I think everybody slept in late today after the party last night - some of us stayed out later than others!

There is a great kitchen staff at the pole, and I thank them from the bottom of my stomach for all the yummy food they've been putting out for us polies (the drinks are another matter entirely but I'm sure that's not their fault). Three cooked meals a day is definitely doing bad things for my waistline but good things to my tastebuds! However, like all normal human beings, even kitchen staff need a day off. And that day is... Sunday. As a result, instead of three cooked meals we get served brunch, which lasts from 9:30am to 1:30pm, where a skeleton staff leave out a whole bunch of things for us to help ourselves to, and dinner is cooked by a volunteer from the rest of the staff (for 250 people this volunteering is no walk in the park!) and assisted by some other staff members and the kitchen staff who managed to get out of serving brunch.

Now as my tummy and all I put into it is highly sacred to me, I was slightly nervous when I heard that this was the situation on Sundays - I tried to imagine myself cooking for 250 people and all I could see were piles and piles of toasted sandwiches. Possibly accompanied by giant vats of heated baked beans (thank god for significant others who can cook is all I can say!). However it came out really well and I was quite satisfied - we had roast pork and vegies (vegetales in mexican, according to the 'cook') and rice.

Even though it was Sunday we got plenty of work done too! After installing RedHat 9 on phobos and deimos on Saturday, we spent today fiddling around with them and eventually reinstalling RH9 on phobos. You see, phobos and deimos run on 2 gigabyte flash disks, which are supposed to work well in the cold (they don't, but that's another story), so when Doug and I were installing the new operating systems, we had to custom install them and try to get rid of as much as possible, since the two computers also need the camera software, which takes up a chunk of space. Unfortunately we sheared off a little too much with phobos. Gdm? We don't need that, right? We did. Kernel source? Pffft, it's huge, we don't need it. We did! So we reinstalled and then spent the afternoon getting them to talk to each other again.

We also installed the camera drivers and at this stage they don't work but we think we may have missed a few more vital packages, and we're going to try again tomorrow. Also Colin finally got vnc working (we all took turns doing random things until something worked!), although we won't find out about his success until tomorrow (not that I'm writing this the next day or anything......).



- Jessie