DC for CA Systems Training

I made a quick trip up to DC for a week to attend CA Systems training. PS310 is a great class if you need to work on CA systems. I feel like I went from knowing nothing to being fully capable of configuring the software and hardware to do everything it needs to do for the various CA roles. The class has a lot of hands-on training and troubleshooting in a good lab setup. I highly recommend my fellow IMS take the course, but my usual point of blog posts is to share pictures. Here's some from the bookend weekends I added to the trip. There's various buildings and monuments (you can guess which ones) and a lot of pictures from the cherry blossoms in bloom that we just happened to catch.

Training En Route

I don't know about the other career fields but being an IMS is great for training. We have a variety of options for training away from post while overseas and en route between assignments. I just have to keep in mind which courses can be centrally funded as training while at post, which serves as another way to get a break during the tour.

Sure, we don't usually get approved for the many months of language training, but at least we can get some courses for a week or two to keep up our IT skills. I'm taking 2 courses in Microsoft Windows admin for 3 weeks. They're fairly basic but it's good to occasionally cover the basics to not miss the details of what we support.

I'd recommend taking at least 1 or 2 classes between assignments because it's an easy extension of the time in the states before heading back out. It saves the government on travel expenses for training so approval is easy unless your new post is antsy to get you there quicker. We also get nice little corporate apartments within per diem and direct billed through the lodging program. Sometimes the government has an easy button that works. I didn't get to use it as a local hire but I'm definitely enjoying the ease of it all now.

IRM Graduation - 19 Days To Go

Here's some ramblings on various topics as we have just 19 days to departure...

IRM Graduation

Yesterday was graduation from the core track of Information Resource Management (IRM) training. We had a little ceremony with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) to hand us yet another certificate. FSI never fails in giving you a certificate anytime you complete something. I don't need that kind of recognition and am glad we didn't have Kindergarten graduation when I was young. I would have been the smart ass kid asking why it's a graduation if we're coming back to the same place for more of the same. If I'm ever called a smart ass then I usually say it's better than being a dumbass. As you can guess, I get called a smart ass often enough. :-)

It was nice having this little ceremony with all of my friends of the past 4 months just so I could see everyone and share in our collective excitement for the future. They decorated the walls with these interesting paper flags with our names on them. It was a nice touch to a simple event and we took turns taking pictures with them. They seemed to be more popular than the certificates.

Some of my classmates leave at the end of July and a few don't leave for several months after that depending on when their post is ready to receive them and the status of their visas. They'll take additional training requested by their posts or other odds and ends to prepare them for their jobs to fill any available time. This is why a "graduation" feels a little silly because nobody's leaving yet and some still have additional training under IRM. We're one of the lucky ones that get to leave on the first day we can after the mandatory overseas security, basic medical, and supervisory training. I only have 19 days left!

Moving Company Survey

The moving company surveyed our temporary apartment this week. It won't be any different than any other military move we've done other than we're not taking everything. We've crammed our house full of stuff into an apartment after we sold it so there's a lot of stuff already boxed. They claimed if it's boxed well enough then they'll just seal it up and take it but we'll have to make sure they don't do that. We only packed things good enough to move a mile and not for long-term storage or the move overseas so they'll just have to repack it all like we told them. Fortunately the apartment is small so they can't split up to different sides of the house since only my wife will be home to watch them.

Cell Phones

I checked on the status of our cell phones and our AT&T contracts. I bought a Nexus 5 recently from Google which is off contract with any carrier so I can just slap a prepaid SIM in it when we land in Stockholm. SIM cards with the local carriers are immensely cheaper than international roaming which must mean they make a killing on anyone that roams with their U.S. number instead of buying a local SIM. We'll use Google Voice to text to the U.S. for free. Unfortunately it won't allow calls over cellular networks but we can call U.S. numbers with our computers. There's also Google Hangouts and Skype for computer to computer video calls.

My daughter had a contract phone but she already messed up that one so she's currently using my old Samsung Galaxy S3. We had exchanged SIMs to move it to her line and the contract lock is tied to the hardware instead of the line so I was able to request an unlock code. They emailed it to me since that phone was already paid off on my line. We'll have to pay a cancellation penalty for the phone she broke since the subsidy contract on her line isn't actually over. At least we can slap a SIM in the Galaxy S3 so we'll have 2 out of 3 working phones when we land.

