"Land of the Noon Moon"

We always hear about northern areas being the land of the midnight sun but there is a counter to that and that is these same areas are also the land of the noonday moon. In all the years I have lived in Alaska, I have never noticed the moon directly north before. Here, I am looking due north out over the Arctic Ocean at right around 1 pm, and the moon is right there. Back home, we are on a south facing slope so there isn't a clear view to the north. I guess the phrase will never catch on since it almost doesn't make much sense. I really like the color of the sky when it is really clear and, yes, the color in the picture is pretty accurate. This is about as bright as it gets during the day as there won't be another sunrise here for another 1½ months.

I have all of the radios installed on the quonset huts now but I can't reach one of them today. Ping fails and another has about 40% packet loss. I looked at the base station and one of the radios has a red light blinking. Of course, there is no documentation and the manufacturer must not believe in the value of the Internet. On another note, I have also been working with Apple Podcast Producer 2 that comes with 10.6 server and it is pretty slick software. There is a science oriented presentation here in Barrow every Saturday, I think it is called Saturday School Yard, and I thought that it would be a good idea to try and capture some of these. Tomorrows presenter agreed to be videoed so I will try out Podcast Capture (comes with OS X) with an external iSight camera just to see how it comes out. I have been testing with a number of different formats and it seems to work pretty well. I haven't been able to get Podcast Composer to open the default workflows or upload new ones. I think I must have messed up the permissions somewhere along the line. Real documentation seems a little scarce.

Didn't feel like spending much time outside today. Air temperature is -22°F and with the breeze blowing, it was something like -43°F. I originally thought of bringing my insulated coveralls but they take up a lot of room in your luggage. I scheduled a short outage this evening to swap out a couple of UPS units and that went fairly smooth except for the problem with the point to multipoint radio system. I don't know if it was related to the outage. Dinner tonight was at Osaka's again and the donburi was really good and warming. Donburi is a savory stew, in this case made from vegetables, chicken and eggs, served over rice. Nothing really fancy but they do a really good job with all their menu items.