A Brief History of TogetherWeServed: Back in 2003, TogetherWeServed.com was formed as a Marine Corps portal for keeping in touch with other grunts that you may have served with. In late 2006, the website opened up a new subdomain Navy.TogetherWeServed.com as an entirely different website, offering the same features to sailors. Quickly, this site became one of the most popular sites visited by sailors looking to get in touch with one another. I remember when this happened because every single day my inbox would be flooded with a bunch of “so and so has added you to their shipmates list” or something like that.

Well, now the TWS folks have gotten together to create an Air Force version and at the time of this writing, it already has over 57k profiles created on it.

When the Navy version came out, I don’t remember there being any kind of a fuss about it. However, now that the Air Force version is coming out, AF officials are warning Airmen that this site is an OPSEC nightmare. I wasn’t able to find many articles on this subject online yet but there were a few news stories on it here and here.

In the email I received, it was mentioned that some AF headquarters have even begun blocking the website, denying access to airmen at work and .mil computers. As of this writing, I was still able to access the site from a shipboard computer although it doesn’t do me any good because I’m not going to pay $20 to go to Navy Myspace.

I’m proposing a new recruiting poster for the type of sailor the new Navy is attracting.

It’s a new Navy, everybody knows that. Today’s wars are no longer fought with two battleships, side-by-side, taking blows at each other with sailors swinging from the masts and fighting with swords. That’s for Hollywood movies and historical archives. Today’s wars are high-tech and most sailors are trained like technicians and don’t even know the difference between rope and line.

Consider the following brief article and feel free to comment below with your thoughts on “The New Navy”.

Dying Traditions

Let’s look at Navy traditions for a moment, those are either gone or fading away, too. Navy Shellback Initiation (Wog day) is basically a joke. The scariest thing about my last wog day was the jollyroger flying next to the Union Jack, lol. It was also the toughest thing about the day. Wog day used to be a way for sailors to prove themselves while out to sea. This is a tradition that is dying in our generation.

But what about those traditions that died a long time ago. How many people know what a lubber’s hole is? Or why it’s called that? Experienced sailors would go up the Jacobs ladder to get to the crow’s nest instead of using the ladder on the mast and climbing through the hole in the bottom of the crow’s nest. This hole was called the lubber’s hole and was reserved for land lubbers and inexperienced sailors.

Some Traditions Belong in the History Books

How about flogging? The Navy’s History site has an interesting page on flogging in the Navy. I don’t know about you but I know a couple of sailors who could probably benefit from a good flogging.

Only kidding.

Sort of.

Ok, here’s how it works:

The Navy has advancement cycles. For advancement to paygrades E-4 to E-6, there are two cycles. January 1st - June 30th and July 1st - December 31st. These cycles have one main purpose, to provide “limiting dates” for advancement authority but they also give a clue as to when the VERY LAST day is for Navy Advancement Results to come out.

Basically, the Navy has until June 30th or Decemeber 31st to:

However, the Navy usually does the second part earlier (though it varies a lot).
March 2007’s advancement results cames out in May and September 2006’s results came out in LATE November (after Thanksgiving).

However, this cycle the Navy changed something. The Navy sort of “rearranged” the way that they score the final multiple. They chopped the legs out from underneath sailors with average evaluations and mediocre test scores. Luckily for me, I’m in neither category. I have a fairly high eval score and I do way better than average on the test. Basically, the change helped me, so why does this bother me? I’m going to assume if you’ve read this far, you are familiar (at least a little bit) with the Navy advancement system.

Without the change, and all things remaining the same, I needed 14 points to get advanced to 1st based on the previous test 6 months ago. The final multiple to get advanced was 218 and my final multiple was 204. Because of my test score and my eval average, I gained 6 points in PNA. I also gained 2 points from a Good Conduct Medal, 3 points from a bump in eval average, and 1 point time in rate for a grand total of 12 points. That means, all I have to do is score 2 points higher on the test and I get advanced.

