic engineering. I was one of the cadets running the Semester at Sea seminar, where future cadets got to see pictures and videos from previous Sea Terms, get information about life as a freshman on the Enterprise, and have a question and answer session.

There were four sessions today, so my group got to talk to about 120 students about our experiences on cruise. We had two juniors and four freshmen (including me) so we were able to offer a wide array of information. We showed a video that one of the juniors had put together after his freshman cruise, the year they went to Europe. Then we showed a slideshow of some pictures 2/C Wilson took this year. While we were showing pictures, we each discussed a specific aspect of Sea Term. We talked about division rotations, the Enterprise itself, deck & engine watches, classes, and port time. We also fielded a lot of questions from the future cadets about life on Sea Term, from watch to life in the holds and time off.

I think today went well overall. If you were there and have any additional questions or comments, or weren’t but still have something to share, please post a comment.

This blog has been reborn, for a completely different purpose. I’ve decided to use this blog to talk about life as a cadet at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and other maritime-related information. This decision came on the heels of returning from MMA’s Sea Term 2008, during which I kept a blog about the trip which got an incredibly positive response.

If you’re used to this blog being about tech info and are wondering what happened to it, good news: it still exists, it just has a new address. You can get to that blog by going to tech.christiaanconover.com.

I am excited to get this blog started, and see how it turns out. Go Bucs!