It was early morning near Midway as the alarm clock rang at five AM. I staggered out of rack to shut it off. I climbed back in to snooze for a few minutes but talk myself into getting up and start the day off early. I started work and noticed the beautiful sunrise.
Ah yes, it was this type of early morning where this island was not so peaceful like today 67 years ago. I have been to many World War II battlefields. Including Wake Island, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Guam, Philippines, Okinawa, and Pearl Harbor. I have sailed in waters where historic naval battles took place. These include waters off the Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz, and Tarawa. There are no plaques or memorials there to remind us where it happened and so many men lost their lives. I see small atolls such as Midway, Iwo Jima, and Wake Island and wonder what the purpose was? Why did the Japanese so desperately want Midway that they threw so much to get it? They never came close after the debacle of losing four top line carriers. They sent several cruisers to shell the island after losing their carriers but lost one cruiser in the process due to no air cover. It was the same when I landed in Iwo Jima for refueling over 13 years ago. The mountain where the flag raised did not look that tall from the airfield where I stood. Things look so different with the naked eye.
I got up early to put in several hours of overtime to take care of some items that was on the backburner for a while. I also wanted to finish by four in the afternoon. I have been getting back in the groove of exercising again after last week’s stopover here. I did not want to get complacent and believe that riding a bike around Midway was all I needed to do. The day went by quickly and I used up every minute of each hour at work. I like days like this as it makes it fast and subtracts from the countdown until I get home.
Backups, backups and more backups of desktop computers, and is an infinite process. Oh yes, it can be done automatically but there are prerequisites that must be met. Of course, the program to do that specific function was design for office use and not for applications in our environment. Whatever happened to the fifth generation computer talked about 25 years ago? It would be nice if it can program itself to back up.
In the early 70’s, there were science fiction stories and made for TV movies about computers taking over dominant militaries, and launching nuclear weapons without any control from humans. Why the engineers failed to unplug the computers was beyond me. That was truly “science fiction” or FICTION today because of dominance of an unnamed software company of the past two decades. There is no need to worry about such a scenario of Armagadden because you have to keep resetting the machine due to the programs not responding to the “End Now” thumbnail. Of course, the novel would have a missile launched by a rogue computer and the software would not respond to an abort command. Now that would be realistic and comical to nerds but not so in a real scenario. Because of my work in this field using software from this dominating company I have become a Linux fan, especially that of Ubuntu Linux and open source. When I first entered the industry in the early 80’s there were much innovation and it was fun to be in the “high tech” field. Then came the dominance of one company and it became a bore. I actually dropped out of the computer industry for a long time, worked with defense electronics (even a bigger bore), and had a stint in Japan with robotics. Linux and Mac remind me of that era of the early 80’s when there were multiple operating systems and software companies came and went. However, there was innovation and lots of it.
We arrived in Midway around nine this morning. I was too busy to notice any thing outside my domain. I decided to take a break and step outside and low and behold. A turtle was swimming up to the ship! I ran back to the stateroom to get a camera and took multiple shots of it coming to us. When the turtle came close to port side bow, he dove and I lost sight of it in the water. A beach is restricted where the Fish and Wildlife people told us the inlet is full of sea turtles. I have seen turtles like this in Samoa and Hawaii. Turtles are a sacred symbol to the ancient Polynesians.
We are going to be here until Friday and then it is back to Kure. Meanwhile I have a list coming up and tomorrow will be like today. That is fine with me.
I bid you goodnight from Midway Atoll in the center of North Pacific.
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