Out on the BEO

Another walk out on the tundra. I needed to replace an antenna on a tower out at the BEO Control Shed and, since I didn't care to climb the tower, I needed to wait until a certain support staff had some time available. It was a wonderful walk out with just enough breeze to keep the mosquitos near the ground. The ground is starting to dry out and the temperature was around 53°F. Pretty close to a perfect day to walk out on the tundra.

Still not too many flowers but these were easily the largest and most colorful that I saw. The Control Shed is only a bit over a mile out from the road but it's still a challenge to walk on the plastic walkway. I feel like I need to really watch where I'm stepping to avoid slipping.

The wide open spaces really remind me of other places that I've visited. Such as Montana or west Texas. But most areas have a lot more vegetation. I took these pictures on Friday when I walked out but today, Saturday, I'm writing this post from the Control Shed partly to check out the network. I was helping a project set up a point to multipoint wireless network that should be more reliable than what they were using in the past. The new one is using Ubiquity 2.4 GHz radios.

It's not quite as warm today (Saturday) as it was yesterday but there is a nice breeze to keep the mosquitos at bay. But still it's hard to complain about 50°F and sunny.

San Francisco (part 3)

This evening, I had dinner with some colleagues at an Italian restaurant on the other side of Chinatown. They had a delicious mushroom risotto. Like I've said before, I don't think there is bad food anywhere in San Francisco. It did make for a long walk back to the motel but did get me to Union Square and Powell Street. This is the area where I have stayed in the past and it is very busy and touristy with lots of expensive stores selling things that no one really needs. I did end up stopping at the Apple store as my iPhone had zoomed the screen and I didn't know how to turn it off. In case it happens again, the solution is triple tap with 3 fingers to bring up a zoom menu assuming that the zoom feature is turned on within accessibility.

With all of the walking around today at Moscone West, going to the Whole Foods store for breakfast and lunch, and through Chinatown for dinner, it added up to a lot of steps. I hadn't walked this far in a while. This screen is from the pedometer app on the iPhone. That's almost enough walking to offset dinner. I had gone by the Piston & Chain storefront but there was some sort of private party going on by the time I had gotten there so I didn't stop.

There were several UAV vendors showing off their wares as well as quite a few presentations and posters where they have been used to collect data. I gather that there are some real challenges to using UAVs to collect data but in many cases the lower cost still make it pretty attractive option. I found this model interesting as it has 4 electric motors for vertical lift and a twin cylinder gas engine for flying. The gas engine gives it a lot of time in the air and a large payload but still retains the important benefit of vertical take off and landing. Pretty slick. 

Endless Sunshine?

Yesterday morning was the Heart Walk. There were about 3,000 participants for the three mile walk to raise money for the American Heart Association. Even though the weather initially looked ominous, it turned out pretty nice. I was part of the UAF/Fire Dept team and UAF was "competing" with the hospital. I think the hospital had more participants though the university raised more money. So I think everyone won.

This morning, I headed north to Barrow and just noticed that as of May 11th, no more sunsets for a while i.e. 24 hours of sun above the horizon. Of course this didn't mean that things are warm and green. It was snowing when the plane landed in both Prudhoe Bay and Barrow. I've showed this graphic before. The orange line shows the path of the sun including its elevation relative to the horizon. The edge of the yellow circle is the horizon with zenith in the center and the local time along the orange line.

Here is a shot from the front porch of my hut. It is definitely "mud season" up here. There are still large piles of snow, the ocean is still frozen, and the roads have so many potholes that all you can do is try and minimize the number and try and avoid the ones that threaten to swallow the wheel. In this picture, you can get a good look at the overhead utilidor since there are no buried utilities. And I don't think that I've seen the sun since arriving in Barrow.

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Riding Withdrawal?

Just as you would expect, broken bike brings wonderful riding weather. Since I've been back from Barrow, it has been between -10°F and +28°F just about everyday. So warm that I expected to see Cheyenne taking Conchscooter for a walk among the palm trees that seem to be sprouting up everywhere.

This morning, I was looking for some other locations for sunrise photos plus I really wasn't feeling too good so I went for a walk. And wanted to post something other than a torn down bike. This is looking southeast from the lookout between upper and lower campus. And this photo is using the built in HDR setting in the standard photo app. Much more subtle than the ProHDR app that I have used in the past.

