darkholme

drawing overlays

Well, it's pretty late at night now, and I should be heading off to bed. Just taking a few moments in the common room to do my usual blog reading and email checking. I wonder how I can survive without the internet.

Behind me sleeping on the couch is one of the NSFs (National Serviceman Fulltime) and he's apparently going to use the common room as his bunk tonight. I can see why, as it's pretty quiet, it's enclosed so it's harder for insects to come in and bite you, and it's also air-conditioned. I can get used to sleeping without air conditioning, but the one thing that I cannot seem to get used to is showering with cold water. The worst thing is that usually you have to shower late at night because training ends pretty late.

Just to give you guys an update on what I actually have been doing, today was mainly lectures again. However, this time we had some hands-on practice with drawing overlays. The Singapore Army doctrine is such that on top of a normal map, the intelligence officer needs to draw an additional 10-15 overlays on it. We use this transparent sheet called "talc". It's basically like the kind of stuff that you use to wrap your school books in, but much much bigger. Incidentally, no one really knows how it's spelt. Some people say "talc", others "telt" and various other permutations and combinations.

So on these overlays, we draw terrain features, obstacles etc etc. Rather interesting but tedious at the same time. Ended tonight at around 10pm and then did personal maintenance (shower, eating, washing clothes) and here I am now.

What's interesting is the make-up of this course. In total there are 18 people from varying vocations and countries:

2 Regulars (One Commando, one Air-Defence)
5 Foreign Officers (Thai, Brunei, New Zealand, Indonesia and Australia)
6 NSmen (BRC PC-Stationary wholesaler, Brigade DyS2-Fund Manager, PDF-IT guy, Me, Lawyer, Combat Engineer)
5 NSFs

A pretty diverse group of people. What I find most impressive is the NSFs. They are mostly 18-19 years old and they really seem very confident and able to present themselves clearly and with knowledge. I don't think that I was ever that well trained. I really respect them, and they have been helping out the others, especially the foreign students, who don't have very good command of English. I wish that I was as well prepared, motivated and knowledgable as them.

Another thing that we've been introduced to/exposed to is the process of Concept Mapping. I won't go into detail about it here, but it seems to be a very useful tool for processing thoughts. If you are interested, go to http://cmap.ihmc.us to find out more.

Alrighty, pretty tired now. Going to go off and rest. Tomorrow is another big day.

posted by kelvin @ 12:07 am