Road Trip

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I am back from my most recent roadtrip. I loaded up the Tesla and started letting the hands-off Full Self Drive (FSD) supervised take me to points North. First stopping in a campground in Tennesee and up to Pittsburgh for the CIDM Convex Conference (which was the best conference in years). There was a celebration of the 20 years of DITA XML. I was an earlier adopter. My presentation went well and I semi-stealth launched wisdomino. I demo'd some extra cool software we developed and will be selling in weeks to come. It's truely game changing. Of course, there will be much more than that to come. After that it was on to Franklin, PA. to meet with some colleagues in the mining division and onto the farm stopping in Olean NY for the night. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had driven across the entire Allegany National Forest. I ended up driving through the very dark forest expanse during a night time thunderstorm. Although I normally trust the Tesla FSD on the Interstat...
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Today I was in the shop. I fixed a radio or two and we spent quite a bit of time screwing around with this huge (geographically) wireless network we are building. One of the problems we have is that we have a pretty mixed bag of various vintages of equipment. Some of the stuff is ancient in terms of wireless LANs. Some is new. The feature sets vary so much it is important not to mix and match in each subnet. Even then functions across the net can cause issues.

I got word today that I am headed out to the ITASE traverse start site at Taylor dome, I believe for the put-in. What that means is I fly out in a twin otter skiplane with the folks who put up the tents and generally "make camp". There will be six of us. We will have to do a lot of hand digging and such. I understand to get one of the Challengers out of the snow it will be a manual process and then we can use that one to get the second one unburied. I have to get the radios working and install a couple more. We will probably have to rely on HF and satelite phone (if available). I don't think I can make the path on VHF. I am not sure. I have a meeting tomorrow to discuss this. I bet they are going to want Internet as well!

The important thing is that this time or another time I will be out in the field at the whim of weather and equipment. I may not post for a day or two or three. Don't panic. It just means I have to go primitive for a bit. I will post when I am in town.

These photos are from my helo ride yesterday. I have hundreds more just from that short trip. That is a great arial shot of McMurdo. Mt Erebus is in the background. Erebus is an active volcano. There have still been no trips to Pole, still too cold. I bet a few of these people would like to get home after being totally isolated since February.

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