Steps to Calculate Reserve Retire Pay

To easily calculate your pay at retirement (using today's dollars), follow these 5 simple steps.

1 - The first thing you need to do is figure out how many retirement points you have by going to https://www.hrc.army.mil. (Under Services select Self Service>My Record Portal>Use CAC Login>Reserve/Retiree/Veteran Record>Retirement>CHR Statement of Retirement Points)

2 - Estimate how many more you will get before you file for retirement. 

     a. The most retirement points you can receive in a year is 365 (except for leap year: 366). These    points can be acquired by -

• Active Duty Points: Transferring to the Reserves from Active Duty, Deployment, Annual Training, and Active Duty for Training (ADT). 
• 130 Non-Active Duty Points 
• 48 MUTAs (Battle Assemblies), 15 membership points, 24 RMA points, 12 ATA points. This equals 99 points. To get to 130, you can serve for retirement points (requires DA Form 138

Note: If you are not on Active Duty then the most you can get in a year is 130 retirement points.

3 - Divide this  number by 360.

This gives you the total number of years equivalent to Active Duty years.

4 - Figure out the base pay for the grade you anticipate retiring at by going to https://militarybenefits.info/2021-military-pay-charts/

Note: Replace 2021 with year you run these calculations

5 - Multiply the base pay by the equivalent Active Duty years from step 3 and multiply the result times 2.5%

• Note: For the Blended Retirement System you multiply the result by 2.0%

That is it. You now know your monthly retirement pay.

An example is below.

Step 1 + Step 2

Let's say that my retirement points at retirement are anticipated to be 3600. This is based on my actual retirement points as reported by HRC and my estimated anticipated retirement points. For example, let's say that I have 3 years until retirement but I am sitting at 3300 points. I anticipate getting 300 points over the next 3 years by actively drilling and attending extra training (SHARP, EO, etc). So, this brings me up to 3600.

Step 3

3600/360 = 10

This means I have 10 eligible years for retirement pay calculations

Step 4

Let's say that I am currently an E7 pay grade. I am promotable and plan on achieving E-8 pay grade before retirement. Navigating my browser to https://militarybenefits.info/2021-military-pay-charts/, I find E-8 base pay for 26 years service (these years of service are based on your LES years, not equivalent active duty years). 

The base pay is $6,452

Step 5

Monthly pay = ($6,452*10)*2.5%

Monthly pay = $1,613

Note that Monthly pay is shown in today's dollars. Army Reservists draw retirement pay at age 60 (with an exception of deployment time subtracting from 60 after the year 2008). As a result, retired pay will be more based on cost of living annual increases.  

Note that to get the E-8 pay grade, I would need serve at that level for at least 3 years (High 3). 

I hope this helps clear up any confusion with retirement pay for Reserves.

Sources: 

https://www.hrc.army.mil.

https://themilitarywallet.com/guard-reserve-points/#:~:text=Earning%20Annual%20Participation%20Points,Inactive%20Ready%20Reserve%20(IRR).

No individual should be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

As we prepare to take off for a long weekend, it might be appropriate to take just a moment to think about why we aren’t coming to work Monday … Martin Luther King Day – for his commitment to equal rights, non-violence, and social change.  The inspiration of Dr. King and the civil rights movement led our nation and the Federal government to a new standard of equality and inclusion, which was Dr. King’s purpose.  He wanted to challenge our country to be a better place, where every person is valued and respected. 

Dr. King challenged us to overcome oppression and violence.  He urged us to reject revenge, aggression, and retaliation.  His vision that “no individual should be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” set in motion changes that led to the passage of civil rights and voting laws.  In honor and respect for his contribution to the improvement of our national attitudes, policies, and laws, the Federal government celebrates Dr. King. 

Over the years, there has been some speculation on what Dr. King could have accomplished if his life had not been so tragically cut short.  He was only 28 years old when he was elected the first President of the Southern Christian Leadership Council.  He had already graduated from college at 19 and graduated from Divinity school at 22.  By the time Dr. King was 29, he had published his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom.” In 1964, he gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech to 250,000 people who marched on Washington in support of pending civil rights legislation.  In the same year, he was successful in getting the legislation passed and he won the Nobel Peace Prize.  A lot of accomplishments for a man who was only 35 years old.

Dr. Martin Luther King believed in our country and its potential for greatness.  He also believed that each one of us is essential to achieving its full potential.  Although Dr. King’s primary efforts focused on equality for African-Americans, his ultimate goal was the equality and inclusion of every individual.  As Dr. King said“There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose.  People who have a stake in their society protect that society.  But when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”

-Curtis L. Coy

Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Opportunity

Professor Messer

Professor Messer is a great learning resource for all kinds of certfications including A+ and Network+.
His online videos are free. You only have to pay if you want to download the material.
I used the free online versions to supplement my learning.
And, a cool little fact...Mr Messer live in Killearn Lakes, in Tallahassee. ;)
Here is the link:
http://www.professormesser.com/

Extreme Programming

Tired of your nerd friends wearing those cool 'Extreme Programming' shirts and not knowing what it's all about? Look below, so now you know! 

