February 19^th 1999

Today was somewhat of a strenuous day. I started the day off by arriving at the site and to my dismay my workstation was moved aside and someone else had set up his computer right over mine. I was at first wondering what was going on but then realized that I wasn't there to fight for operating space. So I had to make do with working under the table. Hans then asked me if I could set up all of my stuff up down in the area where all of the testing was going on. I asked a few concerning questions like what about the wind and what about the Internet connection. He made some suggestions and I immediately began to rush around. I had about an hour to break down my equipment and set it up and test it out again. This was for the live event that was going to be taking place at 11:30. I piled all of my stuff into the car and ventured on down towards the Rover, the RAC equipment and the Suit equipment. I thought this would be good place to have the event but it was a bit unplanned, so I was a little nervous. As Mark always says "Situation Normal". I was thinking that when things weren't working when I set them back up again. The encoder wouldn't even turn on and when I finally got it to go on the Ethernet connection wasn't working. After sweating all of my internal fluids into the desert air I finally got everything to work right and I called Alan Federman back at Ames to do a video and Audio check. It all worked pretty well. It was very windy so we put two cloths and a rubber band over the microphone. This worked better than I had thought. I had to also get someone to work the chat room back in the RV and when there were questions then we would radio back and they would tell us what the questions were. They had a hard time getting into the chat room so I went up there and got into it with a little work. I also got someone to man the camera, for there would be a lot of moving around with the various amount of equipment all over the place. Cesar manned the Camera and Linda manned the chat room. They both did a good job. We started the event and no to my surprise I got a call from Alan and the audio wasn't working. Just before the event, Hans and the RAC camera people decided to send a bunch of data over the connection. I believe that that is why some of the first part of the event was chopped up. The last 28 minutes were very useful though. The rest of the event went as planned. There were many questions over the chat room and the Internet connection stayed up quite nicely. After the event there was still a lot of things for me to do. I did bios of the new people that had come to the site to do various testings. I also spent most of the day converting the pictures that I had taken over the last week. I hadn't been sending pictures for most of the week because I knew that they would not be put on the web page until Alan returned to Ames. There was a lot to see today, so I took even more pictures. I worked on some journals as well. After all that I went back to my motel and typed up the bios that I had taken and sent off the pictures, bios, and journals. Today I worked non-stop it seemed and at the end of the day I wanted to just collapse in my bed. And that is what I did.