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...

The station mode is changing. We are changing from primarily an aviation supported group to marine supported. The Swedish ice breaker ODEN is more than halfway through the sea ice to station. They will be here is another day or so. It is pretty strange to consider that the ship will essentially be cutting a channel through our early-season ice runway where we were landing Air Force C-17s just a few week earlier. We are still hoping the sea ice will blow out to sea.

Ice breakers don't really cut through the ice. They have a hull that allows them to slide up on the ice and the ship breaks the ice by its weight. The ship goes back and forth breaking up the ice that is almost 9 feet thick. Pumps are used to transfer ballast and pump water on top of the sea ice to lubricate it so the ship can more easily move on top of the ice.

A co-worker got word that he will be on the Nathanial B. Palmer for a cruise or two after February. Getting this work on the research ships can be very competitive.

The bad news is we have a sick llama.

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