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.
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. :-)
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!
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 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!
Above is a blurry cell phone photo from way in the back but you can see the flag on the screen. We're moving to Stockholm Sweden at the end of June! Some classmates leave at the same time and others leave a month or so later. We were all presented little flags for the countries and my daughter promptly took possession of our flag when the ceremony was over.
Yes, this ended up being our first choice and surprisingly many in our class received their first choice or somewhere in their top 5 out of 22. I think there were a few that weren't so lucky and got something towards the bottom of their list but I'm sure it was impossible to give everyone their top choices.
We did get a lot of feedback during orientation from the people that have worked at various posts that those "third world" countries many of us put at the bottom ended up being the best and most rewarding places to serve. I'll get one of those "third world" opportunities next time since I have a "first world" post this time. The higher equity posts based on differential and hardship pay get higher priority for their second assignments.
I'll start by saying this blog is my own personal thing. This isn't the place I can or should reveal anything that isn't public knowledge about my employer. I don't see it as an unusual restriction or anything I've been specifically instructed about in orientation (so far). I'm just going to use common sense and only share personal things here about my life outside of work. Having said that, there will be some crossover and one thing that definitely impacts me is the "bid list" or my first list of possible assignments. I'm not going to share the specific list since I haven't seen a complete list on any other foreign service blog. I've seen a few general summaries so that's what I'll write. In the end, only one location on this internal list of openings will be mine and that's the specific location I know I can share in a future post.
I will confirm for anyone interested in joining the Foreign Service that they really mean it right from the start when they say we must be worldwide qualified. Fortunately we have a large class of Information Management Specialists (23 now) so there's a lot of variety on my list. Every continent except Australia is represented. The list is somewhat evenly spread over South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. There is one North America opening and fortunately it isn't in the US since I didn't join to stay in DC. There will be opportunities later in my career to come back to DC or maybe even NYC supporting the UN for an assignment. Being in the Foreign Service does mean that I can't be in the US longer than 5 years if we do come back. The State Department has many Civil Service jobs here in DC if you want to just stay here instead of move around.