Now, here comes the change. I get the 6 PNA points, 2 from the GCM, and 1 from time in rate but the new advancement scoring gives me 6 points for a grand total of 15 extra points. I should be happy right? Well, actually, I’m a bit skeptical. When the Navy does a big shake up like this, the numbers get all out of whack. That final multiple of 218 could easily shoot up to a 228 or even higher. I’m not saying it’s going to, I’m just saying that I like to be in control of my destiny and at least feel like I have a little control of my future income.

After all, that’s why I even write on this blog. It helps me to talk about the things going on in my life and allows users to interact with me and opens up the possibility of future connections (like Doc) and the guarantee that I can keep up with old friends, like Casey Eaves (Cheeves), that are stationed overseas.

This brings me to my next thought, comment spam. These spammers are getting better and better every day. I recently moved to a dedicated server and the pending DNS move caused a few comments to be lost. Luckily for me, most of these were spam. When the DNS finally did propagate, I found 119 comments and most of them appeared to be legitimate. I decided to spot check one of them to see what the commentor was saying and low and behold, it was some random quote from John Paul Jones that had nothing to do with wordpress plugins or php. All they were doing was trying to gain 1 single link back to their black hat site, at the expense of my site. It’s bad enough this was the worst server move in the history of server moves.

Hey, at least they got the Navy part right, though.

What most people don’t realize is that gearadrift.com and www.gearadrift.com are technically two different websites. The WWW version is a subdomain of gearadrift.com, the main domain, just like http://docinthebox.blogspot.com is a subdomain of http://blogspot.com.

Webmastering 101

What most webmasters do is either let the two sites stay as they are and simply allow www to be a copy of the main domain (like gearadrift.com) or they redirect the non-www version to the www version (like yahoo.com d0es).

Try it out, open a new window and type yahoo.com without the www and watch the address bar. You will see that yahoo.com redirects to www.yahoo.com. Both of these tactics have advantages that are outside the scope of this post.

Now, what does navy.mil do?

They don’t allow navy.mil to copy to www.navy.mil and they don’t even bother to redirect it for you. This causes navy.mil to not be found and forces the user to type in www.navy.mil. Really sloppy, if you ask me.

I checked on a couple of other websites and http://navy.com is the only one that works properly (probably managed by a different group of people).

Don’t get me started on passwords

Tell me, what good is it to have 197 different passwords that require different strength levels when you just allow a person to change it so easily.

Take the Navy Portal, http://nko.navy.mil (careful, the link probably won’t work), this website has been hailed as the “be all and end all” of all Navy websites. Have you ever been able to log on to this thing the very first time you tried?

NKO Password Strength

The password requirments are very strong, 9 character minimum consisting of: at least 2 uppercase letters, 2 lowercase letters, 2 numbers, and 2 special characters. This is probably a good idea considering the type of information on this website and what the Navy has planned for it.

Dangerous Flaw

But you can change your (or someone’s) password very easily. All I need to know is your First Name, Last Name, Birthday, and Social Security number. WTF?!?!? Has it occured to anyone how easy this information is to get?

Either make the passwords easier and reduce the sensitivity of the information of NKO or increase the requirments to change the password. You can’t have it both ways and still be safe.

Navy Shellback Initiation has always involved a lot of contriversy and lately, Navy shellback initiation is in danger of becoming extinct due to the political correctness of today’s Navy. Regardless, we are here to document shellback initiation as a great Naval tradition and to help keep alive the loyal order of shellbacks.

Shellbacks, are sailors who have crossed the equator. Pollywogs, are sailors who have not crossed the equator. Shellback Initiation is the ceremony which converts pollywogs to shellbacks. This ceremony is said to have dated back to the early days of the Royal Navy and was originally created to test a new sailor’s ability to withstand long, hard days at sea. Early shellback initiation ceremonies involved beating wogs with wooden planks, wet ropes, and in some cases, dragging sailors overboard. It is historic fact that some sailors died while participating in Shellback Initation.

During World War II, Shellback Initiation still involved some rather brutal methods of initiation. The “Devil’s Tongue”, a piece of electrified metal was often shoved into a pollywog’s side. Beating of wogs was still very common and remained common until the early 1980s when several beatings led to many injuries and at least one reported death.

Since then, the Navy has implemented regulations and strict practices which prohibit physical attacks on wogs.

What do you think about the kinder, gentler Navy?