online portal of Andrew Nuttall - R.I.P. - “Make a difference…Live life to the fullest”

Update from Afghanistan 3

November 17th, 2009 Posted in Military, Personal/Website | No Comments »

I’m moving to another place that definetly won’t have any internet.  I
am really thankful for all your replies and best wishes!  Hopefully
I’ll be in touch soon with some more interesting photos.  Stay healthy
and keep having fun!!

Andrew

Update from Afghanistan 2

November 15th, 2009 Posted in Military, Personal/Website | No Comments »

(All my Afghanistan tour photos are located here…)

Hi all!

Well here I am now almost 1 month on the ground in Afghanistan, and
woh boy does it feel as if I’ve been here for ages! Busy is the
standard around here, which is by far the way we like it as it keeps
the mind (mostly) from wandering to nicer places not in this country
(back home, upcoming hlta, etc). Now that everyone of our guys are
here, we’ve jumped to full bore operations; doing a lot of patrols
(walking and driving), shura’s with local leaders, finding and
exploiting IEDs like their going out of style, and much of the usual
army stuff. When the Vandoos got to my place, the area was a rats nest
of bad guy activity. Through their time and now my time here we’ve
made huge leaps and bounds forward security and development wise. All
of the locals respect what we bring to the table much more than the
Taliban, even though its in an Afghan’s nature to always play both
sides. I’ve found everything about it very rewarding as I can actually
see the progress made toward a better future.

Though not everything is rosy and nice. As you’ve all probably heard
our battle group has already lost 2 really good guys to IEDs. Both
were friends of mine, Justin was a really good friend. I appreciate
all of your rememberance day and well wishes. All of us here are very
proud to be doing this, no one is doubting thier decision to be here,
and all of us know how strongly we are supported by great people like
yourselves back home.

On a lighter note, you may see my photo in the Times Colonist. I
hosted the minister of defense and minister of industry and pamela
wallen from the cbc here. Showed them around my little area of
operations and talked about the local security and development
situation. You may notice me by my large red mostuashe ;) Our corner
of the country is quite a popular one with many of the in and out of
country big wigs, but as usual happens everywhere when it rains it
pours. Everytime they show up it seems as if the rats nest stirs up
and we’re running to trap ‘em again. But its all fun, a wierd kinda
roughin it kind of fun, but we’ve got some good stories. For example,
i had a shura where most of the old men decided they really wanted a
peice of one of my “security advisors” and flirted with him as much as
they could, I could barely hold back the laughter as he was blushing
up a storm trying to explain that he had a wife in canada, though none
of them believed him and some were quite desparte to get him home,
offering up land and guesthouses!

The situation around here seems to continually be up in the air, so I
really don’t know how the rest of the tour is going to look like. But
the one thing I know for sure is I highly doubt I’ll see very much of
KAF, which pleases me because the place just feels like a gigantic
mega base, and really I can do without the extra niceities like fresh
coffee and shopping boulevards. We’ve got cold showers, a mini gym, a
bunch of jimboogily’s (aka junk food), afghan food, occasional phone
access (when it works and there are no operations going on), some slow
internet, dusty hot days and cold desert nights. Whats to complain
about!!

I appreciate very much all of the emails I’ve recieved to date. They
are the best distraction I have around from the daily bump and grind.
I really wish everyone nothing but the best, stay healthy and have a
great time adventuring!

Andrew

Update from Afghanistan 1

October 24th, 2009 Posted in Military, Personal/Website | No Comments »

Hi all,

Well its day 3 in country now, and i’m right out in the countryside!  This beginning feels like super fast waterslide into a completey different world.  We had a comparitively lush ride from Edmonton to Cyprus on an Air Italy plane, then onto one of canada’s new C117 globemasters for a dizzying 5hr ride into KAF.  24hrs in total and literally on the the other side of the world!

Kandahar Air Base (KAF) is so much more than I was expecting in all aspects!  There is almost 35,000 people there now (and will be way more by the end of my tour), from a lot of different countries (US, UK, Australia, France, Belguim, Netherlands, Germany, to name the ones i’ve seen).  The place is soo built up, tons of buildings, cement walls around everything, lots of vehicles ripping around (the place has morning and evening traffic jams!), a promenade with different stores (timmys, oakley, subway, pizza hut, carpet stores, different country military stores, and more).  On top of it the airfield is incredibly busy, i’d say easily as busy or busier than toronto or montreal international airport.  The very wierd thing is that being in KAF is definetly not like being in afghanistan, the entire time I felt like a tourist.  I didn’t spend very much time there at all, just enough to get the usual briefings, pack my kit, get a bit or rest, then I was on a chinook helicopter out to the countryside.

