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.

Foxes @ FSI

I overheard a rumor that the mother was run over and these 3 little foxes were left behind inside the fence at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I haven't seen them this past week but it was neat seeing them hanging around the P3 gate while they were there. There were also many bird feathers so apparently they were getting themselves fed. There's bars over the drainage ditch opening and it doesn't look like they can get out of the fence without help so maybe someone finally captured them and released them elsewhere.

I wasn't too surprised by their presence. We had foxes pass through our neighborhood and back yard in Vienna VA all of the time so we had to be watchful for our daughter's chihuahua. I recently saw one cross 23rd Street with me by Main State in DC. That city fox appeared to know about crosswalks and traffic lights or it was just following the pedestrians across the street. Either way it appeared comfortable wandering the city.

The FSI foxes may have moved on now and we'll be doing the same in just 4 short weeks! For now, here's a few more pics of the FSI foxes.

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!