Back in Fairbanks

I think someone has discovered the lower latency connection. This is a graph of Internet traffic to/from the science facility in Utqiaġvik for the last 12 hours (on Thursday). This is the connection that I was working on the last couple of evenings. After the switchover, Internet browsing felt kind of like it does for the rest of the country. Bandwidth is still limited (it's still 4.8 Mbps) but latency was reduced from 700ms down to 30ms. I suspect that this graph may be pegged for the most of the summer.

On Friday morning, I heard that the first large science group of the summer arrived the previous night. I guess that getting on the Internet was a high priority for them. This will be a good test of the reliability of the connection. Terrestrial should be more reliable than satellite.

I ended up doing quite a bit of walking today between Lowe's and Fred Meyer. We picked up the new flooring for the RV on Thursday evening after the morse code class and I needed to pick up a good straight edge for trimming the floor material. Unlike the snap-together floor that we installed in the house, this stuff is cut with a utility knife and not a chop saw. The next post will probably be the flooring installation.

After walking a couple of miles in the Sidi boots, I must say that they are comfortable enough to walk in. I'm not sure I would want to use them for walking really long distances but the soles and ankles are flexible enough.