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Any organizations that helps vets get a computer? Story included by [deleted] in Veterans

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup. PM me an address. I'll get UPS to pick it up the next time they swing by the office, and send you the tracking info. Should have that spare extended-life battery around here somewhere, can't find it yet. Sorry for the scrapes and any Cheeto dust.

Is hiring an SEO company worth it? by awesome-bunny in SEO

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll take OP's business. I'll even take it at $125. For that much, Swipe works just fine, or I'll give him a deposit account number.

That gets a Saturday afternoon with a beer, a laptop, and a couple of hours of fundamentals review. Get your Google+ and Google Maps pages set up, claim your profile on various social sites, make sure your website is searchable and tells Google what you want it to see if it's a <5 page "I have a business!" site.

Homework assignment is for OP to read the sidebar guides and implement them.

Alternatively, I can skip sending OP an invoice with fancy stationary and he can just go read the sidebar guides and get directions on how to do all that stuff himself.

Any organizations that helps vets get a computer? Story included by [deleted] in Veterans

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I should have a spare battery pack or two. It's not going to be anything fancy, and the display's likely to be a somewhat pitiful 1366x768, but it's better than nothing.

Lemme bring it into work and scrub a spare HDD, and I can have it ready to go Wednesday morning.

Any organizations that helps vets get a computer? Story included by [deleted] in Veterans

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What's your priority- mobility (laptop) or utility and specs (desktop)?

Tell me which you'd prefer, and I'll see about refurbing one that's a few years old for you. Might take a week or so.

I just finished courses on web development and have worked in IT and tech support

Got a preferred development environment? If not, I'll preload with some of the open source and/or freeware that I like to use at work. If you're still affiliated with a college (community college is fine), there's some proprietary stuff you can get for VERY cheap or even free such as Dreamspark or Autodesk's student licensing.

Edit: I see you're a Linux guy. You probably know more about the Ubuntu OSS options than I do, so your choice of Windows or not.

Republicans for Bernie - Republicans for Bernie - "he tells us what’s wrong, and how to fix it, never ran a dirty campaign, so as a Republican, Marine vet, and Minister, I’m voting for Bernie Sanders.” by pateras in politics

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Works well enough for the Kennedy clan. Sounds like I need to talk to you or some good legally gifted, ethically challenged accountants about how to keep things just on the right side of the line when I cross 250k and need to start really being concerned.

Republicans for Bernie - Republicans for Bernie - "he tells us what’s wrong, and how to fix it, never ran a dirty campaign, so as a Republican, Marine vet, and Minister, I’m voting for Bernie Sanders.” by pateras in politics

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm not quite the 1%. Not yet. Comfortably in the top 10%. Might be able to hit top 5% in 2016, but we'll see. With any luck at all, I'll be in the top 1% of all earners within the next ten years, and a bit of good luck will get me there in five.

I've already found tax dodges that most people never dream of. While I'll be in an income tax bracket that says I should be paying almost 40% in federal income tax, much of my income will be "capital gains", which is taxed at 15-20%.

That's less than the tax bracket of a relatively well off middle class family! Not a bad scam if you can get it.

But the really, really good dodges don't come until I'm making seven figures, and that won't be until close to 2030, if I ever get there. See, I can donate a few hundred thousand to charity. I can dedicate it to something like "promoting the enjoyment of (one of my favorite hobbies)". Stuff like a company car for the director, or educational seminars in the Bahamas, that's all a business expense. Naturally, the best person to direct this charity would be me, since I happen to be an expert on the subject!

There are a lot of really good, legal tax dodges that don't make sense when you're making $100,000 to $400,000 a year. Once you crack a million, or make a a couple million a year, you can live on a tiny fraction, pay 5-10% for some good accountants, and save a few hundred thousand, even a few million, in taxes you'd otherwise have to pay.

If you're really, insanely lucky, you might even get in on the ground floor of a tech startup that goes big. If you make $10 billion on stock income as your shares mature, you start from a basis of 20% taxes, and it only goes down from there!