Extreme Programming broken down into its tasks:
• Realistic planning: Customers are to make business decisions, programmers are to make technical decisions. Update the plan when it conflicts with reality.

• Small releases: Release a useful system quickly, then release updates on a very short cycle.

• Metaphor: All programmers should have a simple shared story that explains the system under development.

• Simplicity: Design everything to be as simple as possible instead of preparing for future complexity.

• Testing: Both programmers and customers are to write test cases. The system is continuously tested.

• Refactoring: Programmers are to restructure the system continuously to improve the code and eliminate duplication.

• Pair programming: Put programmers together in pairs, and require each pair to write code on a single computer.

• Collective ownership: All programmers have permission to change all code as it becomes necessary.

• Continuous integration: Whenever a task is completed, build the entire system and test it.

• 40-hour week: Don't cover up unrealistic schedules with bursts of heroic effort.

• On-site customer: An actual customer of the system is to be accessible to team members at all times.

• Coding standards: Programmers are to follow standards that emphasize self-documenting code.

• Horstmann, C. (2010). Big JAVA: Compatible with JAVA 7 and 8 (4th ed.). Wiley ISBN: 978-0-470-50948-7

The pain of password complexity

Did you know that there is a method to the madness of password complexity required by most organizations?
Here is why you are required to create a password consisting of lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and special characters, and usually a minimum password length
of eight characters (although 10 is preferable):
There are 26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, 10 numbers, and 32 special characters. These combined make up a key space. This key space can be calculated
based on the following formula: C^N where C is the number of possible characters used and N is the password length. So, let's say that you use a password
that only consists of 6 characters and they are all lowercase. This means that there are 26^6 possibilities. This equates to 308 million possibilities. Changing
your password to 10 characters raises this value dramatically to 26^10, which is also 141 trillion possibilities. An important note here is that although a
10 character password (all in lowercase) may look pretty darn secure, there are password cracking software tools available that can iterate through 2.8 billion
password combinations in just one second. This means that it would take a tool like this only about 13 hours to crack a 10 character lowercase password.

Now, let's say that you use a combination of the four variants (lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and special characters). This means that you are using 94 possible
values (26+26+10+32). A password such as this is also known as a complex password. We will also use the six and 10 character length as examples. A complex
password consisting of just six characters (94^6) equals 689 billion possibilities. In contrast, a complex password that consists of 10 characters (94^10) equals
53 quintillion. To recap on what this means, the order is million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, and then quintillion. What this boils down to is that a
complex password consisting of 10 characters will take years to crack!

References
Darril Gibson, (2011). CompTIA Security+

Complex passwords can be a pain; however, perhaps this will allow you to understand the reasons behind the madness. It really is to ensure that you are and stay
secure in a digital world.

Soft Inclinations: eDOCS DM Server Log Parser - Part 1: Understanding...

Soft Inclinations: eDOCS DM Server Log Parser - Part 1: Understanding...: A good thing about eDOCS DM is that DM Server can create log files, which give you idea of what is going on behind the scene.

HTML/XHTML/HTML5/XML

   Some years ago (about 13 or 14) I coded a website (and have of course coded others since then) and stored it on Geocities (no longer around). I did this in XHTML because that was the new HTML standard. The idea (or so I thought) behind XHTML was to transition web documents from HTML which supports sloppy markup to XML documents (which must be written as a well-formed document). Making the transition to XML would essentially be a move to creating intelligent documents as documents are self-describing. This in turn would empower Internet searching to be more exact in search results and also reduce Internet traffic. The ultimate idea was to create what is now coined as the "Semantic Web".

   Then along comes HTML5. HTML5 contains self-describing tags such as <element>, <footer>, <article>, etc. The questions that present themselves are; with the introduction of HTML5, have we abandoned the move to XML? Will we continue to release new HTML standards? Why did we need HTML5 in the first place? What is the primary goal of HTML5? Is it to push the Semantic Web? If so, doesn't XML do that already, and do it better? Is it the push to remove the need for plugins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight? If this is the primary goal then I can understand.

   Don't get me wrong, I understand the need for HTML. If you need non-persistent information then HTML is the way to go; however, for persistent data that can be shared easily with others, isn't XML the proper choice? Will the web ever make the move to XML (with the caveat that HTML can be easily created using XSLT)?