Dreary Weather

As you can see, the weather here in Barrow is rather dreary. This is the view to the west (towards town) from the Barrow Arctic Science Center a.k.a. BARC. I thought about going for some walks in the evening since it isn't too cold yet but one of the cooks in the college kitchen said that there were sixteen polar bear sightings around the NARL campus in the last month. Apparantly, these were bears that missed getting to the sea ice before it retreated from shore. I'm told that the ice edge is now several hundred miles away from Barrow.

The college used to generously share their gym with BASC but no longer since the BASC affiliated folks didn't seem to clean up after themselves a couple of times after using their facilities. Too bad. But then again, the last time I used the gym, the treadmill was still broken.

I still haven't finished working on the BARC phone system. I needed to modify the dialing plan to be a little more consistent. Yes, I could have made the change from Fairbanks but I wouldn't be able to test it. I don't want to make that kind of a change on a production system without being here. I'm not sure why but everything always seems to take extra long around here. I did get the NDT server up and running so we can measure network performance and throughput. Complaints about the network up here are common but it usually turns out to be the setup of the PC or laptop. I've read on the Internet that Mac 10.5 automatically changes your TCP window size for the speed and latency of the connection but Windows still needs manual optimization. At least for now. We now have a way of testing the performance of the network using a set of standardized tools.