Things here are alright (i’ve ony fired my weapon at a pop can), we’ve got a lot of food and other goodies, some very slow internet, a cot to sleep on, and even a shower with wamish water.  The temperature is nothing to complain about, feels like a canadian summer, 30ish in the day, 5ish in the night, and not a cloud in the sky.  The locals are all very friendly too, to them we are like cable tv.  I’m in the middle of the relief-in-place here with the Vandoos (who have done an excellent job around here at least), while I wait for the rest of my platoon to arrive.  Things are busy, but definetly not overwhelming.  All in all, its nothing to complain about.

I hope everyone is doing very well, I’ll try to send some pictures when I get another chance.  Stay healthy and enjoy yourselves!  Much love to all!

Andrew

Working hard, hardly working…

September 20th, 2009 Posted in Music, Personal/Website | No Comments »

Nuttman presents At Least Its Not The Red Slide

Well this has been a very long time coming, but finally I’ve made a new mix! This time I’ve gotten together all of the best trance tracks I’ve found recently that have been making me move and thrown ‘em together. I think the mixing is pretty good, especially considering my very low tech minimal setup. I hope you all enjoy this and I can’t wait to make some more, so please, I’d love all constructive criticism!

I am dedicating this mix to the fantastic group of people I work with everyday. These people have quickly and forcefully become my family away from home, I consider myself lucky to have known them and will try everyday to exceed their high expectations.

Nuttman - At Least Its Not The Red Slide (Sep 2009)

01 - Mat Zo - Rush
02 - Orbital - Halcyon (Tom Middleton Re-model)
03 - Galore - Sunshine (Klems Remix)
04 - John O’Callaghan ft Lo-Fi Sugar - Never Fade Away (Andy Dugiud Mix Edit)
05 - Cold Blue - Mount Everest (Dennis Sheperd Remix)
06 - Above & Beyond present OceanLab - I Am What I Am (Lange Remix)
07 - Tiesto & Sneaky Sound System - I Will Be Here (Wolfgang Gartner Remix)
08 - Adam Nickey - In Motion
09 - Moony - I Don’t Know Why (DJ Chus & Jerome Isma-Ae Superdub Mix)
10 - John O’Callaghan ft Sarah Howells - Find Yourself (Cosmic Gate Remix)
11 - Ronski Speed ft Mque - Are You? (Sun Decade Mix)
12 - Calvin Harris - I’m Not Alone (Tiesto Remix)
13 - Breakfast - Air Guitar
14 - Marc Marberg with Kyau & Albert - Grrreat
15 - Dan Stone - Mumbai (Cressida Remix)
16 - Hybrid - Finished Symphony (Deadmau5 Remix)
17 - Cliff Coenraad - Gone South
18 - Muse - Bliss

Hear my new mix!

December 1st, 2008 Posted in Music, Personal/Website | No Comments »

Just made a new mix, I think its actually my best and cleanest to date.  Lots of good progressive & trance tunes.  Hope you like it!

Nuttman - Praire Landlocked Sucka

1) Intro - Nuttman Powerful Intro
2) Deadmau5 - Jaded
3) Moonbeam & Tyler Michaud ft Fisher - Love Never Dies
4) Kaskade & Deadmau5 - Move For Me (Extended Mix)
5) Robert Babicz - Dark flower (Joris Voorn Magnolia Mix) (with Optimus Prime)
6) Marco Denmark - Tiny Dancer (Deadmau5 Remix)
7) Emjae - Necromancer (Probspot Vocal Mix)
8) Morgan Page ft Lissie - the Longest Road (Deadmau5 Remix)
9) Daniele Papini - Church Of Nonsense
10) Deadmau5 vs Freemasons ft Amanda Wilson - Watching Berlin (Popkids Vibes Exclusive Bootleg)
11) Calvin Harris - Acceptable In The 80s (Tom Neville Remix)
12) Diplo - Bay Of Figs / Ward 21
13) Diplo & Buraka Som Sistema - Inna De Ghetto (Remix)
14) Groove Armada ft Stush - Get Down (Donnie Hot Wheel Radio Edit)
15) Hybrid - Finished Symphony (Deadmau5 Remix)

From snowflake to steel edged blade

July 25th, 2008 Posted in Personal/Website, Sports | No Comments »

I may not be a big fan of where I found this, I have to respect the content for what it is … an excellent cut-to-the-chase overview of what it takes to accomplish something great, of the mindset required to do what very few around us do, go the extra mile.

