Tobin Family Website

It is still hard for me to believe, but I have been in the Air Force about 19 years now.  What started out as a nifty way to pay for college turned into a very enjoyable and interesting career.  I never planned on staying in past the 4-years I owed in return for my 4-year ROTC scholarship, but here I am with just one year to go until I can retire and start my second career.  In hindsight, it is kind of interesting to look back at the events that led me down this path.  While some people plan out their whole career in advance, I have taken it much more one day at a time with shorter term goals. 

The events that led me to the Air Force were born out of financial necessity.  In my junior year in high school, I decided that a college degree was “the right thing to do”.  Knowing that my best option to get there was through a scholarship of some sort, I applied to West Point Military Academy and for an Air Force ROTC scholarship.  I was just about to get screened for West Point when the Air Force offered me a 4-year scholarship.  Needless to say, I liked the prospect of 1 day a week in ROTC, versus 7-days a week at an academy.  I also like the career opportunities in the Air Force and thought they would more easily port into a civilian career later on.  Wanting to enjoy my college years, I opted to go to the University of Vermont and join the Air Force. 

After graduating from UVM, my first assignment was at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where I became an acquisition project manager.   I managed reliability, environmental, and acceptance testing of a low altitude targeting system called LANTIRN, a weapon system deployed on F-15 and F-16 aircraft.  It was a fun program and I learned a lot about systems engineering and large scale development and production programs.  Karen and I also got married about 9 months after I joined.  At the 3-year point, and with 1-year to go on my commitment to the Air Force, I decided that I might need to pursue my Master’s degree before getting out.  It was also 1992 and the economy was not doing so well, so I opted to stay in and applied to attend the Air Force Institute of Technology, a graduate school on the base.  I was ultimately accepted and spent 18-months as a full-time student getting a Master’s of Science in Software Acquisition Management.  This tacked on another 4-year committment.  I pinned on Captain while at AFIT.

After graduating from AFIT, we moved to Los Angeles where I worked as a Project Manager on Military Satellite Communications Systems.  The first system I worked on was an old 1960’s era satellite system called the Defense Systems Communication Satellite, or DSCS.  I managed a program that was refurbishing unlaunched satellites to extend their on-orbit design life by improving their solar panels, station-keeping thrusters, and their communications transmitters.  After I got that effort on contract and through preliminary design, they moved me over to another communications satellite system called MILSTAR to manage the continued development of its ground control software in advance of launching a new payload (someone found out I had a software management degree).  Ben was born while we lived in the Los Angeles area.

We left Los Angeles in 1998 and moved to Satellite Beach, Florida, where I worked as a project manager on the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or Joint STARS.  It is an airborne radar like AWACS (the plane with the big dish on it), but on Joint STARS the radar is on the belly of the plane like a big canoe and it tracks ground activity (not airborne activity).  I worked at the Joint Test Force, which was collocated at the contractor’s facility.  We were responsible for testing all development upgrades to the system, and we had a Boeing-707 test aircraft that would be flown all over the country to support testing.  I ultimately became the Director of Plans and Programs and was responsible for managing the annual budget of the Test Force, making sure that we could support all of our test missions and keep our test pilots and test engineers current and proficient.  I also managed a 50-head contract for all of our engineering and IT support.  It was a great assignment that afforded me the opportunity to travel as a crew member with our test aircraft to participate in an Air Show in Boston (an odd opportunity for an acquisition officer).  Delaney was also born while we lived in Satellite Beach.  I pinned on Major while at this assignment.  At this point, I could have gotten out of the Air Force again, but I was having too much fun and was over halfway to retirement, so I decided to stay in. 

On to the Pentagon in March 2001, where I worked for the Secretary of the Air Force in the Acquisition office as an Air Force liaison for missile defense funded programs.  I was responsible for the financial execution of over 80-programs being executed at Air Force bases worldwide in support of the Missile Defense Agency.  It was during this assignment that 9/11 occurred.  For a retrospective on my experiences that day, you can click HERE to read my post that I wrote on the 5th anniversary of that tragic day.  The second half of my assignment at the Pentagon, I was a Program Element Monitor for the Air Force’s fleet of gas turbine engines.  I was responsible for advocating and defending the budget used to fund reliability and safety programs for the entire Air Force jet engine inventory. 

On to Eglin Air Force Base in late 2003 where I was the Program Manager and Division Chief for several weapons programs.  While there, I was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and was appointed as the first Commander of the 693d Armament Systems Squadron, which was developing multi-ship F-16 precision targeting upgrades to the High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) Targeting System as well as some other programs.  We enjoyed living near the beach yet again, an really enjoyed the beautiful white sands of the Gulf Coast.  While there, we evacuated 3 times due to hurricanes, but never suffered any significant damage. 