This is from the middle of the long metal staircase which drops you from the hill the campus sits on back to the less lofty area of town. I went down to College Coffeehouse after stopping for a meeting on lower campus and talked a bit with George Rahn, the local airhead guru. He mentioned that based on his experience the life expectancy of the rotor is around 80k miles so the failure wasn't unusual or unexpected. He did add that  maybe the larger battery might have accelerated the failure since full output was required for longer periods of time. But that would be speculation. On long trips many airhead riders carry a spare rotor. He has never installed one of the Enduralast systems but has heard a lot about them and is curious to hear of my experience with it. He also mentioned that he probably had a replacement rotor in his inventory of spare parts but it would be at BMW prices.

I think that maybe the walk has done some good as I'm feeling a little better. 12,049 steps after lunch. Hopefully the alternator will arrive in today's mail as I seem to be going through some sort of withdrawal after not riding for the last eleven days. I don't remember this ever happening in previous years or maybe it did but I didn't recognize it as such. There's hope as the USPS tracking site claims "Out for delivery" but around here that doesn't mean much.

As far as the photo, I really like the frosty look the trees along the roads. I think they pick up a lot of frost from the water vapor in vehicle exhaust. 

A Nice Walk on the BEO

I've been procrastinating for the last couple of days to go out to the BEO (Barrow Environmental Observatory) control shed to resolve some networking issues. This morning, after an early morning freezing rain, I borrowed a truck from another project and headed out. I had tried going out last Thursday but after riding the quad to the turnout, it was really too cold and windy. After the rain, much of the ice on the surface had melted.

It is only about 1¼ mile walk from the turnout and is a combination of wooden walkways and plastic grid through the really swampy areas. On Thursday, the plastic grid was solid ice. Not so right now. The power line was a NSF infrastructure project that ended up costing a small fortune since there is only one customer along the entire path.

There was a lot of small birds nesting in the area and this is an area set aside by the native corporation for arctic research. This morning, it was just a little bit above freezing but at least it wasn't raining. At least not yet.

This is the control shed. The tower behind the small building has a variety of antennae to support a variety of point-to-point wireless networks to the different projects. I was looking into a connectivity problem with a web cam and a single board computer installed on another tower. Another project set up a Windows 8 computer and it needed both a public and private IP address on the same LAN segment. Windows 8 is a real pain to deal with. It may be the new and shiny thing but it is difficult to use if you are at all familiar with Windows.

I was able to get all the problems resolved and there were a number of researchers out there as well as a bear guard with his 12 gauge. When you have researchers working in the field, they generally tend to look at the ground and not always paying attention to their surroundings. Which is the reason for the bear guard. His job is to pay attention to the surroundings. It started to drizzle on the way back to the truck but fortunately, it didn't last for long.

It turned out to be a pretty nice walk. I'll end with a picture I took last night pretty close to midnight. This is looking to the north and the sun is pretty high in the sky. What looks like hills on the horizon are pressure ridges out on the ice.

Blog Post 750

I was originally asked to start this blog by our public relations group in 2004 as a place to log my walks around campus. They were attempting to get staff more interested in getting some sort of exercise and walking is a great place to start. Originally, it was on a University of Alaska host then they asked everyone to move off to some other provider such as Blogger. People complained that it was an inappropriate use of university resources. Out of all of those that started back then, this may be the only one still around though I don't mention walking or exercise very often though it is still an important part of my life.

Yesterday, it was above freezing and the mess known as breakup has begun. This morning, the rivers flowing through the parking lots have re-solidified and I am again reminded that my rig doesn't have reverse while pulling it into the parking slot while trying to keep my own footing. I was originally considering removing the tire studs a few days ago but installed a fresh batch on the rear instead. Now I'm glad that I did.

Having the hard pack removed has done wonders for our driveway. Now I don't really have to worry whether our front wheel drive Prius will be able to get out once we remove the studded snow tires. The traction control cannot be turned off on this car so if a wheel starts to spin, forward motion comes to a complete stop. Toyota claims that it's that way "for your safety".

You can see how much snow has melted as the snow on this hill was few feet thick only last week. The clear sidewalks are a lot easier to walk on. You don't have to pay much attention to where you place your next step. On the exercise front, I still have managed to continue walking almost every day with a goal of 15 hours per week. I am part of a virtual team here on campus and, as a group, have managed to average just under 14 hours per week. Sunrise is now before 6am and sunset is almost 10pm. Lots of opportunity to get out and do something.