My wife's phone is the same one on her line for the subsidized contract. Now this one is tricky. They'll give us an unlock code... several days after we cancel the contract and pay the subsidized phone penalty. She needs her phone and that number right up to our departure so I can't cancel it until we leave. Then I can request the unlock code and get it in a few days but she'll be without cell service until I can get that code or needlessly buy her another phone. It's a Galaxy S4 Active so I haven't found anyone online successfully unlocking their own phones for free (some phones have simple hacks). It's just not worth trying a paid service to unlock it if I can get a free code with just a little patience for what's still a nice phone.

International Driving Permits

Another thing we've done this week is get international driving permits from AAA. They're only good for a year but they said it's easy to renew through the mail with updated passport photos to glue in. It really isn't anything fancy other than the AAA stamps they put in it. It's just a little passport looking booklet describing that we're U.S. licensed drivers in 10 different languages and you have to carry a U.S. license with it to be valid. It was only $15 and they gave it to us about as quick as the walk-in. It's probably worth it just to have the translations booklet with our picture in it for a foreign cop to read if we're ever pulled over and can't speak the language. Hopefully that just never happens but it's good to be prepared.

This brings up the other problem of moving overseas combined with changing our state residency. We sold the house and the cars will be sold off soon. This cuts our ties to Virginia as our most recent residency so we can establish ourselves back in my home state of Texas. We started using my parents' address for bank accounts and other important things to demonstrate intent. We also tried to get Texas driver's licenses when we were there for Christmas, but they wouldn't let us since we had vehicles registered in Virginia. We would have to register them in Texas or get rid of them before they'd issue us licenses.

Here's the next potential problem. We're leaving Virginia and going directly overseas without going back to Texas. We'll be stuck with our Virginia licenses until our next visit, which isn't planned until we have home leave in 2 years. I've read on Trailing Houses (Facebook group) that Virginia has revoked some driver's licenses if they correlate a change of address with our driving records. For this I may have to use the pouch address instead of the DPO address for our post. Otherwise we'll just need to contact someone at the DMV that understands the Foreign Service to request a special exemption for keeping our licenses active. The Foreign Service relates to military service in many ways but it doesn't always get the same automatic protections and exemptions as when I was in the military. It seems I'll be constantly explaining that the Foreign Service exists.

Basic Telephone Training

Training this week was basic telephone. The antique phone below wasn't a part of our training but it was in the classroom. It was just a fun visual to show how many aspects of current telephone services and wiring come from the "good old days" of simple rotary analog phones.

One old term we used was tip and ring to describe the twisted pair wire connections. The term comes from those human telephone operators and the line connectors they used to patch calls. The plug connected on a metal tip and ring so the wiring had to match it. I only knew about seeing that plug from reruns of Laugh In or Green Acres. I watched this stuff when I was a little kid before cable TV.

Laugh In

Green Acres

Aspects of past telephone technologies in current use made me think of my late grandfather. He started out climbing poles with Indiana Bell and ended up working with all aspects of phone systems and wiring. My mom told me that even after he moved into management he was sought after for troubleshooting because he was one of the best at figuring it out when things went wrong. It was really cool for me to learn some of the skills of my grandfather this week.

One skill I learned was punching down cables... which was even more fun since I'm color deficient. I figured out the best way for me to do that was to put different colors next to each other. I can figure out what must be green, orange, red, or whatever by using the contrast between colors that look similar to me. I just can't look at a wire by itself and tell you what color it is. The picture below is what I had to sort. Each wire has a primary color and secondary stripe color to identify it.

That's my 25 pair cable in a bix block. I had a little help sorting out a few of the wires into 5 pair sets but I put everything in the right order on my own after the sorting. Yes, that sentence makes me sound like a child (I did it myself!) but this comes from the person that failed Kindergarten color recognition by insisting purple was dark blue and not a real color.

We used a punch down tool to connect them to the block and cut excess line in one step. This 25 pair bulk cable can be cross connected to the phone system or phone sets depending on the purpose of the cable. Here's mine all punched down before flipping it over so cross connect wires can be punched on the other side.

Finally, here's Kraftwerk singing about a telephone call just because I like Kraftwerk. :-)

Kraftwerk - The Telephone Call (1987)

Spring @ Foreign Service Institute

Information Management Specialist training continued with a nice spring day at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). A bunch of us walked out the gate to a food truck and ate our lunches on a picnic table under some trees. The picture below was our view from the picnic table on top of a hill. My daughter complains that the pictures look fake because I let Google "enhance" the pictures. I think they look cool. I'm also red/green color deficient so if they look a bit off then I probably don't see it like she does. If you want to see a sample of what color "blind" people see then check out these examples at the Vischeck link.

