Observation Hill

Two posts in one night! After dinner Gavin and I conquered Observation Hill. It's a pretty stiff climb, especially with the wind and such but it was good to get out and break a sweat. I took a couple of nice pictures; I guess the light is good at 3AM in the morning. I also marked up a 'pictorial representation of my life at McMurdo':

Frosty Boy Returns!

It's funny how people seem to fixate on the littlest things down here, and also quickly I find myself fixating on them as well. Take Frosty Boy for example. Frosty Boy is the soft serve ice cream machine that they have in the Galley. Frosty Boy has been gone for most of the week with a sign on the machine saying he'd be back on Tuesday. So every night at midrats, the conversation inevitably turned to Frosty Boy and wondering how he was and whether was really going to be back on Tuesday. Being on night shift and not eating during the day, I didn't get a chance to have some Frosty Boy, so imagine my disappointment when I walked into midrats and Frosty Boy's door was closed. At the table, no one could figure out why there was no Frosty Boy. But none of us could remember whether he was open for midrats, so Tom and I decided to ask the rather imposing chef about Frosty Boy's whereabouts and whether he was generally open for midrats. The chef said that there was no product for the machine and that it would be a couple of days. We were awfully disappointed but they had a nice German chocolate cake for dessert so we were willing to make do.

Fast forward to about 30 minutes into dinner. A fireman got up, walked over to Frosty Boy, opened the door, and helped himself to a bowl. All eyes nervously turned to the kitchen just waiting for the big chef to come out and brawl with the fireman. The chef came but didn't stop the fireman. So after the briefest moment of hesitation, half the room got up and got in line for Frosty Boy. He was back! I thought I could hold out, since I'd already had a piece of cake but when we started speculating at how long Frosty Boy would last, I had to give in and have a bowl:

Night Shift Life

Things have been pretty slow going the last couple of nights. We haven't had enough core to fill the whole shift but I've been staying awake the whole night to keep up the schedule. With my free time, I've been doing various things. One of those things has been adding new features to PSICAT. Today I finally tracked down how to do Eclipse update site mirrors. This is an important thing because we've got a bunch of people down here using PSICAT but there is very limited bandwith, so I don't want everyone having to download from the main PSICAT update site in Ames. So I finally tracked down how to specify mirror sites (and when I say 'tracked down' it wasn't that hard to figure out, I just hadn't looked previously). A couple of lines in an XML file later and we had a McMurdo-based mirror site.

Adjusting to the night shift hasn't been too bad since the first day or so. I think I'm actually sleeping more during the day than I had been during the nights. Yesterday I got into the gym before my shift started and I'm going to try to make that a regular occurrence. I also did some laundry yesterday, so I should be good for another week.

The night shift is much different than the day shift. There is hardly anyone in Crary Lab, which is nice because we have the run of the place but it also sucks because they turn the heat down/off and it gets pretty chilly. Tonight Kelly and I hung out in the freezer and watched movies on my laptop because it is the warmest room in the building (it sounds odd that a freezer in Antarctica would be warm, but it is the best insulated room in the building). They have a special meal for the night shifters in the Galley at midnight (called midrats for midnight rations). So far our nights are filled with waiting for meals to begin, but I'm sure once the core starts really flowing in we'll look back on these free nights fondly.

Coming up soon, I think I might post a blog entry about everyday life here in Antarctica. Here's a teaser: "work is the stuff that fills the time between meals".

First Core

Above is a picture of the sedimentology team logging the first gravity and push cores we got in. It was exciting to actually be in there and watching them work. Overall, I think the logging process went well. It took them a little time to figure out the logging flow and who was going to do what, so the first cores took longer to describe than the last ones.

Overall, I think PSICAT performed well. There were a few minor bugs and some feature enhancements requests. While they were working, I was fixingthe bugs and adding the new features. When they had a little down time between cores, I updated PSICAT. It seemed to work out well and there were fewer issues as the night went on.

Tonight, instead of sitting in with them and hovering around, I'm going to let them fly solo and see how it works. Hopefully they won't run into any major problems and I can get a bit more work done.

Adjusting to the night shift is touch and go. This morning I was pretty grumpy when 10AM rolled around. I think it was mainly because I was tired, stressed out, and have been working too many long days. It's tough, too, when the day shift folks are coming on all rested as you're ready to go to bed and expect you to fix all of their problems on their time. I guess I'll have to tell that 11AM isn't a good time for me but if they'd like to swing by the lab at around 3AM, I'd be happy to tackle their problems :)

Night shift

We'll be logging core tonight. It's amazing how quickly the situation can change. We had been hearing that we'd be getting core on Saturday night so we'd officially start logging core Sunday night, but Ross came and found me a couple hours ago and told me that they'd made quite a bit of progress at the drill site and to plan on starting a couple days early.

