For sports fans, myself included, Spring is a wonderful time of year. Of course there’s March Madness and tons of college sports championships, and the NHL, and NBA playoff picture is shaping up.

I grew up as a child of the 70s.  No, I was not wearing bell bottoms or syncing my dance moves to John Travolta (I did that when disco got cool again in the 90s).  By the time I had been born in 1971, humans had stepped onto another celestial body a few times over.  We had NASA fever in our household and Walter Cronkite narrated the saga; his voice hanging in the ether on hot summer nights.  As a kid, I gazed at the stars and the moon with a keen sense of wonder.  Madly leafing through NASA picture books, I dreamed of the future.

When I first entered the fire service in 1998, it was all about eating huge. After all, you never knew when you were going to eat again…. at least that was our station’s philosophy in the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Apple’s release of the iPad Pro unveiled a world of new possibilities to me both as a Fire Captain and as the founder of a tech company that provides Incident Management software.

We’re a long way from the black and white images of cops with their feet up on the desk and firemen playing cribbage in Fire Station USA. Since 9/11 and the dawn of the iPad, emergency services is becoming increasingly armed with the latest and most intuitive technological enhancements from the consumer space to track, measure, and analyze.

When I look back on my travels and readings from 2014, I logged a tremendous amount of exposure to several different emergency incident command gurus and methodologies. One of the methodologies that I have become a student of, literally, is Blue Card Command. I’m currently enrolled in the online portion of the command course with the classroom portion soon to follow.