It’s no secret that I get tired of the vintage computer systems with which we’re saddled here. Nothing says progress like IE6 circa 2001, and waiting 5 minutes for the the Outlook calendar to load is not my cup of tea. Sometimes you just need to look at (and write on) a big calendar to block out times for leave planning, transferring, working on a major project, what have you.

I’m glad I found David Seah’s compact calendar (via Lifehacker), because it’s already helped me make the case that I should go on R&R when I want to. The Excel file is customizable, and you can add in host country holidays to the template. I had a bit of trouble because we’re on a Sunday-Thursday work schedule here, so I modified his a bit to make it work. If you’re in a Western country, go to his page; otherwise give mine a shot. Sorry folks in Saudi…no love for that Saturday to Wednesday nonsense.

Download: Compact Calendar for Sunday-Thursday work week (.xls)

I’ve been lax, have I not? Six months in to my tour, I still don’t have internet at home (hey, that’d be a good post, huh?). That lack of connectivity, combined with a very busy workload, has made it really tough to keep up-to-date with this blog. But, given that it still gets some 100 visitors a day without me having updated in six months, I think it’s time to make this a bit more useful.  So here’s my resolution: I plan to write at least one substantive post per week for 2008. Watch this space, or consider adding my to your RSS feed. And, if I’m not keeping up my end of the bargain, feel free to berate me. Publicly.

Happy 2009, everyone.

Yes, I realize there has been a many-months gap between this and the last posting to this blog. I PCSed out to post (so I have many new stories and tips to share, like how I got $1300 for my FTA instead of $1000 and some travel per diem tips) and was occupied by logistical and social obligations. I now have a good amount of time on my hands, but internet access at post is non-existent. I’ve had 12 minutes of access (cumulative) since I arrived a month ago, which is not enough time to download my email and sync my contacts to google, let alone write a blog post. But stay tuned, because I’ll be starting up again in a few weeks, insha’allah.

I’ve blogged previously on how to upgrade your flights under the new business class regime, and so I was surprised to find out that some of my research wasn’t quite right. I’m currently booked on a 9+ hour flight from Chicago to Rome in early August. The nice folks at Carlson Wagonlit went ahead and ticketed the flight so I could request an upgrade from American Airlines. I knew I was ticketed in YCA, and was stupid to assume that that fare was “full fare.” After looking at their website, I thought I’d be out 20-30k miles for the upgrade. Turns out I’d be out 50k + $600 (termed a “copay”) for two tickets, as YCA counts as “discounted economy class” as far as upgrades are concerned. Assuming a value of ~ $.02 per airline mile, the upgrade would set me back $1600, 4x more than the $400 I was expecting to pay. That said, it’s still cheaper than cost constructing, as the difference between a YCA fare and a regular Y fare is running ~$2400 for two tickets. Plus, if you flush with miles, the $300 copay might not seem all that bad.

Apple announced the new, dead-sexy iPhone on Monday, and it finally has 3G compatibility. I don’t own an iPhone because most of its features would have been unavailable at my previous and future posts, but they plan to launch the new phone in over 70 countries by the end of this year.

Sadly, it’s still not a good buy for most FS types. DS still restricts the use of camera phones at many posts. They offer a few different reasons for this, all of which seem very silly to me (the solutions to the two biggest problems are keep it so that the camera is in a pocket or not facing outward and don’t bring them into secure areas). The new iPhone, however, is GPS enabled, which would probably make it a bigger security risk.

I’ve been served quite well by my Motorola v195. I purchased it on eBay for $40 two years ago and had a Colombian tech unlock it for $10. It is quad-band, meaning it can be used on just about any cell network in the world. It has no camera. It is WAP-capable if you get the service. It runs on a SIM card, so you can pop em out and in while you travel so you have local coverage everywhere you go. The best feature? Bluetooth. Every day it syncs my iCal and Address Book data to the phone, wirelessly. I keep a few lists with address book entries sorted by country, so when I travel, all I have to do is drop in the new SIM card and sync my phone and all of the contacts are updated in about 30 seconds.

