Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
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Today I will getting a tour of the Ice-cube project. Ice cube is a huge array to hopefully detect neutrinos. You say so what if we detect neutrinos? ... let me give you a potential outcome. If we can create and modulate a neutrino effectively it will make all of our satellite communications obsolete. We will be able to send a signal through anything we want, including the earth. Of course the physicists will be able to use neutrino detection as means to help figure out the begining of time and space. But the radio thing is a neat idea too. http://icecube.wisc.edu/

Last night I got on 20 meters and worked my new friend at Patriot Hills Antarctica. He is the radio guy for an expedition company. He gave me the heads up of adventurers headed our way. We have a few more treking over ice to get to pole. Most do just the last hundred miles. Some do over 600 miles. His company flies folks in from Argentina on Russian jets that land on a blue ice runway at Patriot Hills. It does cost them a little money of course.

This is the dining room in between meals at the New South Pole station.

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Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
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