Day 56 (125 days to go…)

Well I am continuing on the search work. It has to go through channels before the rest of my team can get involved, but I am trying to get a head start so it can be completed as soon as possible. With my team we estimated three weeks to a month for the whole effort.



~David

Day 54 (127 days to go…)

I got another care package today. This time it was from the McNeeley family. Mrs. McNeeley baked me some mint chocolate chip cookies (my FAVORITE) in her new kitchen. Such an awesome surprise! She vacuum sealed them so they very fresh and tasty. The rest of the office thought they were awesome too. Thank you so much! Again excellent timing while I am trying to figure out all this search stuff. She also sent a few other things including this little toy basketball/hoop. I hung it up above my desk. She also wrote me a note where she noted I messed up on my math in an earlier post in this blog. I had actually realized it pretty quickly and fixed it like the next day after I posted it. SOMEHOW she still caught it! :-P



~David

Day 53 (128 days to go…)

Well today was a fun day. It was the day of the meeting I mentioned previously. I knew we were leaving at around 9am so I woke up around 7:30 so I would have enough time to take a shower and get ready. Well it turns up things got moved ahead an hour. So just as I am getting up, Byrd comes banging on my door asking for me. I was just getting up so I was fine, but it scared my roommate to death. Byrd notified me of the time change and said to be ready by 8. Unfortunately that meant there was no time for a shower. I quickly got changed and got all geared up in my body armor. That stuff is heavy! We packed into our vehicle, all five of us, and got going. The trip was to serve several purposes – two separate meetings as well as dropping Amanda off at the airport. She is going on leave for about a month.

This is my first time out of the protected area since I arrived and was driven from the airport. I must comment again, the traffic situation is crazy. No rules. We also drove past one of the garbage piles. See we Americans (and other countries) are considered to throw away too much good stuff. So what they do is they take all of our garbage and dump it on the side of the road. People pillage through it for anything valuable. They also lead their livestock like goats to it to feed. After about a week they scoop it all up and dispose of it. It’s really kind of crazy. Below are a few pictures someone took of that and some other things while driving.

Once we got to where we were going, we all got straight to work. I went with Ryan to go talk about search. It was very informative as for the first time I saw exactly how people use the current search and how they want to use the new search. I saw what they needed, what was important and just general workflow of their jobs. I am going to have to dissect this information over the coming days, but unfortunately I think there are some issues with how certain things in the new search are currently. Certain things could be fixed easily with a database fix or training but other things will probably involve a code change. Any code change would mean things would have to go back to square one in terms of the testing and approval process. We are supposed to roll this new version in a couple weeks so I will have to make my report to the Theater Lead pretty quickly, and I doubt it will be good news. Unfortunately it just seems there was a miscommunication somewhere, and some very important features were missed in the requirements given to us. The meeting was good though, and I look forward to breaking everything down to see what path we need to move forward on.



~David

Day 52 (129 days to go…)

A care package from my family arrived today! Thank you so much mom, dad, and sis. It has honey buns and cinnamon rolls and paper towels and all kinds of cool goodies. I was just thinking I was running low on good snacks. They are hard to get out here! It is just in time to brighten my day too; I am still dealing with the whole search situation that came up Monday. I think I have wrapped my head around some of the issues, and I have ideas on what has to be done. I will find out more in my meeting tomorrow with the users. I look forward to talking with them and really see firsthand how the software will be used.

Unfortunately around midday one of our 3 AC units for the office broke. It just had to be the newest one, and thus the one that blew the coldest air. This really showed after a couple hours when it became sweltering hot. The office space we are in is about 24ft by 36ft (estimation) and we are packed in pretty tight. The main heat source though is the fact that every person has 3 to 6 computers. There are also a dozen or so test boxes scattered around. So in a 20ft by 30ft area there are about 80 or more computers. It gets hot pretty quick without the AC units. It was about 90 or 95 degrees outside… yet it was cooler outside! With the work already on my shoulders to get done, this was not fun at all… Thank goodness I got a care package or today would just really suck.



