Monday, June 3, 2013

Spring in Barrow?

On Saturday morning, I headed north to Barrow for the week. Since I happened to get a window seat with a view of a very bright sun, I played with iPhone camera apps trying to get a reasonable picture. I was surprised that this actually came out as it was too bright to even look out the window.

Just in the couple of days I've been here, the weather here has varied all over the place from warm (40°F-ish) and sunny to freezing rain and snow. I must admit that the snow kind of surprised me but one of the locals mentioned that having snowball fights in July isn't unheard of. The sea ice is still in but there are a lot of melt ponds near the beach.

I had one of my old servers finally bit the dust last week and it took a bit of TLC to get it resurrected again. It was providing the dhcp service to the local networks as well as collecting network flow data. I may be the only one that finds any value in the flow data. Plus a bunch of other tasks around here that can't really be assigned to the tech working up here for the summer.

This is the current view from the BARC. The small, frozen puddles in the tundra were melted last night and frozen this morning. BTW, there is no sunrise or sunset listed for Barrow at this time of the year. Kind of nice to be able to go for a walk at 10pm and have the sun up as high in the sky as the middle of the afternoon. If it clears up, I'll post some pictures of the sea ice as it looks pretty colorful in the sunshine.

9 comments:

  1. If this is how spring and summer is supposed to look like... no thanks ;-) I rather get along with the rain over here.

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    1. Sonja:

      this would be the perfect place to live if you wanted to ride your snow mobile all year round

      bob
      Riding the Wet Coast

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    2. Not enough snow to ride a snow machine and it would be too dangerous to go out on the ice. There are plenty of places in the world much further north (or south) where you would be able to ride snow machines year around. Assuming that's what you'd want to do. Eventually, all of the ice will be melted but it may be Fall by then...

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  2. I actually know plenty of people who would be happy with that weather all year long. I'm not one of them.

    It was surprisingly light here at 9:30 last night. I love that.

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    1. That is one of the nicest things about this time of year, all of the daylight. It drives some people crazy though the same could be said of the darkness in the winter. Maybe it's the same people...

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  3. Isn't it interesting how some of the things you do and information you collect that help you to tune the system are beneficial ONLY to you? And then when you no longer do that job, no one else understands it and will never perform it as efficiently. Sigh.

    Yep, the weather is all over the place! But that is what makes it exciting! :)

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    1. It's mostly network info such as what connected to where and transferred how much. I summarize and anonymize the data for the funding agency as part of the contract. So there are those that are interested in the data just not the details.

      The weather is all over the place. It was snowing again this morning but was sunny last night.

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  4. That first picture turned out really well for not being able to see. Nicely done iPhone.

    I can do without freezing rain. I have having to chip away at a vehicle before I can get the door open.

    It would be odd to have no sunrise or sunset but nifty to go for a walk at all hours.

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    1. Couldn't see much out the window due to the bright sun. I just held the iPhone onto the window and used the ProHDR app to see how it would deal with the bright sun. Not too bad...

      The freezing rain is worse than the snow. At least with the snow, everything is still dry. And no sunset is actually pretty nice especially if you aren't constrained by time. Unfortunately, most of us have jobs that expect you to be there during certain hours.

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