Army Rankings

What are the army rankings? The following are regular army rankings. I have mixed some Australian rankings with American rankings and vice versa.

Private/Cadet
Lance Corporal
Corporal
Sergeant
Staff Sergeant
Lieutenant/Leftenant
Captain
Major
Lieutenant Colonel
Colonel
Brigadier/Brigadier General (must be addressed as "General")
Major General
Lieutenant General (note Lt. Gen. higher than Maj. Gen. even though Maj. is higher than Lt.)
General
General of the Army/Field Marshal




My favourite war book is Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose.

10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2008

I have just published an article titled '10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2008'. Due to the success of my previous article, which I have renamed '10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2007' on EzineArticles.com, I have decided to write a new one this year.

The new list includes some programs from last year, which are still essential to me, like Mozilla Firefox and LimeWire. New programs which make it onto the list include Google Chrome, YouTube Downloader, Smart Defrag (a 'smart', i.e. self-learning, defragmentation tool), TuneUp Utilities 2009 (utilities for optimising your PC), Filezilla (FTP program) and PrimoPDF (Word-to-PDF conversion). All the programs which are suggested are still freeware or I suggest using the 'free version' of a paid program. There is one exception, which is the trial of TuneUp Utilities, but I felt that it was so good that even the trial deserves to be downloaded.

Click here to access '10 Useful Programs for Your PC 2008'.

Retiring from Cadets

This year, I have retired from cadets. I finished my "career" as a Corporal in 3 Platoon of Alpha Company. I have decided that I wanted to do something different and we have a large percentage of cadets continuing on this year. I have switched to a service known as "chess club", as part of administration for social services.

Scotch College Annual Tattoo 2008

The 2008 Scotch College Annual Tattoo was held on the 7th of November, 2008. The parade started at approximately 8:30pm and lasting about 1.5 hours. During this parade, the cadets, military band and, pipes and drums crew salute a General of the Australian Army. This year, the parade was done in the rain, showing that the cadet unit won't even let downpour stop them. It is a tradition to "freeball" during the parade.

The RSM leading this parade was Regimental Sergeant Major Ricky Hanson and the CUO of the Unit was Cadet Under Officer Nathan Su. The General saluted was General Peter Gration AC OBE (1987).

Transition to HostGator

I have recently purchased a HostGator plan, and the website is currently being transferred to their servers. This explains some of the strange phenomena (strange template, and missing links and images) occurring on the website.



I moved from Yahoo! GeoCities Pro to HostGator because HostGator's plans were cheaper (Yahoo! had recently increased their price for additional benefits) and they were very generous with their disk space, transfer limit and other aspects.

Firefox 3 is now out!

Mozilla Firefox 3 was released on June 17, 2008. Updates include a sleek new design and lightning-fast web-paged loading. Firefox 3 uses version 1.9 of the Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The new version fixes many bugs, improves standard compliance, and implements new web APIs.



Click here to see the Mozilla Firefox 3 Wikipedia page.
Click here to see Mozilla's release notes for Mozilla Firefox 3.
Click here to download Mozilla Firefox 3 from Download.com.

2008 SCACU Annual Camp

The 2008 Scotch College Army Cadet Unit Annual Camp went underway from the 12-17th of September (the Advance Party went to Puckapunyal on the 10th). It was an enjoyable camp where there were lots of interesting activities. I arrived on the evening of the 13th as I had state chess finals that morning-afternoon.

The days were split up like this (for Alpha company):
12th - Arrival and setting up camp
13th - Abseiling
14th - Boating
15th - Ranged shooting
16th - NavEx and Confidence course
17th - Packup, renaturalisation and departure