Technobabble

One of the interesting things about being a system administrator, is that everyone just assumes you live and breathe computers. It often inspires unsolicited conversations describing, in excruciating detail, your clients extravagant home setups (and I'm not talking about people looking for home tech support, that's another story altogether). So I often get incredulous looks and words of disbelief when I tell people that my "home setup" is just a single desktop with an external hard drive for backups. A couple years ago we expanded that to include a laptop for my wife. I guess I never really saw the fun in "taking my work home with me."

Our upcoming move overseas has spurred me to revise that policy somewhat, since the likelihood of hard drive failure skyrockets the more you move them (or leave them in extreme heat). In addition, one of the perks to living in the United States is the access to various online streaming video sources (e.g. Netflix, cable channel websites). Many of these sites are blocked to IP addresses originating geographically outside the United States. Some countries also censor specific websites or content. When I studied abroad in Hong Kong, one of my classmates was unable to check his college's e-mail because sites with the name "George Washington" were censored.

A common solution to this problem is to route your web traffic through a US host. After a bit of consideration and some price comparisons, I decided to go with an out-of-the-box solution. Since I won't be readily available to maintain it, I didn't think setting up a custom server was the best idea... and as is often the case, buying a product specifically suited to my needs was cheaper than building my own solution. To that end, I'm going to pick up a QNAP TS-219P+ with 2x 4TB hard drives, configured in RAID 1. I'm going to set it up as an offsite backup, a VPN, and a proxy server. This is not an original idea, many companies use VPNs to securely host work related files for their employees, and some larger companies even use proxy servers to obfuscate their employees internet traffic's origin. My brother, who lives in Florida, has agreed to provide power, space and cooling (the minimal amount that this product requires) in exchange for space to backup his own files. This way I can securely backup my files and access US only or censored sites while overseas.

Orientation Dress Code

The official dress code for orientation is business formal (which translates to suits and ties for me). Although I have a couple of suits, to cover the occasional wedding, I'm not really in a position to comfortably wear one every day for three weeks. It's kind of an odd situation, since I know my actual position will rarely, if ever require me to wear a suit. In theory, I wouldn't mind picking up one or two to bridge the gap (I mean, it's not like they go bad very quickly), but it seems silly to do so before Flag Day. Who wants to be the guy that spends hundreds of dollars on suits, only to find out he's moving to Bangkok in a few months and can buy them for a tenth the price? I guess I better figure it out soon, February 10th is approaching fast.

This desire to temporarily put off purchases doesn't just apply to suits. It has become a recurring theme around our house. It's a weird feeling to know you're moving in the next few months, but not where. For example, every time I put on my jacket I notice the broken Velcro strap and think, "I should replace this....oh right... not yet." (enter superglue) This has happened with a handful of other things, such as dishes (perhaps spurred by my breaking yet-another-one), or my computer's keyboard which seems to be ending it's lifespan. It's surprisingly hard to ignore a lifetime of being told to proactively replace things (oh, consumerism). In the end, it's just a couple months of waiting and we can obviously make due with the purchasing freeze, but it comes up more often than I ever would have imagined.

An Offer You Can't Refine

I received my official offer letter for the Foreign Service Information Management Specialist position today. I accepted my orientation invitation 11 days ago and was really starting to wonder when I'd receive my final offer. In the end, I called up HR this morning and asked for a status update. Apparently my invitation acceptance e-mail was misplaced, so they rushed to get me my official letter. I hadn't been too concerned, since receiving an offer letter after an invitation is not a competitive process, but I have had a little anxiety to see what pay step I would receive. Unlike the private sector, many (if not all) federal government positions use strict metrics to determine starting pay. As a strong believer in always negotiating (or attempting to) starting salary, it was weird to get an offer that I knew I had no influence to change. The IMS position is guaranteed a grade 5 on the FS payscale, but after accidentally reading the FSO salary determination details, I'd spent a short time believing that FSS positions were salary matched (in grade). When I found out my mistake I was understandably bummed.

However, there are more important things in life than money, so I fully intended to take this position regardless of my starting pay. This concept was reinforced when my HR representative called to make sure I was aware of the system they used to determine starting salary, and that it would be a not-insignificant pay cut for me. I told her I was aware and believe the experience and opportunity this job represented was worth the difference in pay. She then pleasantly surprised me with an offer 4 steps above what I'd previously expected. Having already been maxed out on excitement, I can't claim to be more excited than I was before, but I'm certainly happy to accept a 12% increase in my starting pay. Due to the frequent moves, the Foreign Service seems to compensate with an expectation of single career families, so even their lowest starting pay is quite reasonable. Now it's time for the inevitable struggle between wanting to be helpful until I leave my current job and "short timer" syndrome. Wish me luck!

Two Weeks Notice

Today, I gave my job two weeks notice that I am going to work for the Foreign Service. Although I wouldn't call myself a "pro," it's safe to say I'm no stranger to quitting - I've worked for four companies in the last five years. Unlike most job markets, seeing a person that's changed jobs every year or two is not really a red flag. In fact, it's not unusual for contractors in my field and job sector to change companies frequently.

In the past, I had always worked in overhead (non-billable) positions, supporting the facility and other (billable) people. For the past two years, I have been working as a billable subcontractor on multiple projects, as well as spending some time on overhead supporting our corporate systems. It's not unreasonable to equate my current situation to the Office Space quote: "And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now." Each project has a boss, the contract I work under has a boss, and I have a couple bosses at my company. My immediate superior, one of my close friends, had known about the possibility and imminence of my departure for awhile, but the others had no idea. So, I had the dubious pleasure of giving my notice half a dozen times today.

It wasn't actually that bad; people around here are used to staffing changes, but most were quite surprised as to where I was headed next. My departure is in some ways well timed, as my primary project recently moved from development to production. That seems like a good milestone with which to take my leave.

Library Liquidating

I've always been surrounded by books. Growing up, my house was filled with them, most rooms had at least one bookcase, many were stacked two deep. You might be wondering why I'm bringing this up. Well... a couple years ago, in what I can now claim was a stunning amount of planning for the future, I decided to get rid of most of the books that I'd spent much of my life (to that point) collecting. I'd reached a point where I no longer saw the need to have hard copies of books that I could much more easily store digitally. So... I started giving away and selling my books, in an effort to downsize (eeeh, see the connection now?).

The Foreign Service will pay to store any household goods, up to 18,000 lbs, that I won't need during each assignment, but it seems silly to have them pay to store books that I'll likely never use again. To that end, I'm going through wave two of book clearing. Last time I gave a bunch to my old roommate and charity (my local library, and sending them to our deployed troops), but my wife also had the brilliant idea of selling our used textbooks on Amazon. She took the initiative of checking the Amazon market price for each textbook and listing our copy for sale if it was going for more than $5 (our minimum to be willing to drive to the post office). It has been slow going, and we've had to adjust prices from time to time, but I can happily say we've received over $800 after expenses, in about two years. Of course we undoubtedly spent more on those books when we bought them in college, but I'll take what I can get, since otherwise they'd be rotting on the shelf.

I haven't and don't plan to ditch all of my books; I've kept a loaner copy of a handful of books that I regularly recommend to people (e.g. World War Z and Ready Player One). The only downside to all this is the apparent relationship to number of books and the educational success of children. I'd always thought it was just some silly cultural idea that the more books you owned, the more educated you were. Though, I'm not convinced that that relationship still applies 25 years later, after the rise of the internet.