It's Football Season!

As September rolls around, everyone at the Bubblehead household gets excited about football season. Pro football causes a little bit of contention -- we've got one serious Carolina Panther fan, two less-involved Dallas Cowboy fans, and one father who likes the Chargers as well as the Panthers. College football doesn't cause as much of a problem -- the boys root for Nebraska, and Subbasket only occasionally mentions how she hopes they lose all their games because of what they did to her wedding.

Break -- New topic. A post by Vigilis at Ultraquiet No More last week got me thinking about communications bandwidth on submarines. When I was on the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) back in 2000, both subs had SIPRNET (the crypto-keyed military version of the Internet) connectivity when they were up at periscope depth. It made communicating with the boat a lot easier; instead of having to pass everything on the radio or my message, I could get them info over real-time chat. It'd be great; I'd be sitting at my computer, playing Minesweeper working on vital staff paperwork, and the sub would come up on chat. At times I'd have three chat windows open with the boat: the JOOD on his computer in Control, the CO from his stateroom, and a radioman wanting messages they'd missed. It was pretty sweet.

Anyway, back to football (these two topic do eventually tie together). I've seen at least part of every Super Bowl since probably Super Bowl IV, back when I first became aware of the game. (I remember getting a Joe Namath Jets uniform when I was about six, and I'd always be playing football with the neighbor kids -- I'd tie rags around my wrists as "wristbands", and I'd have a towel hanging from the front and back of my pants like the centers used to have (so they and the QB could have clean hands.) Two of the Super Bowls I saw were at sea -- the one in 2000 on the Stennis, and Super Bowl XXVII in 1993 on USS Topeka. We were just finishing our deployment, and had the ORSE team onboard. As soon as the evolutions were done, we surfaced the boat and were able to pick the game off the #2 periscope from a Tijuana station. I only saw a couple of plays (including the famous Leon Lett fumble) but it was enough to keep my streak alive. All because submarines have had the capability to receive high rates of data for a while now. (See, I tied the two disjointed topics together at the end.)

Bottom line: expect to see more football talk here for the next few months, especially if Nebraska keeps winning...

Going deep...

Edited 1614 12 Sep to correct an embarrass embaras stupid typo...