What's it like living in Dallas, Texas?

Dallas/Fort Worth is (in my opinion) a little slice of Heaven (having lived in multiple states and countries) there's a good economy, inexpensive housing (compared to other metropolitan areas) and diverse cultures.

Yes, the North and East sections of the metroplex leans Liberal/Democrat, yes, there are some super Conservative/Republican people, but you don't generally hear about people getting in physical altercations because of their lifestyles and beliefs.

People tend to think "Cowboys and Rednecks" and forget that the integrated circuit (the basis for all computers) was invented in Fort Worth, and there's booming tech, aerospace, and manufacturing industries.

Even taxes are much lower than in other places in the country, no income tax, reasonable sales and property taxes (again, compared to other places) there's a good Highway system (you can get to just about anything you might want in less than an hour), although there seems to be a trend of building toll roads lately, that if you use them a lot can get expensive.

There are some nice lakes for boating and such, and there are a lot of "indoor activities", Baseball, Football, Hockey, Basketball, Six Flags, Rock climbing, the list goes on and on, there's even rumors that indoor snow skiing is coming.

Downfalls are there's basically no public transportation system (except in downtown Dallas and downtown Fort Worth), so you're going to have to drive just about everywhere. And it's flat, really flat, so if you like the mountains or the beach, it's going to be a weekend trip.

SGT (Join to see) Dallas is my hometown, although I took a job at Ft Hood. I'm a Solaris administrator, but I've been doing Linux as well for the last decade or so.

Is your clearance still good? If so, Raytheon is your best choice. Raytheon likes to get people straight out of school and keep them poor, but they are desperate for Linux admins with a clearance.

Texas Instruments and the FBI are the only other two outfits that seem to want cleared personnel in Dallas. Ft Worth has General Dynamics, and that's a good choice. Otherwise I think you'd be better off in San Antonio.

If you want to slide me a resume, I don't mind passing it aroud the organizations I know of.

The DFW area is getting Californicated to a degree. Most job opportunities are in the North Dallas area and surrounding suburbs, i.e. Plano, Richardson, Allen. There is also strong growth along the Alliance corridor north of Fort Worth. Depending on where you find employment I would recommend staying in the northern part of the Metroplex. Also, keep in mind, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country. Only New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago metropolitan areas are larger.

I worked the technology business there for almost 25 years before I retired and left the area. As a recovering techno-geek I would suggest studying up on Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare as well as the Unix varieties (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.) running on the big iron. A lot of folks can run Linux varieties on Intel centric servers but it takes fairly specialized training and experience to be able to slice up a petabyte SSD array.