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I spent three years on the USS Hartford (SSN-768). It was a fantastic experience, though I always talk about it in Dickensian terms…

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

– A Tale of Two Cities

I recently saw a video that reminded me of some of my more fond memories of the boat… watching dolphins play in our bow wake. This video is from the USS Wyoming (which has a higher sail than the Hartford, we were a bit closer to the surface) and is something that many submariners have seen at least at some point in their careers.

So here’s a little taste of submarine life.

Dolphins playing on the bow of the submarine USS Wyoming

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This is a hilarious advert; as soon as I saw it I knew I had to find it on YouTube and blog it!

Today has been a big news day. The international financial markets went crazy, and the US Federal Reserve cut a key benchmark rate by 0.75% about an hour before US markets were going to open after a long holiday weekend. Last night was a major Democratic party debate, where the candidates started really doing battle with each other. Heath Ledger was found dead in his NYC flat. There were other big stories, but it’s late and these were the big surprises of the day.

What’s odd about all this? I found out about both of the “Breaking” news stories from Twitter.

I know that the tech-saavy people have already experienced this phenomenon, but as I’ve described earlier, I’m much more of a Twitter voyeur than a true Twitter-community participant, so it’s never happened to me. To be on the receiving end of breaking news twice via Twitter on the same day was fascinating.

While there’s really no implication of this in anything, it’s still interesting to note. Perhaps I’ll pay more attention to Twitter in the coming weeks/months.

If you want to break through the bulls**t on the Internet, sometimes you need a helping hand. David Friedman blogs at Ironic Sans (a great blog), and a while back he posted a Firefox plugin to “Uncensor the Internet.”

All you have to do is go to his page, and click on the appropriate link to start using the plugin.

Most of the time, you’ll never need it… strangely enough, if people are going to “swear” on the Internet, they mostly just go ahead and do it. But others (like me, occasionally) choose to moderate things a bit. In my post I would just like to point out that I was just quoting Jimmy Carter… he’s the real culprit there!

Anyway, I highly recommend Firefox, and David’s plugin is a great one for you, too.