I didn't sleep so well last night - I was having a bad case of periodic breathing, where your carbon dioxide levels are so low that your body isn't triggered to breathe until the oxygen levels drop at which point you can gasp in air quite violently - enough to wake you out of a deep sleep. I was pretty snoozy for the rest of the day as a result, but I'm sure no-one else noticed the difference!

Doug had gotten the KVM switch password off Kevin and hooray - we could log into it (after some fancy footwork with the network settings). Fred replaced the normal, flat-head screws on the back of the telescope with huge, glove-handleable screws with big wingnuts attached, to save our winterover tech Dana from having to stand up there forever with his gloves off unscrewing two dozen screws with a screwdriver whenever we need him to go into the telescope (hopefully never if we can set it all up correctly!). We also started to get a handle on the communication problems we've been having.

Once upon a time, there were two computers. Let's call them phobos and deimos. They shared an important task - taking images of the sky and storing them. They got along fine until one day, phobos insulted deimos' mother (we think this is what happened from the logs). Deimos was understandably quite upset and refused to share his important task with phobos any more. Since phobos had some critical software for handling the important task, this was a bad thing. No images. They lived unhappily ever after.

Well, until we decided to upgrade their operating systems so they'd forget all about their little spat. So we backed them up today (thanks Michael for a very detailed description of how to do this). When I was trying to think of a theme song for today, I kept singing to myself "Back me up, with your love, your love takes me higher (back me up, with your love, with your love)". I have no idea if this is a song or if these are the words to the song but google was no help. For once. God bless google.

The station store here has free DVDs for people to borrow. Free. Can you imagine that? You walk in, choose from a surprisingly large selection (two bookcases worth), take your selection to the counter, tell them the name of yourself and your DVD, then you walk out. Considering I had only brought NZ currency with me and the station only takes US currency (I misread something obviously). I took advantage of this marvellous gesture (and Doug's laptop) and watched Catch Me If You Can. Very funny. Very Stephen Speilberg though.

Since nothing I've talked about involved pictures I'll throw in an image of a long walk I took from the AASTO, which is on the left in the background. I think my favourite thing about the pole is making footprints in fresh snow.


- Jessie