We're not lost, Sergeant, We're in … France

We’ve had a mild winter and I’ve been diving into more veteran reunions, so I’ve gone far too long since I last posted a Weekend Wanderings.

• As I was cleaning out my inbox to try to rebuild my To Do list, I came across a link to our pet photographer’s blog, in particular to her entry on our photo shoot for our Christmas car with our little Cavalier, Henry.
• Melissa was in Mumbai, at the Taj, not long before the terror attacks there in 2008. We were both more horrified about the risks taken by the staff who’d been so marvelous to her, so when our favorite Village Smith blogged about the Heroes of the Hotel Siege, we really took note.
• If you’re blogging and you’ve wondered how to get a million hits on your blog in less than a year, you should consider following The Other McCain’s advice. I picked and chose from among his recommendations, so you will never see a Rule 5 post here. Of course, if you like Rule 5, you can always go see XBrad’s Monday posts labelled Load HEAT.
• In my paying job, I do software development for a company that does international development (think “foreign aid”, but sponsored by many sources, not just first world governments). So, I get to see a lot of interesting technologies. The latest one is FormHub, which is used for mobile data collection. It allows collection of survyes, integration with GPS data at the time of data collection and rapid analysis of that data via maps. They’ve got a great explanatory video and I keep thinking that we can come up with some applications as military historians for this software. Craig Swain’s work on the Historical Marker Database comes to mind.