As of 010001NOV2011 or midnight on November 1st for the civilians out there, I am officially retired from the United States Army after a combined total of 8273 days or 22 years, 7 months and 24 days I am kind of a civilian again. I don’t have to cut my hair and I can grow a beard if my lets me. It came faster than I thought it would but I am proud to have served and glad to be on civvy street again at the same time. Now I just have to go out and find a real job, great economy for that huh? 
As my wife and I were harvesting the carrots from our garden yesterday we pulled up an Oompa Loompa. I am wondering if I should use this as my profile picture.
Oompa Loompa in its Natural Habitat
This is just a picture of my dog enjoying a beef rib bone
Pirat enjoying a bone on a crisp October day
Below the fold is a list of historical sources on the internet, this includes both primary and secondary source collections. I am constantly updating this list when I run across useful sites. Please point me at sites I miss in the comments section.
I am trying to keep this blog mostly academic or at least reasonably scholarly while at the same time making most of my source material easily available. Therefore I thought it would be a good idea to put up a note about sources I use on the site. For the most part I will try to use online sources in my essays and blog posts for one main reason. There is tons of great information on the internet if you know where to look and how to search. I hope that by posting online sources it will point people to some of the many resources available online. Occasionally I will use books from my personal library to cite some items that I just cannot find an online source for.
I get about 15-20 spam comments on my blog every day. Most are the “Thanks for that Awesome posting, it saved MUCH time” variety. They usually have a link in them to anything from Viagra ads, penis enlargement, cheap homeloans, to how to get student aid. I am currently doing an experiment to see many of the “thanks for that Awesome posting spam I get as a percentage of all the spam I get. My gut tells me that the “awesome posting” spam is about 50% of all the spam I get. I have recieved 31 spam comments in the past two days and 18 of them were the “awesome posting” comment.
"Thanks for that Awesome posting, it saved MUCH time"
I use the Akismet plugin to stop spam. It is an excellent program and for personal blogs you get a free activation key. It stops almost all my spam and because of the way I have discussion set I have to approve every comment the first time and then a person can comment without me having to approve it. It is the only way I have found in the four months I have been blogging to avoid being overwhelmed with spam.
I will probably do an update on this in a week or so. What is amazing to me is that this blog is not extremely high traffic, I only get between 20-30 visitors a day, and I still get so much spam. I would love it if I got as many legitimate comments as I do spam.
No posts for the next week or so as I will be on vacation visiting historic places I can post about and probably lounging on the beach as well.