February 3^rd 1999

I ended up sleeping in today. I missed breakfast with the others. I guess I can do that because I am only authorized to work eight hours a day while they are limited to 12 hours a day. So I figure that in the morning while they are setting up I can still be relaxing in my bed. Then by the time I get to the site I can do my work because there is more to do. It is 5:30 now and they are still working but I am just finishing up because my eight hours are up. We finally got the Internet connection working today. I encoded live audio and video. My boss was happy to hear that. I was also relieved because I was getting rather nervous considering the live event is scheduled for Friday. As I write though it is not working again. They had another problem back at Ames with the routing tables. We had the same IP numbers as the people back at Ames. We might have to set up a new subnet here to get things to work again. B ut at least we know that it works. So I am not as worried as before. As for the Rover, it was being worked on by technicians on both ends of the project.

I went for another 4X4 adventure. It was really cool. I had to get out of the car several times and look for alternative ways of getting to certain paths. At one point I was driving on rocks and they were so compacted into the ground and flat that it was like I was on a paved road. There are slow points during the time that we are here. Cesar started to take apart the old cart that we had for the Rover and build a little cart that supposedly will have a sail on it and he is going to take it out on to the dry lake nearby and use it as a wind board. I have noticed that these engineers always have to be doing something

. Last night the moon hadn't come up yet and the stars were out at full force. It was quite a site to see. I could see the Milky Way and there were so many stars. It is getting dark now but it isn't as cold as last night. It was windy last night so that might have something to do with it. I took a group picture of everyone here today. We were just about to take the picture when we realized that Edmond was not around. We looked around and barely saw him in the distance near the landing site. I offered to go get him. They said hey take the white truck. So I said ok. I went and got him and came back and we took the picture. I gave the picture to Hans on a floppy and he sent it back to whoever wanted it. I felt like I was doing something important for the group. I will send the picture to my web site for you all to see. I am in the picture too. Well that is just about all for today. I will keep you people informed. I hope to get more technical in the days to come in my journals about the rover. So you techies don't worry. Bye for now, this is Seth Carter signing off.