February 12^th 1999

We got up somewhat early today. Our live broadcast is today so we have to make sure everything is working properly. Jamie and I set everything up. I wanted to try something new today. Maybe add a little to the production. I hooked up both the cameras and put a splitter in the line and had one camera set up for the interview and the other camera set up for the spectrometer. The camera that was set up near the spectrometer was the one with the wireless connection. During the interview I switched over to that camera when Jeff was talking about it. Hopefully it looked good and professional. But as I learned later it didn‰t turn out as I had hoped. The audio only stream did not work. I tried to figure out what the problem was but the event came and I ran out of time. Seemed like it was a problem back at Ames. Alan said that he would look into it when he comes out on Tuesday. The event went O.K. I was not paying attention at one point and Hans put the microphone too close to his mouth and by the time I realized what had happened everyone in the chat room was complaining and my phone started to ring. I quickly tried to tell Hans to lower the microphone away from his mouth. Maybe next time I should hold the microphone for everyone. We didn't have as many people in the chat room as I would have hoped either. I hope to be having a lot more people participating in next week's event. But one thing that may have had an effect on the participation is the fact that some schools had Friday off for Presidents Day weekend. The event had a lot of good information for anyone who wanted to know about the spectrometers and some of the reasons why they use spectrometers in space exploration. The rover was also active during the event. Later in the day I helped Anne with the Rover since no one was here. Hans and Linda went home for the weekend. Cesar, Edmond and Sergey went down south somewhere to get some parts for the wireless Ethernet. Sergey went home from there also. I don't know when he will be back. So it was just Jamie, Keith, Ted Anne, and myself to hold down the fort. The people back at Ames did a bunch of Arm maneuvers with the Marsokhod. Jamie and I then went for a ride up a hill and collected some rocks that looked interesting for the geologists to look at. When we came back we told Keith where we went and he said, "You went up that hill". He asked Jamie if she was scared and she said yeah. Keith told Jamie to remind him not to get in the car with me. It wasn't that bad though guys. When we were coming back we went out on the dry lake and found some cool old bottles. We then came back and helped them load the Rover in to the truck. It was a bit different doing it without all the normal personnel. We then went back to our motels and got cleaned up and met back at the local Mexican restaurant. It was quite good actually. I don't know why we never went there before. That is all for now. Until tomorrow. This is Seth Signing off.