And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddeling kids!

I've changed email address again! You can find me at tommie.hustle@gmail.com. I know you are saying why do you have 60 trillion email address well this is why. Email over here is a game of cat and mouse between the IT guys who have two duties.

1. Keep the network running smoothly.

As one would suspect we don't have a lot of pipe (i.e. Bandwidth) so it is imperative that the IT guys attempt to minimize that amount of traffic that comes across as well as protect the network from worms and viruses. That means that the block file sharing ports like FTP and the put caps on the amount of data that can be transferred on any particular connection so in general that means that we are limited to connections that allow basic text and HTML and we can't get large attachments.

2. Control the flow of information.

For obvious reasons the Military and the Government doesn't want a whole bunch troops IMing back home whining to Mommy about how hard it is here and how much they hate it or about a patrol where they had to kill a some insurgents in detail. So they block the ports (communication pathways from one computer to another) that allow for instant messenging. So when there is a heavy load they will deny connections to certian sites (Yahoo, Hotmail, CNN, Fox, SI, bigbooties.com) so they can keep the network up.

Well this doesn't work well for me and people like me that "know" the system. I know that they have to keep some ports open becasue sometimes there is a need for them to get large files onto the network. With the right connections you search around to find some open ports here and there and you can get out to somewhere you shouldn't be or get in something that in general will trigger a response. But, like I said it's a game so they will open ports then we find them and then they close them and then they open others. Well when there is a crunch hotmail and yahoo are usually the first sites to get blocked. Google on the other hand hasn't reached the level yet (most marines aren't savvy enough to even be concerned about google mail) so with the 1000M of storgage space and amount of up time it gets. It's better for me to get my mail there as opposed to keep playing the "will hotmail work today" game.

I'll try to update you all as to where I'll be accepting email over in the right hand side of the blog. Continue to use the email addresses you have and eventually we will filter to the latest one.