I took a walk around our college-like campus and took more pictures now that everything finally looks alive after our long winter. This temporary time of training is starting to feel like an entire job with the passing of seasons. It started in February with everything dead outside and several snow days. Now there's warmer weather and growing plants that makes the beginning seem like forever ago.

I've gone through Microsoft server admin, HF radios, State's messaging systems admin, information program operations, mail pouch operations, wide area network equipment and troubleshooting, system backup and recovery, and now we're working on communications security. I have 8 more weeks at this nice campus environment before we move to Sweden. I'm definitely not complaining!

HF Radio Training

High Frequency (HF) Radios

This was a fun week of training because it was an entirely new subject I knew very little about. We learned about operating HF radios including how the HF transmissions actually work. We'll mostly just use the radios but we also learned a little about installing them and maintaining the antennas if that's ever needed.

Now I know a few things about radio propagation and the mysterious forces around us that may or may not let us talk to someone really far away. Some of it depends on the atmosphere, time of day (the ionospheric layers are different at night), and the effects of the Sun. Our instructor also said it takes a bit of luck or magic (he called it the Walt Disney Effect) to establish a link. I now have a better understanding of why amateur radio operators get so excited about making contact with skywave across long distances.

The picture is of the signs on a radio classroom (another door near my classroom but the signs are the same). Since we were working with electricity and non-ionizing radiation from the radios and antennas there was obviously some focus on safety. It's not really as dangerous as the signs look as long as you don't mess around with the antennas while transmitting and you've installed lightning protection on the antenna line. You should always be careful with electricity and use proper grounding.

The "danger of death" can happen with any high voltage so that sign could be put up almost anywhere. My wife had an experience with lightning traveling down a phone line. Lightning also hit a metal fence outside our son's bedroom when he was a toddler so that sign should be everywhere! The lightning strike near our son set off all of his electronic toys like that one scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I don't think there were too many lasting effects on him. ;-)

Anyway, through the week we talked on the radios, crimped on some cable connectors, and even went on the roof to check out the antennas connected to our classroom equipment. We get a good dose of "enough to be dangerous" for our jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none type of job.

Moving from House to Apartment to...

During this same week we moved from our house into a 3 month lease apartment. My wife handled a lot for the move since I can't miss training. Fortunately, she could take off work for 3 days so I only had to bust my butt on it after training and on the weekends.

We boxed up most of the house for a couple of weeks before the move. We hired a moving company to move the furniture and whatever we had boxed up. Even after that we still had to make probably a dozen trips with the SUV to get various things not boxed or too fragile that we didn't want them to move it. We only packed them good enough to move a mile in a car instead of stacked in a big truck by people that don't care as much about our breakables. We'll probably unbox stuff as we need it until the day the next movers come to pack it all up for long-term storage or headed for Sweden.

We still have way too much stuff for our apartment in Stockholm. A lot of that stuff in the 3rd bedroom picture above (including a walk-in closet full of boxes you can't see) will end up in State Department's long-term storage. We won't have room to put up the guest bed buried in there somewhere if we don't store a bunch of junk. It does make me wonder how much stuff we really need and how much we unnecessarily hold onto throughout our lives. We got rid of a lot over the last month but we're still surrounded by boxes!

IMS Training

IMS training kicked off with a week of Information Resource Management (IRM) Tradecraft. It was similar to the 3 weeks of foreign service specialist orientation except it was focused on the IRM part of the organization. The week was full of briefings on everything that will directly impact my new job.

This week starts the last of the 3 weeks we have for Microsoft system administrator training. This has been a good class because the training lab has virtual machines with mock post environments. We use the lab to work through State's standards and procedures for Active Directory, Exchange, and file and print servers (so far). It's not hard work but it isn't something I have much experience doing. The labs are nice since we'll be expected to just do it when we get to post.

Training is always helpful when it focuses on real use cases. It provides the opportunity to put hands on keyboards instead of training us with death by PowerPoint. There are briefings using Windows training modules covering the basics of server management. Fortunately more time is spent on instructor demos showing what we do instead of just talking about it.

We're going on some field trips this week to see some of the DC area offices that support us. I'm looking forward to this since we'll get to see some of the things we've only been briefed about. We'll only experience these offices through emails and phone calls when we're finally working at our embassies so it's good to put faces to names.

On the home front, we're still packing and getting ready to move from our house to a local apartment in a week and a half . Everything's going well on finalizing the sale of our house closing in mid-April. We've also received our apartment assignment in Stockholm and they provided some pictures. It looks pretty good in a nice area of the city close to a park, the water, and the embassy itself. The apartment doesn't look too small to us considering it's an apartment. Our house here was built in 1959 so we're used to smaller rooms.