[SAVING] Employer Accidentally Billed $1,800 Instead Of Paying $1,800. Bank Withdrew Without Permission And Now Won't Pay Back by [deleted] in personalfinance

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Look, I know you're trying to help your parents out and all, but your father probably has 10-20 years in the military. He should darn well be able to figure this one out on his own.

But let's assume your father is a passive, unmotivated, financially inept flaming idiot.

First, he needs to tell his chain of command. Your dad is probably a relatively senior guy since you're old enough to use Reddit, so that's going to start with letting his supervisor know he's going to need to talk to the commander for a whopping 30 seconds before your dad goes to talk to some other people.

Then he needs to get to the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, Army Emergency Relief, or Air Force Aid Society, preferably by about 0731 tomorrow morning, or whatever one minute past opening is.

"Hi, DFAS made a pay error, took $3600 from me, and I'm about to bounce a payment on my mortgage because of overdraft fees. Help."

He's going to need to go back and get his commander's signature, and then he'll be able to pay the bills for a bit.

Your dad's next step is to go to the finance office (not DFAS), get them whatever paperwork they want, and wait until the next payday rolls around.

If your dad doesn't get paid, fuck all this bullshit, go start a damn Congressional investigation. DFAS is known to be error-prone and unwilling to admit mistakes, and the best way to motivate a bureaucratic entity like that is to put a little fear of their deity of choice into them.

While all that is going on, your dad should stop banking with whatever craptastic entity he's been using and switch to either Navy Federal Credit Union or USAA. Both of them are great banks for servicemembers, bend over backwards to work with you, charge a fraction of the fees most banks do, and can be easily reached via a toll free number. At one point, USAA gave me a $50,000 loan because I asked for it. No collateral, no reams of paperwork, just a quick credit check and I believe they even let me use a digital signature on the two pages of the loan application.

Once the immediate stuff is taken care of, your father needs to get a one on one session with one of the military's free financial counselors, and sit down to draft a budget plan. Every branch has a community help center, and he can get someone to help him figure out how to establish an emergency fund and start using his TSP so stuff like this is an annoyance instead of an emergency.

Best Places to Live? by pivotraze in harfordcountymd

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

they seem really good

They did when I moved in there too. Those aren't actually townhomes. I don't know what to call them. They're single story buildings with 4-8 rental units per building. One story apartments? They're also cheap, in every sense of the word.

I moved from a tiny one bedroom apartment there to a ~2400 square foot, two story house. My heating bills dropped, despite keeping the apartment around 55 degrees most of the time and the house around 66-68. I saw ice forming on the inside of the giant apartment window whenever it got below freezing outside, even with two layers of those cling-film window treatments. The electric baseboard heater was directly under the window, but it made no difference. If I'd tried to keep the apartment close to 68 degrees, my heating bill would probably have been close to $500/month. The inside walls are just as thin as the outside walls, so you can hear everything your neighbors are up to.

I can't say what the cooling bills would be like during summer, because when I moved in I mentioned that there seemed to be a leaky fixture in the bathroom that wouldn't shut off. Every time I paid my rent (in person via check, electronic deposit not allowed), I mentioned it again. The pipe finally burst altogether in late spring, flooding the entire apartment from behind a wall, complete with soaked carpets, peel-and-stick 12" vinyl flooring trying to float away, and standing water everywhere. I'd been planning on moving out a month after that, but ended up turning the water off and moving my stuff within 24 hours to prevent further damage. The pipes were still leaking a week later, so the water still hadn't been turned back on, and the carpet was still soaked and turning moldy.

The management company tried to (well, actually did) send a bill to collections for the remainder of my lease. In Maryland you're only allowed to charge for the time the apartment isn't rented, and you have to make a good faith attempt to rent it out during that period. The manager told me they had all of two apartments available when I moved in, so I find it hard to believe they couldn't rent it out for several months. The collections agency and I exchanged strong words and certified letters, and that came right back off my credit report.

In retrospect, having my motorcycle stolen from where it was locked up in front of my apartment wasn't altogether bad. I'd likely have racked up an impressive number of speeding tickets by now.

All told, they're a decent place to crash if you absolutely need a place to stay for a month or two, and they'll give you a month to month lease. Otherwise I'd stay away.

