Saturday - 4/25

Well, as anyone following my blog has hopefully figured out at this point, I'm not going to be posting every day, but rather every 2-4 days. It all really depends on whether anything interesting has happened or not.

My cold symptoms showed the worst on Thursday, but improved slightly on Friday and today was better. The only thing remaining was the occasional cough and clearing my throat.

Also on Thursday, as I was trying to learn the ropes in the office by watching Peter and how much he knows at this point, I couldn't help but wish that I could gain knowledge the way they did in the Matrix - i.e. transfer the data/information into your brain directly through a needle. (You have to watch that scene in order to understand it) Except, I'll skip the part about having a needle stuck in my neck/skull.

Work is interesting. It's nothing I've really worked with before and is "somewhat" difficult to understand at this point, as I've said. Can't wait until I can be effective and helpful though.

After work, I bought an Xbox 360 and a few controllers. Then went online and ordered Guitar Hero with 2 guitars with the following games for GH: Metallica, World Tour, Aerosmith, and had my mom pick up Guitar Hero III:Legends of Rock at Best Buy. Also ordered Halo 3. I'll probably be getting those in 10 days, my guess.
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Friday. Dust storm. Nice. The air is dust. Yep, a friendly reminder that I'm in Iraq and the weather is not the same as in Pennsylvania. And I haven't even seen the 130-140 deg summer yet.
You would think it was cloudy out, but no, it's just a lot of dust. I would have taken a picture, but my camera is in Michelle's office and I keep forgetting to grab it. Plus, I don't really want it outside for an extended period of time - like, all day during work - during a dust storm.

Speaking of the camera. Tomorrow is Sunday and I will probably try to get some pictures around the base to give you guys an idea of what it looks like, plus upload any other pics from Lebanon. At least, that's the plan.
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Saturday was fun. Still dusty in the air, but you can see clouds now.
It was fun because I went out in the field with Habib, the lead field tech (and he does basically any electrical work, hardware support or physical labor, and is quite good at it). He's Egyptian and speaks fairly decent English, but he's a good guy and 2 months older than me, so he's my age at 27.
We went to military housing areas (trailers) to check on complaints that we received in the last couple days. The process of troubleshooting PCs and the network wasn't terribly difficult, though Habib did do the majority of the work, especially outdoors around the access points and antennas. It was fairly tiring being on my feet all day, but it was a change. Maybe I'll learn some Arabic from Habib. (in Egyptian dialect)

Habib also setup my TV and showed me which channels were in English, as well as organized them so they were channels 1,2,3,4 instead of 79, 174,175, 204. (There are almost 400 channels and only about 6 in English) Lately, I've been listening to the Arabian music video channels. Not bad at all really.
At least now I can watch some American TV!