This week, the Navy held their semi-annual advancement exams for all E-6 eligible candidates. Basically, every E-5 over 3 years and a few early candidates sit down and take a 200 question test with 115 questions on their specific rating and 85 questions on general military knowledge. This test, normally does not bother me. As a matter of fact, I do quite well on standardized tests, I always have. I’m also pretty good and predicting the results of these tests and the likelyhood of my advancement because, after all, it’s just a numbers game.

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.