Home Stretch

It was brought to my attention at dinner that we're coming into the home stretch--only 3 weeks left to go. We've drilled about 850m thus far. That means there's close to 2km of drill pipe hanging off of the drill rig and buried into the sea floor. Assuming we run into no problems, they are going to drill until Christmas day, which should bring us to our target depth of 1200m below the sea floor. The drilling will stop on Christmas day, but we're about 4 days behind the bit in terms of processing and logging the core, so our standard day to day operations should finish up by the 29th. After that, it is writing the on-ice report and packing everything up to go home. My flight is scheduled for departure on January 4th, so hopefully we get finished up by then and can head out.

Day to day life has been pretty routine. I've actually been able to do some coding the last few nights, which has been nice. Haven't had too many bugs to fix, so I've been working on some new features for the end of expedition report and for next year. I've also been playing with Mercurial for doing SCM. I had been using Subversion, and haven't had too many problems with it, but it stopped working since I've been down here. And it's rather distressing to have changes piling up on top of each other so you can't tell when you changed what. I'm the kind of person who likes to commit early and commit often. I've been playing with Mercurial via the command line since I couldn't get the integration working for Eclipse. So far things have been working out pretty well.

Earlier this week I broke the rules and downloaded a bunch of podcasts that had been queuing up back home. I hadn't gotten any new podcasts since I left because they are sticklers about bandwith and downloading down here. They've blocked iTunes altogether because it was taking up too much bandwith. Well, I finally said enough was enough and downloaded them anyways in the middle of the night (a little 'scp -l 160' magic to prevent snooping and limit the amount of bandwith I was using). It was glorious having podcasts to listen to. I think I caught up on the Java Posse in a single shift. Since they cheered me up so much, I decided to drop them a little note thanking them for all of their hard work in keeping me entertained. And I took the time to place myself on their frappr map, so they could say they have listeners on all 7 continents. I've got another batch of podcasts on their way down as we speak. :)

I posted a few pictures from the pressure ridge trip we took the other night and my trip up Ob hill.