I've worked with two companies for contracts in Iraq. The first was ITT and it paid around 130K a year with bonuses. The pay was low but they give plenty of time off (which you shouldn't take if you want to max out your $) and are a good company to start with as they will hold your hand in getting you from the states to the AOR. If you don't have a military background and haven't worked overseas before then they might be a good option. Generally everyone else will pay more than them, so do look around for other companies. My second contract was also for work in Iraq (nearly identical work in fact) but paid over 250K a year. It was also nice that no pay was tied to completion bonuses so I wasn't stuck with any loss of pay if I had decided to go elsewhere. Speaking of, feel free to network like crazy when you get in country, and also to jump ship for another contract if you want.
If you are wanting to work in IT then you will almost certainly require a security clearance. A Secret can be had in as few as 2-3 months if it's just a simple records check and you don't have anything too sketchy in your past. If you want more info on clearances and what can keep you from getting one then http://www.clearancejobs.com/ is a good site (run by DICE now I think). Also note that while you are earning a good salary (30-38$ an hour) you are also possibly working seven days a week twelve hours a day. You should also check on the uplift that the country you are looking at will get you. Uplift is a percentage of your pay that is added on to the hours you work (capped at the first 40 hours if you work with ITT) and will make a big difference in your take home pay. The State Dept sets these rates and currently the rates for Iraq and Afghanistan are the same at 70% but this may go down if Iraq becomes more stable after the troop withdrawl.
Speaking of specific locations, your company will probably not be able to tell you where they are going to place you because they may not know where the openings will be by the time you finish your training and go through CRC ( http://www.campatterbury.in.ng.mil/NationalDeploymentCenter/tabid/1101/Default.aspx ). They may not even be able to tell you what country. If you want to maximize your chances of getting to Iraq (the lesser of two battlefronts) then you may want to stick with companys that are hiring for jobs with the Dept of State and not the Dept of Defense.
If you really want to come away with something after your contracts are over then you should look for a company that is willing to sponsor you for a Top Secret position. It will take much longer to get (possibly more than a year) and you won't want to quit your current job until you have it but it is a great way to seperate yourself from others in a tough job market that is still going to be tough in a year or two when you get tired of working in a war zone:)
If you loose sync (email, contacts or calendar) and are on a BES but don't want to bother with a support call you can try this trick to do your own Enterprise re-Activation. Go to the Options/Advanced Options/Enterprise Activation menu. In the email field type in CNFG while holding the Alt key. After typing this, you should have a new menu appear. From that menu, change the option for Wireless Sync from On to Off and then exit the menu while saving changes. Give the phone about half a minute and then go back into the menu and change the Wireless Sync to On. Exit and save changes again and it should then start the process of Activating. This, as well as taking the battery out and putting it back in will fix 90% of corporate blackberry issues:)
For media that will last that long either some nice silver DVD's stored perfectly or if you want it really locked in, Magneto Optical discs are super. They are usually protected in a casing, and data can't decay as easily as the disc needs to be heated before it can be changed. Either that or just keep the data on a disc array and keep that array alive and with current generation hardware as time progresses:)
Had this same issue with a maxtor drive. I had others from what I thought was the same batch but turned out the boards had variations in them so I ended up buying a working used one off ebay after I confirmed with the buyer the board revisions were the same. It was worth it to me to get the data off it but since that's not the case with you why not just get a new drive that is less likely to fail on you in the future and could be covered under a 3-5 year warranty?
I would recommend heading over to the avsforum.com
Those guys have done just about everything you could think of when it comes to intergrating a computer into your home theater setup.
I call myself a Server Babysiter. I think it helps people understand the basic concepts of my job. I keep the servers in line and doing what they should:)
Whoa... sudden flashback images of the Mac 20th Anniversary Edition in my head. Course I'm sure this product will be much less memorable, after all, it doesn't come with a leather mousepad and keyboard rest:) Cool idea for the hip college student wanting to save precious desk space.
I have put together a system that I can use for video capture from TV/HDTV/S-Video/or RCA. I plan on outputting the video to a Samsung 30" wide screen HDTV. Since my ATI AIW 8500DV is doing the actual video output, I can change the resolution to anything the card can handle, not what the MyHD Tuner can handle. If you want time shifting functions then Access DTV is the only card that offers it. The AVSforum is the only place to go for help with this kind of stuff. If you want to do HDTV capture you might want to consider doing an offsite storage medium like a digital VCR. If you want D-Theater, then JVC is the way to go, if you don't care about that, then Mitsubishi has a nice model. They are bit pricey now but have been coming down steadily. And being able to record 50GB in HDTV means that you don't have to have a Terrabyte system to hold your seasons of whatever. Or you could do like me. I capture Alias and then use HDTV2MPEG2 to pull out the mpeg2 from the transport stream. I then go through some hoops for the audio and run the video through TMPG actually downgrading it to DVD quality which I then burn:) Have a nice digital wide screen copy of the show that I can enjoy anytime. BTW, an hour of HDTV is about 8-9GB of hard drive space.
found it funny that the pics on wahoo's site of the custom lianli case look pretty much like mine:) Except of course mine is better and I have the personal pride invested in it that comes with creating something yourself. I never can understand it when a techie buys an OEM. Why would you not want to put together your own system? (rhetorical question)
Some case pics
I babysit webservers for a hosting co during the night shift. I find a good way to keep me awake and to keep my energy up is to do some jump rope about every 2 hours. Adds up over time and only takes a few minutes to do.