Finally, in the summer of 2006, we moved back to the DC area where I worked as a program manager and now branch chief for geospatial-intelligence programs.  While this is not what I expected to be doing in my final years in the Air Force, I have to say that I have come to enjoy it and am considering a follow-on career with the Agency to which I am currently assigned. 

Again, it is hard to believe that 19 years have rolled by.  It barely seems possible.  I am just 1-short year away from being able to get out and draw a military pension while starting a second career.  I am thankful to the Air Force for the many great opportunities and adventure (including a trip to Korea (with stops in Alaska and Japan), a 90-minute ride in an F-16, and travel to/through almost every state in the country).  At the end of August, I will start preparing for retirement by attending a Transition Assistane Program class, a 4-day course aimed at preparing military retirees for civilian life.  It is just the first step in a series of activities that will lead to my planned retirement in October 2009.  The big unanswered question is…..what to do next?!

Image details: South Korea & US Air Force Conduct Combined Training Exercise served by picapp.com

Image details: Air Force Dedicates Memorial At Arlington served by picapp.com

Tags: Work/Professional

Happy belated 4th of July! I hope everyone had fun! Earlier in the week, we had company as our neighbors from Florida stopped in on their way back from Michigan and Philadelphia. They came on Wednesday afternoon and left on Friday afternoon so that they could get back and get some rest before the work week starts. I took Wednesday off after working most of the night Tuesday at one of our sites in the DC area that we were upgrading. I was ready to leave at midnight, but got stuck there until 3:30AM as an intruder had gotten onto the compound and they locked us all in until the guards cleared the area! On Wednesday, I was anticipating a trip to Palmyra that never materialized. Instead, we met up with our friends and got caught up a bit.

On Friday night, we drove about a mile and a half to a local hillside where we could see the fireworks. It was all going well until the rain started to fall. Fortunately, we brought umbrellas. The show was quite nice, but became obstructed by the heavy smoke that hung in the air because of the rain. We ultimately came back to the house and when the rain subsided shot off $80 of fireworks in the driveway. Not as impressive as the city’s show, but the kids enjoyed it nonetheless!

While I was at the site on Tuesday night, I was talking to one of the site administrators about the benefits of RAID storage (RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives, and it is a storage mechanism where multiple hard drives are connected together to make one large storage area). Our large systems are made up of a LOT of hard drives latched together in RAID arrays. One of the benefits of a RAID array (depending upon how you configure it), is that it provides redundancy such that if one of the drives fails, you don’t lose any data (because it is replicated across multiple drives). You simply remove and replace the broken drive without losing any data, and therefore have greater data reliability. It can also offer improved performance by working around performance-limiting issues that plague individual hard drives (i.e., the mechanical limits of read/write speeds). It does this by striping data across multiple drives, enabling parallel read/write across multiple drives simultaneously.

Knowing that my high-end home PC supports RAID, and that hard drives have come way down in price, I decided to take the plunge this weekend and upgrade my PC to a RAID configuration. It is not as simple of a task as you might imagine, as you have to reformat the drives and reinstall all of your software. Couple this with the fact that I am running an upgrade version of Windows Vista, and you have a lengthy upgrade.

First I went out and bought 4-500GB SATA drives. Then before starting the upgrade, I moved all of the critical data on my existing hard drives to a netwrk storage device that I have. I then replaced the hardware, removing my two 250GB hard drives, and installing my four 500GB drives. Then I had to re-image the first of the 4 drives to Windows XP (using the system recovery disk that came with the PC). Once that was complete, I initiated the RAID configuration (which is currently 97% complete after 4.5 hours)! Next, I will make sure everything is running good in XP on the RAID, and then I will initiate the Vista upgrade. Assuming that goes well, I will install the 23 key applications that I want back on the PC.

Needless to say, this is an exercise in geekiness, but I love doing it. I am strange that way! When all is said and done, I think I will be happy with the new configuration. I chose to install a RAID 10 configuration, which combines both data striping and disk mirroring capabilities to optimize both reliability and performance (at the expense of disk space). RAID 10 uses a lot of overhead to get the best of performance and reliability. As a result, I will have ~1TB of actual storage from 2TB of disk space. Had I chosen RAID 5, I would have gotten almost 1.5TB of storage, but with less performance. Oh well…I assume that Mr Papa will be the only one who will appreciate this discussion, so I will end it here!

In other news, my brother Andy announced that he will be getting married at the beginning of August, so we will plan a quick trip up to Vermont to celebrate that event with him. It will be the first time that all of the boys will be back in Vermont since my parents 50th wedding anniversary in Feb 07.

Other than that, everyone here is having fun enjoying summer vacation. The kids are getting tall, and they are both so smart…..too smart sometimes! Our friends who were here for a few days have a one-year old, and after they left Ben and Delaney were mentioning that they would like a little brother or sister. I reminded Ben that I have “been fixed” and can’t have any more kids. He promptly asked if it was too late for Viagra…I am thinking about sending that one in to Reader’s Digest!

Tags: Family Update, Technology