….

Even in the small world of mountain climbing a few guys were convinced that their betters were using EPO, “because there’s no way they could be that much faster than me.” Ski mountaineering racing is the same. Cycling is the same; the best guy in the country goes to an international level race, finishes below the 50th percentile and before checking into his own training/diet/recovery/stress-management/genetics/etc the ego goes into self-preservation overdrive and imagines all sorts of doping practices to be responsible. This is a natural consequence of having been told from childhood, “you are a unique snowflake.”

Well you’re not and I’m not. If you weren’t given the gift you can’t get the gift so the best you can do – if your goal is important – is work as hard as you possibly can, pay attention every hour of every day and then maybe, maybe if you’ve done enough and been smart enough you’ll emerge from the muck of mediocrity to shine a bit brighter than you shone before. Then, upon reflection you might decide your goal is a bit more important so you’ll start paying attention every minute of every hour of every day. You’ll find people who are better than you and you’ll take an empty cup when you meet them. Their example will destroy or inspire you and if it’s the latter you may stay and learn. You might imitate, doing as they do because you’ve already accepted that you do not know best – if you did you’d be leading the group they were trying to join. Perhaps being exposed to their superior ability will drive you to work harder than you thought possible, or necessary. Maybe you’ll overcome your self-imposed (or worse, society-imposed) limitations and shine even more brightly. Wow, you’re getting it: positive reinforcement for hard work and suffering. So maybe you give your goal even more significance and you begin cutting away the ideas and the expectations and the people who you believe prevent you from achieving it. Now you become a real selfish prick, and you begin paying attention every second of every minute of every hour of every day, and you sustain your awareness for weeks and months at a time. You no longer think yourself a unique snowflake, you’re a steel-edged blade shaped like a snowflake and you’re spinning at warp speed. You’re the biggest fish in the pond. You’re a badass. Now you have options.

1) If you think you haven’t yet done enough, and you could do more, you might begin to understand that, the more capable you become, the higher the mountain rises ahead of you. At that moment you may recognize the existence of a legitimately serious group, ahead of you, above you, somewhere you’re not. They are silent, implacable, constantly improving and evolving and because they are truly capable they are accessible to those who are genuine. Among them there’s no defensiveness, no posturing or pretending, and they aren’t interested in anyone else’s. Selection for such a group isn’t based on physical performance alone. Issues of character and commitment, and discipline and persistence balance physical talent. Because you clawed your way out of the muck, were “up all night, dedicated” and maintained interest for long enough to differentiate yourself from the short-attention-span sporting dilettantes who commonly brush up against this group they might accept you as an apprentice. If you empty your cup your chances are better. If you redouble your efforts your odds improve again.

2) If however, you think you’ve done enough or you decide you have “arrived” then you’ll stay in the small pond and stagnate. And when the rot is complete you’ll be just a little bit better than those around you – your initial example will have driven them to reach higher levels of performance – and there you’ll sit, an intellectually bloated, pontificating fuck who once had the juice to work hard but having done so feels entitled to coast on past success all the way to the grave. That’s when you’ll start offering opinions based on the certainty of your own short-lived, amateur experience.

3) And if that limited practice has convinced you anyone better than you is so because of drugs or because they won the genetic lottery or they have better equipment, you may be right. But it’s a lot more likely they are better than you precisely because of your cop-out opinion, because you are lazy, or confused about the meaning of hard work and diet control. Maybe you think self-discipline means drinking two beers instead of six. Maybe you think (OTC) supplements can end-run a bad diet and inadequate recovery. Maybe you think 3×8 of something, anything, is the apogee of training theory. Or maybe you think intelligent training means competing in the gym or on an Internet forum where people are as fit and capable and talented as they anonymously pretend to be. Maybe you read about a workout, do it, think it was easy and exclaim that anyone who found it hard is not as good as you. Well wake up, everyone is a geek to someone and maybe the “300” workout you found easy has been done with more weight, or faster, or with longer range-of-motion. Maybe that named workout doesn’t matter. Maybe the person you compare yourself to doesn’t share your definition of fitness, or happiness or health. Perhaps his or her objective is altogether different. Perhaps, an honest self-assessment would reveal all of your pretense and blind obedience to a particular ideal. Maybe you need self-destruction to lead to self-creation, or reinvention.