If you have a Mac and this phone and want to set up iSync, you should download this plugin that has the script set up. After dragging the plugins to the folder that they tell you to, double click that folder and go to resources, and replace the file MOTV195.tiff with this image file. That’s it…you’re good to go.

Commenter joeking asks about scanning in documents to document home leave expenses for purposes of the tax deduction. I have no personal experience doing this, as I have not met the 2% floor due to staying in a home I own during home leave.

As I see it, there are two questions being asked here. The implied question is, “what’s the best way to save records for tax purposes.” Without question or hesitation, I’m telling you SCAN, SCAN, SCAN. I see no need to get a purpose-built scanner and am happy with my Canon LIDE lightweight scanner. There’s also the super-tiny NeatReceipts. The good news is that the IRS accepts scanned copies [see: Rev. Proc 97-22] for NEARLY ALL RECORDS. Seriously, quit lugging around paper copies of all that junk.

The second question is about actually deducting home leave. I’m no tax professional, and I recommend reading AFSA’s Tax Guide, but here’s my two cents: unless you both own a home and are travelling extensively on your home leave, you might not be deducting much. First, this only works if you’re not using the Standard Deduction. You must itemize using Schedule A to claim business expenses. If you don’t own a home or make large charity donations (outside of CFC), you’re likely of luck. Second, you can only claim yourself, not/not your family. So, if you’re staying in two double hotel rooms, you can only deduct one single-occupancy rate. Finally, you can avoid saving food receipts and driving receipts if the cost is under the IRS rates of per diem and $.485/mi, respectively. Food can only be deducted at 50% of actual expense. If you’re staying with family or friends, you can’t claim those expenses. See IRS Form 2106 for the full info.

Remember, certain other costs can be claimed as business expenses. These include ORE, AFSA membership costs [I'm not a member], some subscriptions, etc. I haven’t run up a tab large enough to deduct over the 2% floor for miscelaneous expenses. That said, it doesn’t hurt to scan something and figure it out at tax time.

So I’ve been a little MIA lately; I take my final Arabic test in two days so I’ve been a little busy pretending to study. I have a couple of posts coming up on what’s been going on with me: home leave info, tenure/promotion analysis, PCSing with a pet, etc. But this is a bit simpler: How to pack for long-TDY/PCS move.

I’m assuming government-funded travel where there is no nasty extra-bag fee and where you can use two bags of 50 lbs each. Your needs and desires are likely different than mine, but this should serve as a good primer.

First, if you’re PCSing, get in touch with your sponsor to see what can be sent by pouch/APO ahead of time. Must-have books are good candidates because the USPS media rate is so cheap. Clothes that aren’t needed in your current location but would come in handy right away at post are also good, though you’ll want to pack them tight so you’re not paying to ship air.

We’re big fans of bringing our bedding with us in our carry on. That might seem wasteful, but it makes it easier to not have your bed while you wait for your HHE. We bought a large, heavy-duty duffel bag (you can pick one up for $30 at most places that sell luggage or on Amazon.com). Then we stuffed pillows, sheets, and comforters into those vacuum space bags. Those bags aren’t great, but they only need to hold until you can get the duffel zipped. Pack one bag that doens’t need to be opened en route and you’re good to go.

Save space in your other bag and carry-on by packing your clothes differently. I recently traveled using the bundle method of packing clothes and was able to fit two complete suits, jeans, 5 shirts, 2 pairs of shorts, and everything else I needed into my carry on. The suits didn’t need ironing when I was done. Sweet.

Finally, make good use of your “personal/laptop” extra carry on. While a laptop is ideal, I’ve definitely brought an iMac in this carry on. Bringing a large hard-drive with a bunch of movies, a Vonage phone/VoIP headset, and a couple of wireless routers will not only get you connected and entertained right when you land, it will also reduce the need to fill your UAB with a bunch of heavy books or space-hogging DVDs. If you MUST bring DVDs, take them out of their cases and put them in a slim, car visor cd case. You’ll be able to keep 20 DVDs in the space that you would have normally put one or two. Ship the cases HHE and you’re good to go.