~David

Day 50 (131 days to go…)

Well remember what I said about Mondays? That even though I work’s 7 days a week, Mondays are still as dreadful somehow? Well today proves my point. It was just a hectic day with a bunch of crap going on. Chief among the issues was the fact that one of our primary user groups had some major concerns with the new search effort going into the new version of our software in a couple weeks… the new search that I was a primary designer and programmer of. (This is in fact one of the reasons I am out here - to make sure everything goes smoothly.) Some of the issues were just educational ones where things worked a bit different from the old search. These will be solved with proper documentation and training once the version is rolled out. One of the main concerns though was in fact something we (the search team) had previously identified but everyone was led to believe that it was a nonissue. That is a bit frustrating, and even more so that it is only getting identified now. Well, being that I helped design it, it’s now my job to help figure out how to resolve everything. Hal, the theater lead, wants me to go over and meet with the users and discuss things with them face to face Thursday. That should be fun…



~David

Day 47 (134 days to go…)

Another person from the Hampton office arrived today, Mike. He is one of the senior systems engineers. It is good to see a familiar face. He is a pretty cool guy, which is good since he will be sitting right next to me in our nice tight seating arrangement. He has been deployed several times before so he is used to things out here. He will probably be staying a year this time around.



~David

Day 45 (136 days to go…)

Had some annoying bank issues today. Usually I log into my bank while connected through the company VPN so it looks like my IP is U.S. based. Well a few days ago I tried to log in and I wasn’t connected to the VPN. Since my IP was weird (coming from Afghanistan) I guess the site thought I may be an intruder. In any case it prompted me with my security questions. I HATE those questions. You never know how a site is going to use them, and half the information you can find out by doing some searches around the web about the person. You hear about celebrities’ accounts getting broken into via this method all the time.

Anyways, because of this I usually will fill in the questions with garbage as I don’t forget my passwords, and I take proper security precautions (like using very strong random char strings for my passwords). Well when the site decides to do what my bank was now doing… you kinda get screwed. I couldn’t answer the questions so it locked my account. I called in (via my flaky internet connection) to get my account unlocked. After being bounced around I finally ended up at the security department. The woman I was talking to said that everything looked fine on my account and she didn’t even see the trouble ticket. I tried to log in to my account again, this time through the VPN, and voila, it worked. I hung up and thought that was it.

Fast forward to today. I get an email saying my entire bank account had been locked for suspicious activity. I again call in to see what the heck is going on now. It turns out that for whatever reason when I talked to the security department, my help ticket hadn’t made it over yet. When it did make it over they tried to call me on my cell number. Now I am in Afghanistan; of course my cell phone number doesn’t work. When that didn’t work they waited a couple days and tried again. Since they couldn’t get a hold of me they decided to lock EVERYTHING. So after finding out what HAPPENED, I asked how I can get it all unlocked. The woman wants me to come into a branch office. I explain that this is impossible. After going round and round a bit she finally comes up with a solution where she goes through some system that asks all this personally identifying information. She warns that you can only do this once though and if we screw up, there would be no second chance. Luckily I got everything right, and she was able to reset my account, including my security questions. How troublesome…

So I have learned 3 things:

1) Be careful when dealing with security questions for important things like banks

2) Use VPN out here

3) Notify your bank you are traveling oversees… might make things a LOT easier >_<



~David

Day 43 (138 days to go…)

25% Done. WOOT! Well I’m 1/4th done, 3/4ths to go. It has been an interesting ride thus far. Let’s see what the next 25% holds…



~David

Day 42 (139 days to go…)

Since Chuck is leaving, we decided to have a goodbye party over at the embassy. Finally I get to eat there since I missed out last time! The food selection was kinda like being at Golden Corral. I had some French Toast sticks with syrup, some doughnuts, a biscuit, and all sorts of stuff. They had tons of fruit and a good selection of food. Everything was absolutely delicious. We took our food and ate right by the pool. It was definitely a nice change of scenery. For a moment I couldn’t really tell I was still in Afghanistan. It was quite nice.



~David

Day 40 (141 days to go…)

Today, being a Friday, I went over with a group of people to Eggers for steak. It was really good as usual. What made the trip interesting was having Chuck along. Chuck actually just got back a couple weeks ago from leave but is being recalled for some important work back in the States. This is his last Friday here.

Chuck has an interesting relation with the Afghan kids here. He is known for giving them lots of stuff so they absolutely love him. With Chuck around a huge group walked with us to Eggers. On the way back he told one of the older ones, kinda the one in charge, to line them all up nicely. He then handed out a bunch of 20s to them, one to each. I am sure he really made their day. Below are some pictures of the whole event. They are sure going to miss him.

~David