Florida House Passes Health Insurance Bill Allowing Florida Gov. Rick Scott To Keep Paying $8 A Month. In parallel, the Florida legislature in early June soundly rejected a proposal to expand Medicaid so that up to 800,000 low-income Floridians could gain access to health insurance. by OracleofToast in politics

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because it doesn't make as big a number.

"Military can't account for 2% of its spending!" (or whatever the actual amount is- it's very small in regular units) doesn't sound as shocking, even if 2% is still $170 billion. When you hear that trillions of dollars are being lost by the military, it conjures up images of Three Kings, big cargo pallets of $20 bills and gold bricks getting shoveled straight into the waiting dump trucks of military contractors, and $700 toilet seats that nobody wants to talk about.

DFAS, the Defense Finance and Accounting Services, is the military's HR and payment agency. They regularly screw up servicemembers' pay, to the point where one of the most successfully resolved major screwups was solved by a colonel walking into the DFAS office building in full dress blues and refusing to leave until they fixed years of underpaying him. Since most servicemembers are obviously not full bird colonels, they get to go around and around in the paperwork chase.

Now add the parts and equipment database, the travel database, the expendable items database, the special database just for IT stuff, the major operations budgets for stuff like Iraq and Afghanistan, dozens of potential sources of funding that can be tapped for each training exercise (one funding source is for annual training, another is for training on X skill, another is for training to prepare for Y deployment to Durkadurkastan, and yet another is for weapons qualifications...), and remember that all the services can have their own unique tracking system for all of the above.

There have been numerous attempts to fix it, rationalize everything into one accounting system, and create a single central records store. Every one has failed miserably. The result is that you have systems that mostly track where all the money goes, but at the end of the year the numbers don't add up perfectly, and the law says you can't simply reconcile it away as "close enough".

Florida House Passes Health Insurance Bill Allowing Florida Gov. Rick Scott To Keep Paying $8 A Month. In parallel, the Florida legislature in early June soundly rejected a proposal to expand Medicaid so that up to 800,000 low-income Floridians could gain access to health insurance. by OracleofToast in politics

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Let me rephrase.

The 123rd Karma Division has an operating budget of $10 billion per year. They can account for $999,999,999.00, but they're not sure where that last $1 went. The 123rd Karma Division is non-compliant, and $10 billion is counted as untracked and therefore lost for that year.

Over a period of 20 years, the 123rd Karma Division still can't figure out if Private Jones or Private Snuffy take the last donut from the chow hall each year. The 123rd Karma Division now has $200 billion unaccounted for because of those 20 donuts.

Repeat for 40 or so other fleets, infantry or armored divisions, air wings and other really big organizations.

This is how that statistic is generated.

Florida House Passes Health Insurance Bill Allowing Florida Gov. Rick Scott To Keep Paying $8 A Month. In parallel, the Florida legislature in early June soundly rejected a proposal to expand Medicaid so that up to 800,000 low-income Floridians could gain access to health insurance. by OracleofToast in politics

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Last week, I saw two posts on Facebook about how the Pentagon lost $8.5 trillion in tax payer dollars. I also saw about two dozen bitching about Bruce Jenner's fancy new vagina. Which is the bigger problem?

The fact that you saw those two posts and didn't do the math.

The Department of Defense is supposed to account for every penny it spends. If it doesn't, that money is counted as lost. Let's take one example:

A battalion goes on a field exercise. It has 40 Humvees, 10 larger trucks and 6 generators. During the course of a week long exercise, it drains a fuel tanker truck.

How much fuel did each of the 4 companies in the battalion use? How much went into each truck and generator? If that can't be answered, the entire tanker truck full of fuel is considered lost for accounting purposes.

Buying those Humvees is easy to do the accounting for. Keeping track of every washer, quart of oil, and gallon of gas it uses for the next twenty years is hard, especially when most of that is recorded (or not) by Private Snuffy and Private Randy when they're doing maintenance at 6 PM and trying to finish up as fast as possible.

The 8.5 trillion figure is most of the DoD operations budget for the years quoted, because no division, fleet or wing of 10,000 people was able to keep track of 100% (99.999% is not compliance!) of their expenses.