My new challenge with the sidecar rig is to figure out a way to put on the external steering damper. Even with the stock friction damper turned up all the way, there is an instability at about 10mph where the bars want to swing back and forth. I originally attributed it to snow and ice on the road but it is more pronounced with clear, dry pavement. There is a some vibration at speed (over 60mph) with the fairing and windshield. I can't feel it at all through the handlebars. This morning, I stood up on the pegs and looked over the windshield at the front wheel and there was no shaking evident. With the one lower fairing removed for the front sidecar mount, the fairing is less solidly mounted than originally designed. Maybe I will try and remount the lower to see it that resolves the vibration. All this means is that I need to drill a large hole in the upper part of the lower fairing for the front upper sidecar strut to attach. This is one of those measure twice, cut once. Or maybe measure more than twice...

Out For a Walk

It really turned out to be a beautiful day and after dinner, I took a couple of loops around the NARL campus to enjoy the lack of wind. It was still only 1°F but without the wind, it was very pleasant. These pictures were taken at about 8:00PM which is still a couple of hours before sunset and many hours before it's actually dark. This is the location of a geocache which sees pretty good traffic. I dropped something off and picked something up.

The wind blown snow really sticks to things and I kind of like the way it looks. This is how utilities are run if you can't bury things into the ground and I believe that it is still used for natural gas lines. These overhead "tracks" run all over the NARL campus and seem to start at what I think was the former power plant when this place was first built back in the mid-40's. I really enjoy walking around this place with all of the rusted steel and frost covered paint.

I had to put in at least one ocean view though it isn't quite the same as where the water isn't solid. It's still nice in its own special way. I did manage to get in a nice five mile walk all the while looking out for polar bear. This morning, there was a polar bear alert as a one was spotted just a short distance from NARL on the ice. By 8:30am, the guards said that it looked like they were headed back out onto the ice away from town.

I now have about 95% of what I had intended to do on this visit done and looking forward to doing a training session for a couple of staff members on the use of the AV system tomorrow morning. Then I will be receiving training on the keyless entry system that has been in place since the building was constructed but has never worked. 

Small Victory

The sunny, Spring weather continued on for the remainder of last week but this morning, Winter seems to have returned with below 0°F temperatures returning. Not that it really matters to me as I'm sitting in the airport again heading north  for the week with quite a list of things to take care of. Since some of the tasks involve being outside for a while, I even dragged out my cold weather gear. Carhartt coveralls and bunny boots. I tried on the coveralls to see if they fit and this may be a small victory, as the coveralls are probably about 20 years old and I sort of outgrew them a while back. Now, maybe due to all the walking, they fit again! I was wondering if they would be suitable for when driving the sidecar. Since they aren't motorcycle gear, it obviously wouldn't have any armor but the probability of hitting the ground may be lower now with the third wheel. Just a thought...

Bitterly Cold

According to the National Weather Service, this how they describe interior Alaska. It is almost sunrise this morning when I walked out to get some coffee around 10am. The ice fog is has been pretty bad for the last couple of days and being anywhere in town has been unhealthy according to the EPA. The university is only a little above the valley floor but it is sufficient to get above the ice fog. According to the SMS messages from the police, there have been multiple accidents due to the low visibility.

The temperature is still pretty cold but we are fortunate that there is no wind to make it feel even colder. I have still been able to get out for some short walks. I've been trying out another iPhone app that uses the accelerometer and GPS in a way that tracks your movement without rapidly draining the battery. It seems to be working pretty well and my battery has been lasting most of the day. According to the app, I'm still managing 10k steps per day. I was thinking of trying out the FitBit activity tracker but this seems to work. Now if there was someway to upload the data.

Is it Spring Yet?

I didn't get out to the garage and do anything with the bike due to the cold weather. The garage door was accidentally left open yesterday for about 15 minutes and that was sufficient to shut down the garage heater. I needed to warm it up a bit using a very old, forced air, kerosene heater. But it does put out a lot of heat (and a lot of fumes) and had the interior heated up to about 50°F in about 30 minutes. Eventually, the water from the boiler started running again and the blower kicked back on. It is barely able to keep up at these temperatures.

The dog seems to be watching the sunset last night or else looking for moose. Initially, the cat was sitting there as well staring out the window but as soon as I took out my phone to take a photo, the cat lost interest. There is evidence that a couple of moose have been bedding down in the side yard next to the dog run.