Prerequisite: Inbox Zero

Diplomatic Security imposes an IT lockdown on computers connected to OpenNet–that is, you can’t install software, you can’t use a non-DoS owned device on computers, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on any official machine. Most GTD ideas, including Inbox Zero, require additional software or websites that don’t render well in IE6. In this post, I’ll guide you through how I manage to keep my inbox empty while keeping tasks moving.

Read more on this Article!

We’re met with a special dilemma…we’re constantly travelling so it’s hard to keep tabs on all of our vital documents but there are a lot of circumstances where you need those documents at a moment’s notice. HR keeps a lot of your admin and EER documents on HR Online, but that isn’t much use when you don’t have OpenNet access. My solution is platform- and system-independent and has saved me many, many times.

Basically, I scan in everything and put it on the internet. Here’s how you can do the same. First, get a scanner. I recommend a scanner that you can easily pack in your carry-on luggage, like the super slim and lightweight Canon LIDE 90, which only requires a USB cable (no bulky power cables) but still scans photos perfectly. It works with both Macs and PCs and comes with software that allows you to create multi-page PDFs. Next, find a secure place online to store your documents. I have my own webserver, so I have a password-protected directory where I keep everything. Creating a tag in gmail that is something like ‘vital docs’ would also do the trick. Your level of trust may be different than mine, but generally I think the security is good enough to put my tax and financial information. You might want to try Amazon S3 service if you need a brand name you can trust, though they cost money.

But what do you bother to scan in? I keep (color) copies of all of my passport bio pages, drivers licenses, birth and marriage certificates, vaccination records, my travel orders, all of my vouchers, any tax documents (including 1040s), EERs, receipts, important visas, and anything I feel I might need to pull up from anywhere. Travel orders are the thing that I need to download most often, and the ability to do it from any computer has gotten me out of several jams. I’ll talk in a later post about how to organize and search this information for the right document, but in the meantime you’d better get busy scanning. Macs and some PCs have a “Print to PDF” feature which can also work for documents that don’t need a signature or having a copy is good enough (e.g. IRS 1040s).

I’ve been putting off writing anything for the past week for a few reasons: nothing much is going on with me in the admin world, so I’m not thinking of anything to write. Also, I want to give myself parameters on what I can and can’t write. I don’t simply want to be a re-hashing of things that the Department already does, but I am willing to do a consolodation of stuff that’s found in five different places or is so unclear a plain-English explaination is due. I’m also interested in workflow and process, especially within our IT world. There are some good blogs that deal with Getting Things Done (GTD)/Lifehacking. I see no problem with incorporating some of that into this blog so long as it is done in a way that is useful in an IT-lockdown environment where archiving is often required by regulation.

So, as this all gets more complicated, I decided that some posts might have a prerequisite. If the tip is kind of complicated, I’ll put another link at the top so that they can build on each other. And since I’m fond of stretching analogies, I offer up the following “summer reading list.”

1. A primer on Getting Things Done
2. Inbox Zero – process your email and get rid of it all by assigning actions to each one. If you have 20 minutes, I recommend watching the presentation part of the video. It will save you much more than 20 minutes over the course of the first month alone. I’ll talk later about how I implement this on OpenNet computers.
3. The Overseas Briefing Center’s excellent, if hard to find on the internet website, “What do I do now?” publication has many of the forms, steps, and checklists you’ll need to head to an overseas assignment.
4. If you’re on an OpenNet computer, click the AskAdmin link on your left. A lot of good, if incomplete, stuff there.
5. Make friends with a good GSO. Seriously, I learned a lot from just being around some of our excellent GSOs in Colombia who either knew a reg on the tops of their heads or knew how to get an answer quickly.