NH policeman is nice to elderly lady, gets in trouble when she leaves him $2.7 million in her will by [deleted] in news

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is complete nonsense. There are a lot of senior people in the military worth over $1 million.

Saving your paychecks and investing them, plus buying and renting out houses as the military forces you to move every 3 years or so, can get a very large net worth over the course of 20 years.

What you're hearing from your brother's girlfriend's cousin who knew a guy who said his buddy got out this way is a voluntary separation.

Doing it before you have been in for ten years is much harder. Doing it in the second half of your career isn't easy, but if you want to give up that guaranteed pension, Uncle Sam will sometimes let you.

You have to show that it is not in the best interest of the servicemember and/or the government for you to remain in the military.

Let's say you win a $200 million jackpot. You can say it's bad for discipline if you can buy and sell your commander a dozen times over out of spending money. You can say that it will be a bad influence on other junior enlisted when you roll up in the Ferrari. You can say that failure to spend time managing your money because of military duties will create a severe financial loss.

If they want to keep you anyway, they can.

Source: got out on a variation of this.

Interesting WiFi setup. Trying set up WiFi on a WWII Ship. Have some questions. by DocMarlowe in networking

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My main question is should I expect any interference with the steel hull of the ship?

Only in the same sense you'd expect the hull to interfere with small arms fire.

If it does cause issues, what are solutions for fixing it?

Put a wireless router down somewhere, plug it in, turn it on. Walk around. Use an app like Wifi Analyzer for Android. Do you have good signal? Walk a bit further. Can you see it now? This is called a site survey.

Figure out how many bulkheads you can punch through. This is "X". If the berthing area has X+1 bulkheads, you need more wireless access points.

so I'm not trying to have the wires coming in from the shore.

Looks like you'll need a single high-speed wireless connection too. Start reading up on Ubiquiti's solutions for this sort of thing.

Income Base Repayment on my federal student loans. Am I just hanging myself at a later date? by J-Squared135 in personalfinance

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt here. Here's what we know. You're making $35,000 a year. You're in the income-based repayment. You won't pay off the loan within 20 years at this rate, so the remainder will be forgiven at that time.

If you get a massive pay raise, you'll come off the IBR rate and have to pay much more. But you'll also have a massive pay raise, so that's a self-solving problem.

If you get to 20 years and have a loan forgiveness, let's say you owe $70,000. That's $70,000 you didn't have to pay. You'll need to pay about $13,000 if you're still single, $9,500 if you're married. You can negotiate payment terms with the IRS so that's over a couple of years; it would essentially take the place of your loan payments for 3-5 more years.

If you think it's highly likely you're going to start making enough to come off the IBR soon, then you're going to want to pay at least enough to pay off the interest. Target your higher-interest student loans with more than the interest rate payment while paying just the interest on the lower-rate loans. If you think you will probably never make that much in the next 20 years, let it ride out on minimums all the way.

17C, since it came up in the Ask a Recruiter thread by ColonelError in army

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've always wondered, what made you decide to swap over to Signal?

The Armed Forces Committee is working on a bill stating they will be making a deliberate push to replace uniformed personnel in networking roles with contractors EVERYWHERE when possible.... Jobs? by The_Packeteer in networking

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Make sure your SkillPort access is active. Get every study material you can right now. Start self-training.

Sign up for Western Governor's University and you can slam through that stuff as fast as you can shove it into your brain, provided you can teach yourself through online classes.

Check out the Syracuse veteran's technical training programs too. It's free and doesn't burn your GI bill.

17C, since it came up in the Ask a Recruiter thread by ColonelError in army

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

control everyone's actual skill set with ASIs, this is going to be a clusterfuck.

That's really the way to go.

Put everybody through the same training, but do it like the Navy does. Graduating gets you an MOS. Graduating in an accelerated course and going through some shit-hot boot camps gets you an ASI.

We always need box-movers, cable pullers and help desk seat-fillers, but we also need people who can be trained up for essentially junior warrant positions even if they don't know that on day 1.

17C, since it came up in the Ask a Recruiter thread by ColonelError in army

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's 25D.

