my little corner...

So long, 2007, it was nice knowin' ya...

2007-12-31T19:12:40Z

Wow, hard to believe the year is almost over. As usual it's been too long since my last update. So much going on and blogging falls to the bottom of the pile. Probably for good reason.

]]> It's been an interesting, exciting year. It's been so good to be living back at home in Canada, as much as I enjoyed Qatar. Working for JASCO has turned out quite well so far.

Since the last entry I've finally returned home from AK for good (this year). Work has been busy analyzing the data from this summer. I've joined the winter league of the local ultimate league. Went to Ontario for Christmas (relaxing) went skiing for the first time this season (icy, but earlier than last year) and booked a winter vacation out west (drive through the Rockies with lots of skiing along the way!).

Plans for the new year include finishing the last chapter of my long-overdue M.Eng. thesis, organizing the house, and doing some long term financial planning. I'm also looking forward to doing more minor home improvements and projects.

Back in Alaska

2007-10-09T02:25:02Z

I finally finished in Prudhoe Bay/Deadhorse, and got home in time for my birthday. It was a great birthday. I had a couple of nice meals out with Krista and Kendra, and Krista got me such thoughtful gifts. The next day, however I found out I was likely headed back up north. It took a few days to finalize, but I've now been in Dutch Harbor for nearly 4 days while the ship gets repaired and resupplied. Hopefully we'll be able to get our work done quickly and get back, since weather in the Bering and Chukchi seas this time of year is crappy at best. I've got some pics on facebook, and the ship has fairly good internet access so hopefully I'll be able to stay in touch with home by email and post updates from time to time.

Save some turkey, Krista, and we'll have another thanksgiving in a few weeks time.

Sept 21

2007-09-21T22:45:00Z

I've been in Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay for two weeks now. When I got here it was 15 and sunny. Now on the last day of summer it's snowing. Yes, snow. And I get to go back on the water one more time this afternoon. Pics on facebook shortly...

Pictures

2007-09-14T06:43:57Z

For those who hadn't noticed, I'm putting pictures on facebook these days. Look me up there for current pictures of the Alaska trip and other things...

Holding in Prudhoe

2007-09-12T20:38:23Z

I'm back in northern Alaska, and there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that some bad weather delayed the crew transfer boat we need to get out to the vessel we're deploying from. The good news is that other permit and regulatory things that may have delayed us farther are looking to be all straightened out. The rest of our team arrives today, we stay one more day here in Prudhoe, and tomorrow we should be able to get started. That all means that I could still be back at home nearly on time, sometime around next weekend.

Prudhoe Bound

2007-09-09T22:15:04Z

It's confirmed. I'm on my way back to Alaska. Less than 2 weeks this time, hopefully. 9:15 tomorrow I head via Newark and Minneapolis to Anchorage, overnight, then to Prudhoe Bay/Deadhorse where I board the research vessel and head out for 2-3 days work at sea, then back on shore with 5 days to write a report.

For the first time, I'll be in the Artic at night. The weather is still reasonably nice, highs in the low teens, overnight lows down to low single digits. Different part of the North Slope this time, and I'll be flying in and out, instead of long transits by sea. Hopefully I'll post some night pictures in a week or two.

Another brief life update

2007-09-09T00:07:45Z

I really have to streamline my process for adding entries to this site. I don't think I'm any more busy now than I've ever been, but lately it seems so hard to find time to log in, write, add links, upload pictures.

I've got tons of pictures that I want to add. If last year in Qatar wasn't enough, this year has had plenty of excitement. A month at sea above the arctic circle. Hiking the Long Range traverse in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. An excellent family vacation in St. John's.

I'm probably heading back to Alaska on Monday, which puts my time this weekend especially at a premium. Not to mention that I have to focus on finishing my thesis, since I'm already into overtime as far as university regulations about extensions are concerned.

Speaking of the thesis, I'm seriously into writing now. Making good progress, except today my laptop decided to start having mysterious hardware issues. Like not POSTing for 5 minutes and really freaking me out. I managed to get it to boot, and I immediately copied all of my data onto an external HD. Gotta learn to keep those backups current.

In other news, Krista started a vegetable garden in the backyard this year, and it's going really well. We had our first peas and zucchini today, with some grilled shark steaks. Yum. Krista's working late tonight so while I'm giving the laptop some TLC I'm at the office listening to The Final Countdown. Yeah, life is good.

Commuting

2007-07-06T16:59:32Z

I kept meaning to write an entry about how I have realized in the first 6 months of being back working in Halifax that I never want to have to drive a car to work again. I started riding the bus and found it extremely convenient, not to mention relaxing to be able to read, nap, chat with Krista, daydream, and generally not car about bumper to bumper traffic on the bridge across the harbor. Then last month HRM had bike week, and gave free passage on the ferry for cyclists. I took my bike to work a few times and realized that 1) it is really easy to ride to work (as long as you are careful in a few busy traffic spots) and 2) a cyclist can get downtown faster than a car in rush hour, by a wide margin. In fact, from home to work, there is only one small section where any car can catch up an pass me on my bike, and I've gotten so far ahead everywhere else that in the end I still get to work far faster than the cars passing my house at the same time I leave.

So, either I get to relax, or get some exercise, and either way I get to work cheaper, just as fast and with less frustration with traffic and parking. The point was driven home (pardon the pun) last month when I had to drive my car to work a few times. Each time I did I repeatedly told myself how glad I was that I didn't have to do it everyday. Of course, a big part in making this possible is where you choose to live. With increasing concern about global warming, energy efficient and environmental responsibility, I think that many of us need to think carefully about where we buy houses, how we commute, and how we grow cities, but that's a whole other rant.

