potrerohill

Thanks for your reply. I am very interested in maritime activities. One project I did a while back involved nautical electronics and I was supremely envious of the people who actually got to go out to sea for testing.

By the way, here is the article where I learned about the Patriot Express loan:

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/49297/

I don't have a problem with that criticism. I posed the question the way I did because I thought I'd get better feedback. Mentioning the "serve my country" part of the decision has caused a lot of crazy arguments for me in real life, so I left that part out.

I guess it can't hurt to apply.

slipped discs. I don't know if they let people into the military with that. if not, then i guess this discussion is moot.

I have an LLC that is just me. I do a mixture of electronics and software consulting. I do OK, maybe a little bit more than I would if I was a senior programmer at google or yahoo. (or maybe not) I would like to do more electrical engineering. I have an electronic product I would like to bring to market (ok, a bike computer) that ties in with a desktop and web based analytics tool. This sort of thing is hard to get funding for in the valley, which is why the loan was interesting. (if I'm wrong about this, let me know who would fund such a product... ;-))

I think I could handle the regimented nature of training. Until I got hurt, I used to do amateur cycle racing which involved getting up at 5am every day and riding for 2-3 hours, and long group rides on weekends.

I have a degree in physics. In fact, the job ads on craigslist were for reserve officers. This one is for Tacoma, but was essentially the same one I saw for SF back in April.

http://coastguard.jobamatic.com/a/jbb/job-details/26481

I'm actually less interested in the money. I had the idea to join about a year ago, but kind of gave up on it. I just read the article about the loan literally about an hour ago while I was on the bus, so it got me thinking about the reserve again. Thanks for the comment!