On one hand, it's kind of a bummer to be starting the night shift tonight because ANDRILL is hosting a little "Thank You" shindig in our dorm to thank all of the wonderful support people that have been working so hard to make sure we have what we need to be successful. So I'll probably sleep through the beginning of it and be heading out to work as it gets into full swing. And tomorrow they have the big station-wide Halloween party, though hopefully we'll be able to sneak away and check out the costumes The other bummer about starting early is that it gives us only about a day to completely flip flop our awake and sleep schedules. I opted to just stay up last night, so I'm just passing the 24 hours awake mark on 5 hours of sleep the previous night.

On the other hand, I'm really excited to actually have core to log and to finally put PSICAT through its paces. And overall, it's just good to be finally settling into a routine; I know everyone around here has been anticipating the first core. We'll see if they're just as excited when we're 800m into the hole :)

I also had a delightful dinner over at Scott Base (the Kiwi base over the hill). They invite 12 ANDRILL folks over every Thursday to have dinner and do a tour. Their food is much better than here because they are cooking for fewer people. I think they generally run about 1/10th as many people as are at McMurdo. I'd heard good things about the food and I wasn't disappointed. And the best part--they served it with a Speights. After dinner I played a few games of pool with Julian in the bar and had a beer or two before heading back to begin my long night of staying awake.

Staying awake was easier than I expected it to be. The Galley opens up at midnight for the night shift folks to come in and have some lunch. The food perked me up and got me through the toughest part of the night. Around 3AM, everyone else had left so I cranked up some tunes and did some coding on PSICAT. Around 6, John showed up and we went for some breakfast. I still need to figure out when I'm going to fit the gym into my schedule. I'm thinking I'll get up around 7PM and hit the gym before my shift starts. But we'll see how well that works out.

I promised a picture of the computers, so here goes. Hopefully I'll get some good pictures of the sedimentologists in action using PSICAT and Corelyzer with the core laid out on the tables.

SSDD

Not too much to report on here. I've been working through some system administration issues which I think I finally got sorted out. And I've even found some time to implement some new features in PSICAT. I added the ability to add depth-registered images. It's functionally complete but I need to add a few niceties. I also implemented a clast column which was requested a couple days ago. All in all some pretty standard coding but it sure feels good to be doing it.

Besides work, I haven't been doing too much besides having a few beers in the lounge before bed. I work from 7ish in the morning to 9, 10, or 11ish at night. I take time to eat lunch and supper but it makes for long days. It looks like I'll be switching to the night shift on Sunday night. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to do that. Perhaps if I get all of my preparations done tomorrow and Friday, I can take the weekend to try and adjust to the new schedule. Once we get started on the shift work, things will settle down and perhaps I'll have time to hit the gym. :)

The station Halloween party is on Saturday. I'm guessing that it'll be a pretty big thing, since there's not much to do down here besides drink. And most of the Raytheon folks have Sundays off. I haven't thought of a costume yet. Actually I've thought of a couple ideas but most of them are not appropriate. ;) Someone suggested that since I've got a beard going, I should paint my face green and go as a kiwi fruit.

Well I should probably get back to doing something productive. Hope everything in the outside world is going well for everyone. Tomorrow I'm going to try to post a picture or two of the computer setup we've got down here.

The Dog's Breakfast

Today was a much better day; I actually feel like I made some forward progress. I never did find my access card, but I was able to get a new one without any big fuss. We had our usual morning meetings. The administrative meeting was business as usual. At the whole group meeting, Tim got up and explained some of the science behind why we are drilling where we are and what they are expecting to find. It was really interesting. He's a good speaker and even though there was some pretty heavy science mixed in there, I wasn't completely lost. I also learned a new phrase: "the dog's breakfast". Both Tim and Gavin busted it out while talking. The Kiwis sure do have some interesting sayings.

After the meetings, I spent most of the day getting some issues from yesterday sorted. Since that was all non-coding work, I decided to reward myself with a few hours of coding after dinner. We're expecting to begin logging later this week so I'm updating a few things on PSICAT. I'm working on a clast plugin that should allow the sedimentologists to describe the major clasts in the core. I also have a few small UI and workflow optimizations to make things easier on the scientists.

One of the things I still have to get set up and working is a central Subversion repository for PSICAT data. PSICAT has the ability to store and retrieve its data from Subversion. This is going to be a really awesome feature for ANDRILL because they have a large contingent of scientists scattered all around the world. They will be able to access the core logs much sooner that they have been able to on previous projects. Previously they would have had to wait until the expedition was over and everyone came back from the ice. Not this time, though. They'll be able to pull up the data as soon as it is committed. And assuming that the logging team commits their changes every night, the people back in the States will actually have a negative delay because the core would have been logged on a Monday in Antarctica but be available on a Sunday in the States. :) All joking aside, I think the Subversion is a smart move because not only will it allow them to disseminate data, it will also allow for tracking changes and add a bit of accountability.

Well I had better get to actually working on PSICAT instead of just talking about all the cool things it can do :) Cheers.