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.

Guest post by Eric Tomlinson. Eric is a Deputy Chief with the Kent Regional Fire Authority in Washington State

Much has been said about the brotherhood of the American Fire Service. Put firefighters from neighboring departments together at a conference, watering hole, or other neutral ground and we will buy each other beverages and compare our Maltese tattoos until the wee hours, celebrating our brotherhood of public service. For some reason though, when we broach the subject of change to our practices or operations with our mutual aid neighbors, we suddenly become very tribal and defensive. After all, most of us were hired by a Fire Chief who told us that

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.

As the technical lead for Tablet Command, the most frequent question I hear is “Which iPad should my department get?”

The answer comes with some personal preference but some absolute requirements or recommendations. I’ll walk you through the difficult questions that everyone wonders about. I’ll start by getting to the point and then explain the different options.

My official recommendation for public safety (fire) users:

iPad Air 2
64GB
Wifi + Cellular (includes GPS receiver)

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.

You may know, but recently we did a scheduled upgrade of our database server.  I wanted to provide a technical background on our recent upgrade and explain what that means to you as an end user.  As technical lead for Tablet Command and understanding the dependence of technology in emergency services, we strive for 100% uptime.  The database upgrade prevented us from meeting this, but we are planning our future architecture to accommodate for database upgrade too.

Its risky to start a blog. Will we run out of gas? Will we have anything interesting to say?