A short update on the ChromeBook. I'm still using it almost exclusively. As you may notice, I started this post on the iPad using Blogsy as it's the easiest way to get pictures taken with my iPhone into a blog post. They nout sync with iCloud and within minutes after taking a picture on the phone, it is available on the iPad or just about any other Apple device. I haven't figured out a good way to access the pictures on the ChromeBook. The only other time I had to break out the laptop was to edit a locked MS Word document. Google Apps could read the document but I couldn't enter text into the fields. For what they were trying to do, a PDF form would be a better choice.

The new tire levers came in from Amazon today. With these, I shouldn't have a problem with enough leverage. They are made by a company called Ken-Tool. I included the pen in the photo as a size comparison.

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Winter Solstice

Temperatures are still down in the -45°F range and the ice fog is getting even worse than it was on Monday. But it does make for some spectacular sunsets. This iPhone pano was taken through the window from my office building at abut 2:30 Thursday afternoon. I must admit that I haven't gotten tired of the view though a little warmer would be fine. I have been using the borough bus as often as possible for my commute as I end up walking outside a minimum of 3¾ miles per day.

Things didn't look that much better this morning with the ice fog and low temperatures continuing. Today being the shortest amount of daylight is encouraging for many people but sunrise isn't until 11:00am and sunset is 2:37pm for about 3½ hours of brilliant sunshine. Still much more than Barrow where the next sunrise isn't until January 22, 2013. From now on, the days get longer, This photo shows a little red tint on the horizon already and it was taken at 8:36am while walking to get coffee. The university is located on a small hill overlooking town so it is usually above the ice fog. According to the EPA, Fairbanks is one of the smoggiest, unhealthiest places to live in the country since their sensors are all down low in the ice fog. If you are in it, it feels pretty grim. (Of course, most of the schools are in it!)

Sunrise at 11:19am. It looks like it'll be a pretty nice day as long as you aren't stuck in the fog. If you compare this with the sunset photo above, you'll notice that there aren't too many degrees difference between the position of sunrise and sunset. They're both pretty close to south.

I'm sure many of you have seen this graphic already but I really did get a kick out of it. Especially since there is no Saturday listed. But we're still around and for some, a little warmth would be appreciated.

And, no work done on the sidecar. Waiting until the welder has some free time...

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San Francisco - AGU Part 3

Today, I attended another invited talk on climate change and sea ice. Last summer in August during the unprecedented cyclonic storm (first ever recorded in the summer with 70 kt winds), he watched someone surfing in Barrow. He thought that the arrival of surfers to the north coast of Alaska to be one of the most significant indicators of global warming. There is usually no waves let alone enough for someone to surf. The image to left comes from a page with videos of minimum sea ice extent for the last 33 years. Another climatologist presented about the correlation between open water in the arctic and winter time temperatures in the continental United States. Essentially, the less sea ice, the colder the winters along the eastern seaboard and warmer in the southwest. He was comparing different simulation models which all gave similar results. So his conclusion was that global warming translates to more severe winters in the eastern U.S.

The sessions I judged this afternoon were mostly ones with a lot of computer modeling so a lot of math. But the students did very well with their presentation and the canned questions. I say canned as they usually came from the same area where they were sitting and only after no other questions were asked.

Dinner this evening was back at the Indian restaurant diagonal from the hotel. Today was butter chicken and jasmine rice with garlic naan and a salted lassi. The butter chicken was highly recommended on Yelp and I thought it was okay but not very spicy. The garlic naan wasn't as "garlicky" as the other place across the street but still very tasty. I could've took half of this home but all I took was the naan as it may make a good breakfast.

Only 28,272 steps today or about 13 miles. I feel like a slacker especially since I didn't enter the 5K fun run this morning.

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San Francisco - AGU Part 2

I finally managed to get up Powell Street to Union Square to get a photo the the Christmas tree. I always want to take pictures of the cable cars maybe because it is uniquely San Francisco more than just about anything else. I didn't have a tripod so these are just hand held photos and required a lot of post processing (I use Aperture) to adjust white balance, contrast and exposure. It was just starting to rain so I took off in search of dinner.

Today started with a brief rain shower, just enough to get things wet and slippery. There is still way too much traffic for me and the sidewalks are very crowded. I still don't see how folks can deal with this on a day to day basis. The morning was spent at poster sessions in the south hall visiting with researchers working in Barrow. I was trying to get an idea of their expectations, some understanding of their work and what they have planned for the near future. The afternoon was be spent judging a couple more student presentations as part of the OSPA (Outstanding Student Paper Award).

