Saturday, November 15, 2008

So I lied

Maybe tomorrow I will have photos? Having the internet up at the times it is sort of suck because the majority of the time I am working and when I am here working I generally don't have time to fiddle with much outside of work. I'm assuming this will change slightly in a couple of weeks after everyone gets settled in. Right now we are at 248 poor souls. I think we are supposed to be getting only a few more people in here. Every time we have someone come in we have to make sure that their email accounts are transferred down from McMurdo or we have to create one in general. This generally works without any problems but occasionally we do lose the satellite right in the middle of a transfer meaning folks don't get their email. Thankfully everyone has been understanding of this. I suppose when you go to the South Pole you sort of have to expect delays in well everything, and you just stay ever grateful for things like 24/7 email access while here. So having to wait a day or two most people can stomach. The other thing we've been getting swarmed with is folks trying to get onto the wireless out in summer camp (the jamesways). Feels just like my time in the BugBuster's office during peak only this is far less stressful. Having the experience of thousands of angry little freshman whining they can't get on the wireless has made this portion of the job seem like a vacation. It's also nice being able to work on these windows boxes with your eyes closed since my coworkers aren't as experienced with windows boxes to handle grabbing a computer in swedish/finnish/german/etc and setting up a new wireless connection. :} This job is however in one aspect exponentially more stressful in that a lot of the stuff we need to do requires the internet, and when you lose any sort of useful internet access after 10am it makes the remaining 8 hours of the day sometimes quite difficult. Try going a day without using Google... It does however force you to become better at the job, you can't just rely on Google, you have to get creative and figure out your own solutions and approaches towards a solution.

I've really been wondering how I approach this whole blog thing since I am so far behind in posts and pic and such. Do I just make one huge long ol post going through everything with pics of my adventure up to this point? Or maybe I just start doing individual posts of each day leading up to this post? Or do I just redo the whole damn blog since I think there are 5 people reading this anyway ;}

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Oh one last tidbit; couple of days ago it was really windy 18 knots (no clue what that actually means, I just know it was windy) the base temp was -48 degrees F, and the windchill was -79 degrees F. That my friends is freaking cold… The worst part of this is that without the wind -48 degrees F is not all that bad, so when you are walking with your back to the wind you don’t really notice it, then when you have to come back the trip seems to take 10 times longer. I had to take a workstation (computer/monitor/cables) out to the fuelies shack about a 5 minute or so walk. By the time I got in the shack all the cables were frozen solid, I had to sit the cables and equipment in front of an electric heater for a good 20 minutes before I could even move them without risk of snapping the outer shell.

I <3 Antarctica :}

Oh and I setup my gmail to forward to my usap account so I will be able to get mail and respond 24/7.


One last thing, so you were right Ian, so you were right... work, eat, workout, and sort of sleep. All my little projects thus far, not so much. :|

1 comment:

Cora Lynn Clifton said...

Hi Jeremy- Your adventure has begun. I think that when ever you get time to write on your blog is great. It's fun and interesting to read. I mean I've never been there so your first hand experience is pretty cool. Keep writing and don't worry about when or how much. People here want to know how you are doing, so, keep up the blog.