February 23^rd 1999

As of right now I am starting to get tired and hungry. It is about 3 in the afternoon. It has been a very eventful day so far. It is just winding down. It is like there was a big party and many people have gone home except for the good friends that stay to help clean up. When you have had a bunch of fun and food and then every thing calms down and you just feel like sitting there.

Well that is how I feel except there was not that much fun and there was no food. I had a lunchable today and some water and that‰s about it. I think my body is acting weird because it hasn't had its normal dose of caffeine for the day. You know the usual Dr. Pepper or Pepsi. I am now trying to find out what happened with the network problems that we have been having today. I just got off the phone with a network guy back at Ames and he has come to the conclusion that the satellite was giving us trouble. When I was having problems and I couldn't encode, Anne radioed back and asked if I was encoding because her download was taking a really long time.

My computer was trying to ping the server that I was trying to get to but it was not getting through. Well to make a long story short the satellite just went through a bad spot. I remember back to my trip in the Arctic and the very same thing happened up there more than just occasionally. I guess when your dealing with satellite connections you just have to expect the worst. So I will have some thing ready for you people back at Ames when I try to do a live broadcast. Something that they can put on the web site in case the connection goes down. I am really looking forward to coming home though.

I miss my family and friends. Uh, did I just go way off the subject? Well, let me think back to today's events. I got out to the site at around 7:30 this morning. I was the first one out to the testing site. I wanted to test the encoder out here and see if there would be any problems. Everything went as planned. The encoder operated successfully when it was needed the most but the connection was not very secure for most of the day as I had mentioned. Overall everyone is happy with what I am doing here. I feel like I am making somewhat of a difference here supporting my reason for coming here as well as supporting JSC, Ames and others in their technical tests. I don't help them technically but I have made it possible for science teams at other centers to view what these projects are accomplishing.

Well today was another successful day for the suited tests as well as the Rover. Right now they are trying to fix some things on the rover. The ASRO people packed up and left right when they were done. It is 4:15 now and the hill that we are next to has blocked the sun as it has gotten lower on the horizon. The local students came by again to see what we were up to. Today the older students came. The high school kind. They were more interested in the testing process than the younger kids were. All in all I think it was a good day. In between everything I was taking pictures and some camera crews were here, and when they did some interviews I made sure that I got the information on tape as well. I was always busy it seemed. I went to the bathroom once this whole day. I think I am just about ready to go crash out in my room now. But hey I have work to do still. I have a lot more pictures to process. I think I took about 32 pictures today.

One thing that I wanted to mention here was the variety of aircraft that I have seen out here. Just yesterday I saw a B2 Stealth Bomber whiz by our Base Camp. We have had remote controlled airplanes, a couple of fighter jets, a couple of helicopters, a blimp, a couple of smaller planes, and of course big airliners way up there. There are also a bunch of Ravens here and there. Well until tomorrow, this is Seth signing off.