Anyway, that was the entry I meant to write, but now Commuting has a different meaning. I'm sitting at the airport Best Western in Anchorage, AK, waiting to go to Seward to meet the MV Norseman II. I'm heading to sea for about a month to start a major research project on whales up in the Chuchki Sea. Yeah, scary and cool at the same time. I'll post some GPS coordinates later, but for now, get yerself to Google Earth and find out where those things are. Ain't it cool?

Spring cleaning and summer plans

2007-06-03T21:16:48Z

Just in time for summer, we have finally finished our spring cleaning. A few weeks ago we tackled the wreck that was the basement, and ended up putting most of the junk into the garage. Yesterday we finally had a yard sale and cleaned up the garage. It's so nice to feel like the house is more in order.

Work is good. Starting to get real busy. For a while it looked like I was going to Sakhalin Island in eastern Russia for 3 weeks in the wilderness monitoring the noise of offshore oil&gas work, but due to bureaucratic stuff beyond our control it now seems I won't be able to make that trip. I'm a little disappointed since it seemed like an interesting trip and the timing was great. Instead, I'm likely to be going to Alaska in July to go to sea for a month or so, deploying submerged instruments in the high arctic. Also interesting, although it may mean some slight changes to vacation plans.

Krista, Kendra and I still hope to get to Newfoundland for a week or two in August. The dates are still flexible, because of the Alaska work trip.

mater

2007-05-16T21:40:03Z

I finally bit the bullet and installed WinXP on my old Win98 desktop that's serving as Kendra's MSN and Facebook computer. While I was at it I also dug out the old 233Mhz PentiumMMX machine in the basement to set it up as a samba server for the house. My idea is to put all of our music into one large library on the server so that we don't each have duplicate copies of songs on several user accounts on the desktop and laptop Windows boxes. It will take me a while to figure out the best way to do that, but step one was to put linux on the old machine to become the server.

Since Ubuntu just released a new version I thought it would be a good opportunity to try it out. I downloaded the alternate install CD since I won't bother trying to run anything graphical on that old machine. The alternate CD has the option for a command-line only installation, which I assume will be reasonably slim for a modern linux distribution.

I have to admit, the WinXP install wasn't as complicated as older win installs I've done, but I still had quite a few reboot cycles getting the OS up to the latest security patches, installing drivers for the webcam, onboard audio, TV tuner card, not to mention manually installing just the basic applications: MSN messenger, Open Office, Firefox, Gimp Thunderbird.

In contrast, the hardest thing about the linux install was choosing the computer's name. Thus, mater was born.

Once the system was up and running, I had to read up a little on the net to refamiliarize myself with the locations of the configuration files for a command-line only system, but most of the services I wanted were already installed. The couple of things that weren't installed by default in the minimal setup I chose were easily installed by "apt-get install smbclient". That's it. No thinking, no searching the net. It all just works.

To test the system I tried tunnelling SMB over SSH to mount a share on my WinXP64 system at work. The hardest thing about that was setting up PuTTY, Windows Firewall and a loopback network interface on the windows end. The linux side, again, just worked. I now have encrypted access my server at home as a normal windows share on my office PC, even though both ends are behind firewalls. Yay for samba and linux.

Test

2007-05-15T15:49:20Z

Pillar
Box

Peggy's Cove

2007-01-11T04:32:57Z

Here's a little fun Krista, Kendra and I had this past Sunday. It was a beautiful sunny day, but it had been really windy Saturday night, so we went to Peggy's Cove to watch the waves and have some gingerbread at the restaurant by the lighthouse. The sun made the ocean look so bright, and the wind was blowing perpendicular to the direction of the swells, so the spray was blown away from us and we got to watch some pretty spectacular surf.

Oh, and yes- I'm back in Halifax indefinitely. While I enjoyed Qatar, I just took an exciting new job at JASCO Research, a small acoustic consulting company in Halifax. More on that in another post...

Pictures from Hong Kong

2006-11-16T20:29:01Z

Here, finally, are pictures from my trip to Hong Kong.

News (or lack of)

2006-11-15T07:48:31Z

Two interesting notes:

First, today at 3pm local time (the local time zone is 3 hrs ahead of UTC, so 6pm UTC) Al Jazeera's English-language global news channel Al Jazeera International goes on-air.

Second, a US newspaper has this story about a leaked internal memo from Fox news showing their obvious political bias.

The two may seem unrelated, but I have to say that when I leave Qatar for good and move back to Canada, I hope I'll be able to get Al Jazeera International on cable or satellite. I personally know journalists and other folks who work there, and right now I have high expectations that this new competitor to CNNi and BBC World will cover major news stories with a much more global perspective, and probably with less bias than the western news outlets. To me the leaked Fox memo symbolizes the decline of journalistic integrity in North America, and I fear for the future of the US (and to some extent Canada as well) if our news organizations continue to slide into ineptitude.

Not that I watch the news much anyway...

Ed: two quick corrections. Apparently a news release yesterday indicated the name has been changed to Al Jazeera English. Also, I did the math wrong and the launch is noon in UTC or 6AM EDT (still 3pm locally here in Doha).

Insight in Afghanistan

2006-11-15T07:09:24Z

Here is a fascinating video of a speech given in late 2005 by an AP reporter who has lived 18 years in Afghanistan that goes beyond the black/white Taliban/Majihadeen simplistic portrayals in western media. Highly worth an hour of your time if you have any strong opinions on world matters.