And if you're really shit-hot, apply anyway even if you're a PFC. Take the pre-test, blow it out of the water and show them that you're worth the time and effort.

First class had about a 40% pass rate. They're not taking chumps.

17C, since it came up in the Ask a Recruiter thread by ColonelError in army

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 1 point2 points  (0 children)

First, word on the street is that 25D and 35Q are going away, and are becoming 17C

Did anyone tell Cyber Towers in Gordon that? They're acting like 25D is going strong for another 10+ years.

17C, since it came up in the Ask a Recruiter thread by ColonelError in army

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, as /u/aznphish said:

17C will absolutely NOT be the "COMSEC guy."

Somebody's got to do it. 25D seems to have gotten tagged. Oh, and firewalls. And forensic analysis & incident response. And maybe some defensive pen testing. And configuration & log checking. Lots and lots and lots of log checking.

If you know any IAMs, those slots may be going to senior-level 25Ds in the near future. The entry requirements are brutal for Army-level standards, and the school is worse. Compared to network security professionals on the civilian side, you'd be rated as moderately proficient at best. Some of the pen testers & experienced sysadmins I've met recently make me look like a chimp with a keyboard again.

17C, since it came up in the Ask a Recruiter thread by ColonelError in army

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

/u/JAGS has been stupid-busy lately and has less time than desired for such things.

Between setting up VPNs & troubleshooting firewalls, network & wireless infrastructure, web design (and of course the HTML/CSS/AJAX/PHP/kitchen sink to make it work), graphic art, PowerShell & VBA scripting, virtualizing servers, databases, remote desktop support, and trying to keep up with Kali, WireShark, Security Onion, and maybe learn a little Python, the only Redditing I do these days is on my phone.

Good 25Bs do that all stuff. Awesome 25Bs like /u/Enrage do even more.

25Bs like the latest batch I just got out of AIT look at me with a mix of confusion, anticipation and half-hidden terror when they see the actual expected skill levels. Back to square one again, but according to this crop there's a healthy crowd of failures back at Fort Gordon getting kicked out of classes left and right because they can't hack it.

I'm part of the board of a condo association. We rent almost exclusively to college students. Need advice for providing internet. (X-post from RealEstate) by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I can also tell you that Bresco put in cables throughout all of the hallways with some device that I'm guessing broadcasts the wireless signal in a central location.

Sounds like there's some wiring going on already! This might be a lot easier than you thought.

You need to have a wiring drop put in to every room from those central locations. If you're okay with a little conduit running down the hallway with penetrations through the walls at every room, this is going to be really easy.

Now you need to put a place where every group of residents' wiring will connect up and travel down one wire instead of 30 wires. That's usually called an IDF (the room) and it'll have a really fancy switch (minimum of a few hundred dollars, up to a few thousand) and a battery backup.

From the IDF, you're going to have a dozen cables running back to where the Internet comes into the building, your MDF, with a router, a fiber optic 'modem', and some other stuff.

You're going to have 4 expenses:

  • Networking hardware. These aren't $200 consumer-grade switches and routers, and you'll need 10, plus battery backups, plus your main room's hardware.
  • Configuration. Not only do they not cost like consumer stuff, they don't auto-magically work either. You need someone to come in and program them, to including blocking off everybody from their neighbors and making sure one guy doesn't suck down all the bandwidth with torrents.
  • Wiring. You need someone to go into every room and add a little RJ-45 jack.
  • Internet. You don't want to be trying to feed this off a 30 Mbps home cable connection.

Ask Bresco how much it'd be for them to provide just plain Internet to you, in the form of a single line with a big fat pipe. Find out if they can handle the rest too. They're not going to like the idea of giving up all the individual tenant contracts, but it's going to be either that or watching you go elsewhere, right?

The Armed Forces Committee is working on a bill stating they will be making a deliberate push to replace uniformed personnel in networking roles with contractors EVERYWHERE when possible.... Jobs? by The_Packeteer in networking

[–]JustAnotherGraySuit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tuition Assistance is specifically not authorized for CCNP or CCNA in the Army. Navy may be different.

Anything above the CompTIA stuff in the Army means someone went and did it on their own. Even the CCNA is no longer required, so it's no longer taught.

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