Where I'm going

So, as those of you who follow my Twitters know, I’ve been excited about something these past few days. Now, I think, I can talk about it. I can’t really tell you everything, for reasons which will become clear, but I can tell you a bit.

I’ve been hired by a medical technology company to do a two part job. The first part is to design web interfaces for medical software. It’s Ajax/HTML stuff, pretty straightforward.

The other part of the job is that I’m going to be deploying this software for the client at their location.Which happens a lot. The client, though, in this case, is the United States Department of Defense…and the location is Iraq.

So, uh, yeah. I’m off to Baghdad in September. I’ll be setting up servers in, apparently, some fairly far-flung places.

I am a little apprehensive about it, of course…but I’ve been wanting to do something like this for more than a decade. I’m doing good in the world — helping set up telemedicine to save the lives of wounded people. And it pays…well. Plus, I get to be a fucking William Gibson character, which is about the most awesome thing in the world.

For the next six months, I will be working very hard to lose fifty pounds. I’m also teaching myself Arabic. And I’m probably going to be going down to the local gun store and learning how to use various weapons, because it couldn’t hurt, right?

I don’t know if I’ll be able to blog from where I’m going, or how much I can tell you about what I’m doing. But what I can, I will, and I’ll do it here.

Your thoughts?