Random snippets in the life of a Polie.

I sleep like a rock star. Well, minus the excess of loose women and the drug-induced haze. Ok, maybe I don't steep anything like a rock star. But I sleep like a rock. Apparently the altitude affects many people's sleep here at Pole - remember the effective altitude is usually above 10,000 feet. Many people complain, "man, I'm tired. I didn't sleep well last night - kept waking up every 3 hours." I always say, "I was sleeping like a champion until my alarm went off."

However, monday morning I slept like a champion even while my alarm was going off. I wanted to get up at 7:30, because I had a snow mobile test at 8:30. I have no sense of time in my room, because there are no windows (this is a good thing) and it is always dark when the lights are off. At some point during Sunday night I woke up enough to think, "I should look at the time." My watch read 10:30. Wait, 10:30pm? I went to bed after midnight! My mental gears strained to clear the fog in my head, following the light of my wrist watch in the distance. It gradually drew closer, and I could just make out the digits "10:31 am" AM!!!!!! What!? The fog lifted very quickly as I realized that I had slept through my alarm by 3 hours, and missed the snowmobile test. Well, that was dumb. From now on I will take my watch off of my wrist and put in on the desk where I will be able to hear it. None the less, 10 hours of sleep felt good! And I got my snowmobile training in Tuesday. It consisted of talking about what to check on the snowmobile before you take it out, how to operate it, and stating the 10mph speed limit. No driving, just talking. The driving part is easy.

So I have been working on the autoprocessing software, as I explained before. Yesterday I finally worked through the interconnected software web, and it seems to be working. All in all, it uses 5 programming languages (I am counting bash scripting as a language, which is debatable). First there is a crontab which automatically calls a bash script every 2 hours. The bash script employs perl and magic to write IDL commands to a file, then runs that file in IDL. IDL then processes a bunch of config files, and calls a mixed C and C++ program from the bowels of the GCP (generic control program - what I did last year for BICEP) to read in the archived data, which is then processed in IDL. Is it needlessly complicated? Well, you could probably write all of this with bash and one more language, but this collection of code uses each language where it functions best. So I am content with it.

People can mail stuff to you at the pole, and apparently people like mailing stuff to Liz. Liz is a grad student at Berkeley who appears to be crazy, but I have only met her once so I can't really say. But the people who like mailing stuff to Liz apparently think that she REALLY likes tea. There was a shelf full of tea that she left which I sorted yesterday while taking a break from looking at code. There were no fewer than 37 boxes of tea! The two winterovers had better drink tea 4 times a day all winter, or they will never get through it all.

I am going to leave you with a collection of quotes from our winterover Dan. Dan is Australian, and is doing well an maintaining my impression that all Aussies are crazy. In a good way, but crazy none the less. Here is a collection of quotes over one single evening, and he wasn't even drunk. Just talking. Try reading these out-loud in an Aussi accent.

- "I can't belive that you call a scone a buiscit. You are so barbaric!"

- "When I hear, 'biscuits and gravy' I think of something with chocolate and gravy. Hmm. I guess you could just wing that."

- "Dark matter sucks and Dark Energy blows"

- "I just inhailed some green tea. And it hurts. But I don't care."

- "Imagine if you were launched across the Grand Canyon. Like Evil Kanival. It would be kind of cool. With a cape!"

- "I got mugged by a gang of teenagers. They are getting bigger these days. They took my $20 mp3 player."

- "The context that I heard of Clifford Algebra was when the most beautiful woman I had ever met was explaining it to me. And I was drunk. It didn't make any sense."

- "She is one of those people who the world bends around. And she isn't very big!"

- "Dear Mom. I'm really dirty. Please send soap."