(Gym Jones - 300 Opinions)

effort

Mystery Crypto Letter Has Coders Stumped

July 15th, 2008 Posted in Science & Technology, Security | No Comments »

Now this is super interesting!!!

A coded letter sent last year to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois has the lab, and outside coders stumped. The letter was sent anonymously last March in a hand-addressed envelope via regular mail to the physics lab’s public affairs office.

mystery cyrpto letter

After sitting on the letter for more than a year, the lab posted it on a physics blog in May, hoping to get help cracking it.

Thousands of sleuths have taken a stab at it so far and have succeeded to crack two parts of the letter. An engineer at the Canadian Space Center used a variation of the base-3 system to uncover a line that reads “Frank Shoemaker would call this noise,” which refers to an 86-year-old retired Princeton University physicist who helped design the magnets used with the lab’s first particle accelerator, known as the Main Ring. Another line in the letter has been cracked to read, “Employee number basse sixteen.”

(from Wired: Threat Level)

How the Colombian hostages were freed

July 3rd, 2008 Posted in Politics & Current Affairs, Security | No Comments »

A well executed plan can be an excellent thing (no shots fired during the op!).

” The rescue operation that freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other FARC hostages from captivity was months in the planning. It has been hailed by Colombian authorities as “an unprecedented operation that will go down in history for its audacity and effectiveness”.

Not a shot was fired in the operation, although Gen Padilla said the Colombian soldiers could easily have killed the 60 guerrillas gathered near the jungle clearing. “We preferred to leave them with liberty and life because, in Colombia, we prefer life over death,” he said. ”

(BBC News article)

New FBI Database to Include Photos and Palm Prints

June 30th, 2008 Posted in Science & Technology, Security | No Comments »

I worked on a project fingerprint project like this in school lots a years ago, it was fun stuff

Lockheed Martin has been tapped by the FBI to develop a system for storing and analyzing more biometric markers to augment the fingerprint collection system the agency already maintains. The Next Generation Identification (NGI) system will store photographs and palm prints, according to a story in Popular Mechanics, and may even include iris scans.

(from Wired: Threat Level)

Spartan Workout Rules: The Canadian Forces Way

May 5th, 2008 Posted in Sports | No Comments »

1) Lactic acid is the Spartan’s friend. The Spartan knows the value of anaerobic failure, and actively seeks it out. If he falls on his face, he waits only as long as necessary to move again before he continues.

2) The Spartan takes no breaks between exercises, unless it’s to shove a non-Spartan out of the way.

3) The Spartan runs. He does not use Stairmasters, or stationary bikes, or ellipticals. He runs.

4) When the Spartan cannot run, he walks. When he cannot walk, he crawls. When he cannot crawl, he has failed.

5) The Spartan hits big muscles, like the back, the pectorals, the quadriceps and the glutes. He knows this means he is building functional muscle that will assist in the destruction of his enemies and in the production of testosterone (of which the Spartan has more than the average man).

6) By contrast, the Spartan does not waste much time on small muscles. They will grow as the result of functional exercise that hits the big muscles (see above). For example, the bicep is only useful in that it assists with chin-ups, and scaling enemy fortifications. Anything else is vanity.

7) The Spartan abhors cables and machines. This is for two reasons. First, to activate stabilizer muscles, the Spartan must depend on himself to balance the weight, not a machine. Second - look up the adjective “spartan” in the dictionary: “strict and austere.” You should be able to do a Spartan workout in a FOB.

8 ) The Spartan fears only one thing: his workout. The enemy pales in comparison to his workout. If he doesn’t fear his workout, it isn’t hard enough.

9) Puking is acceptable. Quitting is not. If he gives up here, he gives up in battle. This is unacceptable.

10) So nature abhors a vacuum, so the Spartan loathes missing a workout. A Spartan can complete a workout in his grandma’s basement, a hotel room, or in a city park.

11) If the Spartan is not in pain during his workout, he is wrong.

12) The Spartan never cheats. He maintains proper technique throughout his training, because he knows that smooth is fast, and that he will be mocked mercilessly for, “girly pull-ups”.

13) The Spartan knows the value of the basics: the push-up, the pull-up, the chin-up, the sit-up, the squat, and the dead-lift. He also knows the importance of variety, and seeks out different techniques of the above.