The Stockholm apartment will be a short walk to work for me so that's definitely a huge bonus! We're going to go ahead with our plan to sell the cars here and rely on bikes and public transportation there. We need to buy new bikes so that's yet another thing for the to-do list. We're just a little over 3 months away from the big move!

First Day of Orientation

From Defense to State

There's a noticeable difference between going to work at the Pentagon and arriving at the Harry S Truman (HST) building (formerly called Main State).  The sizes of the Departments of Defense and State just aren't on the same scale. I was curious about the actual numbers so naturally I looked them up on Wikipedia. I was just going to write a little bit about my in-processing day but... squirrel!

The Pentagon (photo Wikipedia)

I used to ride the metro to the Pentagon using its dedicated metro station. Other people arrived at the bus transfer hub, acres of parking, or slug lines. I'd arrive in a sea of 28,000 people (plus 3,000 non-defense support) herded like cattle through security into the 6.5 million sq ft building. It's a huge crowded headquarters. There's also many more lower level headquarters around the world needed to manage a whopping 3.2 million servicemembers (including National Guard) and civilians. According to this BBC News article, the DoD is the world's largest employer ahead of China's Army, Wal-Mart, and McDonald's. The article says China's Army may be a bigger employer if the size of their civilian staff was known. Regardless, my new employer isn't even in the same league since it's #12 in size of the executive branch departments.

Harry S Truman Building (photo Wikipedia)

My arrival today at HST was by way of the Foggy Bottom metro station. It's not too far away but it's definitely not there for the sole purpose of serving the State Department. Foggy Bottom metro is actually surrounded by George Washington University. The HST building is about 1.5 million sq ft with 8,000 employees. It's still a big headquarters but it's obviously not as massive as the Pentagon. State's website says there are 9,000 civil service and 12,000 foreign service (like me) personnel in the entire department. We'd all fit very easily in the Pentagon with lots of room to spare. State also employs 37,000 foreign service nationals (non-US support personnel) but even adding them in is just a drop in the bucket compared to the 3.2M people working under the DoD.

In-processing

I only need to metro to HST a few times since the bulk of our orientation and training is at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington VA. There really isn't much to say about the in-processing day itself because it's similar to previous government employee in-processing I've done. We recited the oath of office, filled out new employee paperwork, got our IDs, and received a variety of new hire briefings. It was very professional and well structured throughout the day. It's definitely nothing to be nervous about if you've never worked in a government job. Everyone seemed to be happy and friendly so the vibe on the first day was a good one. :-)

Transition and Class Size

This weekend is my transition from Air Force civil service to State Department foreign service specialist. It was a happy/sad last day saying goodbye to a great group of people in my office. A big chunk of our weekdays are spent at work so it's always good to work with fun people. The work was interesting enough but I'll really miss the laughs we shared between the work bits.

But now it's time to look forward. I received an email this afternoon saying the final count for the orientation starting Monday is 74 specialists with 24 of us in the IMS speciality. I've seen postings from previous years about the IMS count being about a dozen. A larger class size is a good thing because there's at least one assignment available for each of us. That's at least 24 choices I'll get to rank for our preferences. I learned it's always good to have more from this AT&T commercial...

Appointment Offer

I received an appointment offer and invitation for orientation to start on February 10, 2014! This means the waiting game has now changed to a specific countdown to training and moving. We can now fill our calendar with the various activities we need to get everything ready for the timeline ahead of us. That's much better than wondering when the next step will ever begin. The wheels are set in motion and it'll carry us to new countdowns for every next assignment. Eventually the last countdown will be to retirement from the Foreign Service unless I choose to get off the ride earlier.

One big difference between the Foreign Service and my military career is that I can choose to quit the Foreign Service at any time including in the middle of any assignment. Every military 4 or 6 year reenlistment I signed was a commitment I couldn't break. Every military assignment required a minimum amount of retainability before they'd move us.

I've heard I can quit the Foreign Service at any time but I think I'd have to pay back the government's moving expenses if they recently moved me. I think I'd at least have to move myself home if it wasn't the end of the assignment yet. I'm not really sure how it'd work to quit but it's not worth researching the specifics since I know I'll stick with this for the long haul. This is essentially the dream career and lifestyle for me to take this on and live around the world.

The adventure begins February 10th. I've heard IMS training is about 20 weeks including the 3 weeks of orientation so moving will be whenever that ends. I'll find out where we're heading at Flag Day in the third week of orientation which I'll definitely post about here. Later, we'll ramble on to our first assignment around the end of June and I can start sharing stories from another country!