www.mikestuff.com: Mike's pages and pictures

Schroon Lake, Pharaoh Lake, Putnam Pond, Treadway Mountain, and Pharaoh Mountain and many trails interconnecting these beatutiful remote areas shown in this custom map. My best cartographic effort thus far, I think. Again a 'large' file (about 13.5Mb), so you may want to right-click and choose "save as..." and then open the file after it is fully downloaded.

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2007 Hickory Creek / Minister Creek Map posted 09/11/2007 04:19:39 am by Mike Schenkel [General]
Here it is. Hickory Creek Wilderness Loop and Minister Creek Backcountry Loop in the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania.

This map is about 15Mb in size, and is designed to be printed at 24 by 17 inches. I enjoy doing these overlays - I hope you find this map useful. Here's a scaled down PDF version of the hickory creek wilderness and minister creek wilderness map as a PDF.

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New on mikestuff: RSS Link! posted 04/26/2007 06:24:21 am by Mike Schenkel [General]
RSS feed for this blog is now linked in the footer of the page. Firefox 2.x picks it up and lets you add the feed, but IE7 doesn't (yet). Enjoy!

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Revised for 2007 posted 04/03/2007 04:38:52 am by Mike Schenkel [Career]
I've revised my resume for 2007 to include recent training and experience with VMWare ESX 3.0.x.

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Response to a soldier's letter posted 03/10/2007 01:34:38 pm by Mike Schenkel [General]
I was digging through my emails, and found a "letter never sent". I wrote it as a response to a soldier's letter which was forwarded to me.

I reread my response today, and decided to post it - it's not as badly written as I thought. Comments welcomed.

Response to "a soldier's letter"

(a) The Kurdish people are not defined by a Christian religious viewpoint.

(b) The attack on the World Trade Center and other US targets on 2001-09-11 had nothing to do with Iraq, and there is no link between Saddam's Iraq and anti-american terrorism in recent history.

(c) Failing to overthrow, create, or otherwise intervene with governments not our own has nothing to do with any generally accepted definitions of "democracy."

(d) American troop increases will not "destroy the insurgents" anymore than the the Russian Navy won the American Civil War for the North. (Europe and the US civil war) -- the fighting in Iraq is not our war, but theirs.

(e) "The insurgents ... are from outside the country" -- what??? The "countries" in question (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, etc.) are a European fiction drawn on a century old map of the world in the last years of the British Empire! (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait)

By destroying Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, the U.S. exposed problems exacerbated by externally imposed divisions between the peoples in these regions. The instabilities and dictatorships have been encouraged by external powers throughout the past 100 years, allowing the real outsiders (that's us and Britain) to retain inordinate control over the economic output of the region.

(f) If "we are the only one who can stop al-Sadr," maybe that's because our policies are what creates "al-Sadr"-like individuals. Without our existing policies, there would be much less incentive for such characters to be allowed to exist by the cultures within which they thrive.

(g) If we are so "pro-democracy" and "pro-freedom" why does the U.S. support the regime in Saudi Arabia? In Egypt? Why haven't our troops overrun Cuba? Haiti? Venezuela? The agenda is not about freedom and democracy, or we'd be doing a lot more in places much closer to home.

I think our government should act in our civil defense. But it should not attack other peoples solely to improve our killing technolgies. Nor should we destroy the lives of our soliders and other nations' citizens to remove the fear of a changing world from a elite merchant class. Neither should we continue killing in the name of religious sentiment or so called "political containment." We should not devestate and devalue human lives and cultures to satiate an intransigent labor movement which finds itself unable to cope with global markets.

Defending the current U.S. war in Iraq as "pro-democracy," "humanitarian," or "anti-terrorist" ignores history and current events and insults the people dying on both sides of this conflict every day since the US military and the current federal administration decided to play a board game of "RISK" with the world in which the rest of us actually have to live.

I think we must help other people when we can -- but person to person, purchase to purchase, not rifle to rifle.

Why has our foreign policy been so focused on this region for the past twenty years? Why are we continuing this "peace to end all peace?"

If we are obligated to finish what we've started, I hope that we can put and end to our involvement in a way which leaves the situation better than we found it -- both for our soldiers, as well as for the rest of the world.

- Mike

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