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I've worked with two companies for contracts in Iraq. The first was ITT and it paid around 130K a year with bonuses. The pay was low but they give plenty of time off (which you shouldn't take if you want to max out your $) and are a good company to start with as they will hold your hand in getting you from the states to the AOR. If you don't have a military background and haven't worked overseas before then they might be a good option. Generally everyone else will pay more than them, so do look around for other companies. My second contract was also for work in Iraq (nearly identical work in fact) but paid over 250K a year. It was also nice that no pay was tied to completion bonuses so I wasn't stuck with any loss of pay if I had decided to go elsewhere. Speaking of, feel free to network like crazy when you get in country, and also to jump ship for another contract if you want. If you are wanting to work in IT then you will almost certainly require a security clearance. A Secret can be had in as few as 2-3 months if it's just a simple records check and you don't have anything too sketchy in your past. If you want more info on clearances and what can keep you from getting one then http://www.clearancejobs.com/ is a good site (run by DICE now I think). Also note that while you are earning a good salary (30-38$ an hour) you are also possibly working seven days a week twelve hours a day. You should also check on the uplift that the country you are looking at will get you. Uplift is a percentage of your pay that is added on to the hours you work (capped at the first 40 hours if you work with ITT) and will make a big difference in your take home pay. The State Dept sets these rates and currently the rates for Iraq and Afghanistan are the same at 70% but this may go down if Iraq becomes more stable after the troop withdrawl. Speaking of specific locations, your company will probably not be able to tell you where they are going to place you because they may not know where the openings will be by the time you finish your training and go through CRC ( http://www.campatterbury.in.ng.mil/NationalDeploymentCenter/tabid/1101/Default.aspx ). They may not even be able to tell you what country. If you want to maximize your chances of getting to Iraq (the lesser of two battlefronts) then you may want to stick with companys that are hiring for jobs with the Dept of State and not the Dept of Defense. If you really want to come away with something after your contracts are over then you should look for a company that is willing to sponsor you for a Top Secret position. It will take much longer to get (possibly more than a year) and you won't want to quit your current job until you have it but it is a great way to seperate yourself from others in a tough job market that is still going to be tough in a year or two when you get tired of working in a war zone :)
If you loose sync (email, contacts or calendar) and are on a BES but don't want to bother with a support call you can try this trick to do your own Enterprise re-Activation. Go to the Options/Advanced Options/Enterprise Activation menu. In the email field type in CNFG while holding the Alt key. After typing this, you should have a new menu appear. From that menu, change the option for Wireless Sync from On to Off and then exit the menu while saving changes. Give the phone about half a minute and then go back into the menu and change the Wireless Sync to On. Exit and save changes again and it should then start the process of Activating. This, as well as taking the battery out and putting it back in will fix 90% of corporate blackberry issues :)
For media that will last that long either some nice silver DVD's stored perfectly or if you want it really locked in, Magneto Optical discs are super. They are usually protected in a casing, and data can't decay as easily as the disc needs to be heated before it can be changed. Either that or just keep the data on a disc array and keep that array alive and with current generation hardware as time progresses :)
Had this same issue with a maxtor drive. I had others from what I thought was the same batch but turned out the boards had variations in them so I ended up buying a working used one off ebay after I confirmed with the buyer the board revisions were the same. It was worth it to me to get the data off it but since that's not the case with you why not just get a new drive that is less likely to fail on you in the future and could be covered under a 3-5 year warranty?
I would recommend heading over to the avsforum.com Those guys have done just about everything you could think of when it comes to intergrating a computer into your home theater setup.
I call myself a Server Babysiter. I think it helps people understand the basic concepts of my job. I keep the servers in line and doing what they should :)
Whoa... sudden flashback images of the Mac 20th Anniversary Edition in my head. Course I'm sure this product will be much less memorable, after all, it doesn't come with a leather mousepad and keyboard rest :)
Cool idea for the hip college student wanting to save precious desk space.
I have put together a system that I can use for video capture from TV/HDTV/S-Video/or RCA. I plan on outputting the video to a Samsung 30" wide screen HDTV. Since my ATI AIW 8500DV is doing the actual video output, I can change the resolution to anything the card can handle, not what the MyHD Tuner can handle. If you want time shifting functions then Access DTV is the only card that offers it. The AVSforum is the only place to go for help with this kind of stuff. If you want to do HDTV capture you might want to consider doing an offsite storage medium like a digital VCR. If you want D-Theater, then JVC is the way to go, if you don't care about that, then Mitsubishi has a nice model. They are bit pricey now but have been coming down steadily. And being able to record 50GB in HDTV means that you don't have to have a Terrabyte system to hold your seasons of whatever. Or you could do like me. I capture Alias and then use HDTV2MPEG2 to pull out the mpeg2 from the transport stream. I then go through some hoops for the audio and run the video through TMPG actually downgrading it to DVD quality which I then burn :) Have a nice digital wide screen copy of the show that I can enjoy anytime. BTW, an hour of HDTV is about 8-9GB of hard drive space.
er, better make that for case pics
found it funny that the pics on wahoo's site of the custom lianli case look pretty much like mine :) Except of course mine is better and I have the personal pride invested in it that comes with creating something yourself. I never can understand it when a techie buys an OEM. Why would you not want to put together your own system? (rhetorical question)
Some case pics
I babysit webservers for a hosting co during the night shift. I find a good way to keep me awake and to keep my energy up is to do some jump rope about every 2 hours. Adds up over time and only takes a few minutes to do.