Before I left home for my mobilization train-up, I went on a small buying spree of sorts for techno gadgets. Since I already had a netbook computer, I bought all sorts of adapters and peripherals to create a mobile media office. Tech gadgets keep us connected and provide entertainment while deployed, and after three previous deployments I thought I knew what I'd need.
I also brought my iPhone with me. AT&T allows its customers to receive sms/text messages for free in other countries but charges $.50 per each sms sent out. This way I can connect to the local cell networks and get sms messages from friends and family back home. I can also connect to WiFi hotspots at the USO, etc and access the Internet via my phone. Pretty neato huh? As a staunch Windows Mobile Phone user for years, I have come to like my iPhone. While not as versatile or open for changes to the preset settings, it is still pretty powerful with an impressive selection of applications. Problem is, much to the chagrin of my Mac obsessed friends, my iPhone is now malfunctioning for no reason I can seem to find. (There, I said it. Apple products aren't perfect.) At random times, my iPhone will turn on by itself and flash the message that this accessory is not optimized for the iPhone 4. It'll do this every few seconds repeatedly for a few hours or days at a time, and then it will stop just as randomly. At other times, applications will just quit or stop functioning. before I upgraded the operating system software, what has seemed like a couple dozen times now, my phone used to randomly restart itself. And most annoying, last month I attempted to answer a call and it just kept vibrating with a dark screen. I couldn't stop it or turn it off, so I waited until the batter died that night to recharge it and restart it again. I'm hoping that one of my fanboi Apple-obsessed friends can convince me that these are not flaws, but features since Apple products are the only products in creation that are perfect in every way. Whether we admit it or not, we all depend on our mobile phones like our lives depended on them.
On every single base in Iraq and Afghanistan, We all have commercial Internet available to us. Sometimes it's provided by an outside local contractor and sometimes it's provided by a cooperative of users who purchase a satellite dish and pay the heavy monthly fees for the desired bandwidth. That can be from $500-2000 or more a month for service. Where I am now, there are two local vendors who provide Internet service. One requires that they load software on your computer to create a VPN (virtual private network) to connect to their WiFi networks at a cost of about $80/month. The other requires you buy "scratch off" cards with login username and password for a web portal at a cost of $15/week. Personally I don't want any stranger putting anything at all on my computer, so I opted for the scratch off cards. The download speed of this ISP is typically OK, but since it's satellite based the upload speed is next to nothing. Consequently, uploading photos to this blog seems next to impossible. Although there are times that the service here seems to take a total dump and works as good as a 300kbs modem, if even at all. Tonight was one of these nights.
In order to communicate in a non-text based medium, the USO has a phone bank for us to make short free calls back to the U.S., and some here often buy cheap pre-paid local cell phones that use scratch-off cards to load air time. Others like myself prefer to video chat over the Internet where possible, and Skype is a Godsend. There's very little in this world while deployed that brings more joy than to see the face of your loved ones. Who cares if the picture is often jumpy and the voice quality fades out and distorts frequently also. Just the fact that you can connect real time to the other side of the world makes you feel like, well, you aren't all the way on the other side of the world. Unfortunately again, intermittent Internet bandwidth constraints or other issues will not allow these services to work all the time.
I occasionally go up to my office at nights because we have three computer networks for access there: an unclassified network, a classified network, and a network that we use to talk with our foreign coalition partners. We can use the unclassified network sparingly for personal use to keep us connected back home. I used my Army email tonight to write my brother to see how he's doing because I was worried he might have been on the helicopter that crashed yesterday. I since learned that it was mostly Navy Seals, so that wouldn't have included him. Although the family has yet to hear back from him, so no news is good news I suppose.
The Military has become increasingly reliant on computers, and most of the neat systems and software we use I can't talk about on here. Although I will say that like any major corporation or large computer network in general, we have our problems. Network drives, printers, PowerPoint Presentations, Outlook email, databases, charts and graphs, etc all enable us to do our job so much more efficiently. But when they don't work properly we become paralyzed, lacking the ability or knowledge of how we fought wars before the digital age. I sit at a desk most of the time when I'm not out interacting with the locals. I love how much work I can accomplish with my computer but hate that I'm chained to a desk to do most of it. Such is technology, for it's the real entity that enslave mankind.
More to follow.
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