Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Utqiaġvik, AK

I brought the Raspberry Pi DMR hotspot up to Utqiaġvik to call in on the Alaska Statewide DMR net which is every Monday evening at 7:30. I was joining in on our last road trip from where ever we happened to be. The Pi does have a WiFi dongle but I figured that it was simpler to just plug it into the wired network. The large copper bar is to allow anyone to tie into a good earth ground in case there was a need. Every lab has the ground bar circling the room. That's a lot of copper.

Just in case you ever wondered about the lack of daylight north of the Arctic Circle, this photo was taken looking due south at noon. If you use your imagination, there can see a bit more light on the horizon. It isn't as dark as other times of day but there really isn't that much light. I'm up here mostly emptying the network of no longer used devices to simplify the transition from university management to whomever the logistic support organization chooses.

Tuesday Morning - We had a warm spell last night! There was about 6" of snow on the truck this morning but since it's cold, the snow is light and fluffy. The kind that just blows off once you start moving. The weather app claims that it'll stop snowing this morning but it doesn't look like it.

This is how my morning starts up here. Coffee and whatever I had picked up for breakfast. Actually, the ramen is pretty tasty. I had picked up a box from Costco with the selling point of non-fried noodles.

And this is how the day ended, bento box 3 at Osaka’s. I was hoping to have the soft tofu soup but they were out of the soft tofu. I’m not used to these long hours. 12 hours yesterday and almost as much today. But I am getting a lot done.

The very short video below is the kimchi stew at Osaka's that I had on Sunday night. This may be my new favorite dish at the restaurant. The photo was originally taken using the "Live Photo" feature of the iPhone. It takes a bit of video before and after the shutter button is pressed. The Google Photo app will convert the Live Photo to a short video allowing it to be uploaded to YouTube.


6 comments:

  1. Dark AND cold. All its missing is spiders and snakes. That copper bar seems like overkill. What am I missing?

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    1. You aren't missing anything. That is way overkill. And they used 4 AWG to connect the bars in the lab to earth ground. Even the guys installing it couldn't figure out what the engineers were thinking.

      And no snakes in Alaska!

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  2. Ah, the food looks delish, Richard. It kinda makes up for darkness and cold. Well, at least I like to think so.

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    1. Osaka's really is a nice restaurant up here. And once they added more Korean dishes to the menu, it is easily my favorite place. And you get used to the darkness and the cold. Or at least it doesn't seem to bother me much once you get used to it.

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  3. Boy that's a lot of copper....expensive. Seems like you're working longer hours than before retirement! ;)

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    1. There’s a huge difference between working once and a while versus every day. I can easily put up with long hours once an a while. Especially if I’m trying to get a lot of stuff done. And there is (maybe) literally a ton of copper ground bars in the facility.

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