In an effort to include more pictures, today's dinner was at an Italian restaurant. The meal started out with a delicious beet salad followed by pasta and brussel sprouts. Yet again, another wonderful meal here in the city that is known for great food. If the food's bad, the place would never survive all the competition. I was tempted to just go back to one of the Indian restaurants but felt obligated to try some of the other places around the hotel.

AGU had a pile of free pedometers on the first day so I grabbed one as a better way of keeping track of my walking during the meeting. Using the iPhone tends to run the battery down. Today, I walked 48,752 steps which translates to about 22½ miles in 13 hours. Even for me, that's a lot of walking and I'm pretty exhausted.

Since I arrived in San Francisco, I have been using the Verizon 4G cellular data service (aka LTE) on my iPad as the wireless network in the hotel and the Moscone Center have been almost useless. As you can see in my SpeedTest screen capture, the performance is nothing short of phenomenal and they allow you to tether to my laptop without an additional fee unlike AT&T. Verizon still isn't available in Alaska until sometime next year so until then, so I'll only be able to use their service when I travel. Fortunately, Verizon lets you purchase it month to month and cancel anytime you want without penalty.

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Autumn is Over

After 5 days of light snowfall, we are back to clear and visibility unlimited which means that winter has arrived. This is the 8:30AM view to the south east as the slow transition to daylight begins. Sunrise still isn't for another 40 minutes and we are losing daylight at the rate of 6 minutes per day. I don't think that I will ever get tired of the view of the Alaska Range to the south. Mount Hayes is the highest peak near the center of the picture at 13,832 feet. Reality has finally set in and I packed away all of the bike and camping gear that was scattered around the garage so there is now room for a second car inside.

Now that winter is setting in, it seemed like the "perfect" time to shut down the boiler for some routine maintenance (that I could have easily been done last summer). We get our domestic hot water from a heat exchanger inside of the boiler and over the years it gets calcium and other inorganic minerals built up inside the copper tubing. The way you clean is is to isolate the heat exchanger from the water system with a couple of gate valves and circulate a fairly strong hydrochloric acid solution through the heat exchanger until it flows freely. The water in the boiler should be near room temperature when this is done. I had plumbed the system with the appropriate valves and hose fittings to simplify this job but it still meant that there was no heat for several hours. Fortunately, the house is fairly well insulated.

The University of Alaska pays the borough a lump sum every year to enable anyone affiliated to ride the bus just by showing their university ID card. I'm attempting to take advantage of this benefit as much as possible though it is challenging to make it to the bus stop in the morning. If I do ride the bus, it ensures that I will get at least 3.8 miles of walking (or running) in per day. 

Georgeson Botanical Gardens

 

My credit union sponsored a tour of the Georgeson Botanical Gardens on Thursday late afternoon. It is only a short walk from my office and I frequently wander through the gardens throughout the summer on my noon walks. This HDR photo near the entrance shows some of their giant cabbages intermixed with kale. These cabbages aren't very large but they frequently get up to 60 lbs. A while back, neighbor gave me a couple of 40 pounders and I made a pile of great sauerkraut.

I used to wonder if corn would grow in Fairbanks. Now I know that indeed it will. They had to warm the ground by covering it with black fabric in the spring to speed thawing plus circulate warm water through through the ground using a passive solar heat exchanger. I think that maybe this isn't a commercially viable crop for interior Alaska. Each of these square plots is some sort of project or test and all are vegetables. (no picking allowed!)

The walkways were lined with beautiful choke cherry trees many of them with little signs dedicating them to someone formerly associated with the gardens. The gardens started out as a USDA experimental farm around the turn of the last century and predates the University of Alaska. The government was wondering if Alaska would ever support a population. Of the eleven farms established, only this one in Fairbanks and the one in Palmer are still around. Both are now part of the School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences here in Fairbanks. In addition to the botanical gardens, there is cultivated crop land and domesticated animals. Right now, reindeer occupy the animal pens here in Fairbanks. Over the years I've seen cattle, hogs and goats but reindeer seem to attract more tourists.

Last summer, there was a group that wanted to learn how to build a wood pile cordwood masonary structure and the gardens were the beneficiary of their efforts. They built a small building on the grounds as part of a university summer sessions class using old telephone poles and bottles. The old telephone poles were probably a bad idea as now the interior smells like creosote so the building is only useable as a tool shed. The mortar is only on the interior and exterior walls and the space between the mortar is filled with sawdust and straw for additional insulation.

It was a great way to end the afternoon as it was unseasonably warm (70°F) and large flocks of cranes were circling the grain fields across the street on their way south.