Deckskills.org

DeckSkills.org, by ”Fantail Freddy’s Guide to Seamen.” CMA and TSGB specific. This site was built by some dudes, not unlike the calmaritime.net dudes. They’ve moved on, but the website persists.
General maritime external resources

Celestial

Hardest class I’ve ever taken, along with 1C cruise of course.
C-Nav Time Page
C-Nav Full plot, papers and videos
Universal Plotting Sheet 81/2 x 11
Blank Plotting Sheet (with logarithmic longitude)
Navigational Star Chart
Buy a headlamp with a red filter for cruise

 

Watch

You’re going to have it. It’s a big deal that you show up on time. There are some cadets who screwed this up during our freshman year, and have been trying to live it down ever since. It’s a small niche industry, and your reputation will follow you. It starts right here at CMA.The way we write the watch bills, are “for the evening of.” I use a planner for stuff, so this sorta screwed me up when I first got here. I showed up 24 hours early for some watches. When Wednesday night watch on 12/15 from 20×24 (8PM-12 midnight) is 12/15, the 00×04 (midnight-4AM) is actually 12/16, Thursday morning.
Watch Training Workbook
Standing watch
Night mating (on TSGB)

On campus wi-fi

There is wifi on campus. Those of you with smartphones, or laptop can easily sign onto it.
academic\<username>, <password>
Notice that the slash is a backslash, not a forward slash “/”. If you sign into the WPA-secured network, use your CMA username and password – your devices will remember the password and you won’t have to enter it every time.

Cell phone csum.edu email

Stay on top of your pesky csum.edu email without ever loggin into that account. Set up your phone to receive those emails right away. Settings are as follows: email <username>@csum.edu, server cmamail.csum.edu, domain academic, username <username>, password <password>, use SSL ON.

Mac csum email support

If you’re running a mac and are tired of accessing the web based email account, there may be hope for a mac exchange client. I’ve spent hours researching and even running snow leopard which supposedly supports exchange through the default Mail client, it only supports exchange 2007. Fortunately I have found one client that works… Microsoft Entourage. Entourage is available in Office 2008 for mac and the new Office 2011 for mac but is now called “Outlook” If you need help setting it up shoot an email to calmaritime.net@gmail.com

delete shit loads of email at one time

I didn’t know this until a lengthy, painful, email exchange with our IT department. While logged into an on-campus computer, run Microsoft Outlook. You can pretty much hit next next next, yeah yeah, accept blah blah, and your csum.edu email will come up inside the Microsoft Outlook. Kinda neat. You can delete shit loads of email, pages upon pages, in one fell swoop.

Print your schedule nice on a single page

This has been a little tricky, but here’s what I figured out:
use firefox
go to online services clicking on the gear at the top of this website
sign in using your cma user/pass
“my class schedule”
check “weekly calendar view”
hit “next week” (that default Monday is labor day with no classes)
click “printer friendly”, bottom right
right click, select “this frame”, then “print frame”
in the print dialouge select Pages 1 of 1 only.

Collar devices

There are 18 different ribbons and some have different stars that can be added if the ribbon is awarded twice. According the the display in Rizza there is a certain order they need to go in, you have to match up the ribbon to the number in precedence and arrange them in decreasing order. Here’s the full layout: Collar Devices

Study Murphy’s Questions

When an instructor says: “I’ll be pulling a bunch of questions out of Murphy’s” that means they’ll be doing us a favor and using many of the questions we’re going to see on our third mate’s test at the end of our college career. Here are a few of the study guides that are out there:
http://www.uscgq.com/ USCGQ.COM, from the original creator of calmaritime.net, free for online use
http://seasources.net/ SEASOURCES.NET, from some older dude. Downloadable version available for $, online for free
http://www.lapware.org LAPWARE.ORG, a subscription to the software is required with CMA license prep course

Screw “Diablo Z Drive,” use Googledocs

The real draw back of using the Z-Drive is that you have to be on campus to get stuff in and out of it. I’m also 90% sure there’s a small limit on the amount of stuff you’re allowed to stick in there. I use Google docs. The benefit here is that you can get at your stuff from anywhere with internet. Some documents are editable right online through the Google Docs editor. You can make sub-folders, and update existing versions. CMA Corps watch bills are already posted via Google Docs. Get on the train