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Last night I got a ride back into Tunt with Carl after work which was cool – meant I wasn’t hanging around for 2 hours or so at Yute it nothing else! Flying back into Bethel with Carl again tomorrow evening, and then Kat comes in on Tuesday evening for training/workshops on the Wednesday + Thursday.

Thursday night I’d had pretty much all of the servers performing their backups to central NAS server which worked well. Moved a little over 500Gb of data which wasn’t as much I was expecting, and we have a couple of new switches coming in to aggregate some direct links between wiring closets to separate it from the rest of the network traffic to allow regular incremental snapshots throughout the day.

I got another photo in a Schmap! guide, this time for the Wawona Valley in Yosemite I still have a whole bunch of photos from our vacation at the end of July to go through and upload to Flickr – hopefully as things calm down a little at work and I have more time on an evening I can start to go through them.

This afternoon at work I got my MacBook Pro Very nice machine, and was good to get a chance to really give OS X 10.5 a go. After imaging it from the netrestore server it was set to go and works a lot faster than my MacBook (though that is over 2 years old now), though it still surprised me a little as the MacBook Pro is only running 1Gb RAM compared to the 2Gb in my MacBook. Still, will look nice driving a 30″ Apple Cinema display…

Coming home this afternoon, figured I’d also get a photo of the outside of the apartment since the weather was quite okay and I already had the camera in my backpack. Riverside apartment, but only the back bedroom gets the view! I’m over on the right hand side:

The inside is a little bare as I only brought a few pictures to put on the wall and that was about it – I’ll bring some little bits + pieces this next week:

Nothing too flash, but by Bethel standards pretty good! Everything works, it’s clean, and pretty quiet, although having the utility room between me and the next apartment isn’t all that helpful really given the washer + dryer running and hot water heater kicking on + off But, on the positive side, my pizza has just arrived – after Ramen noodles for dinner all this week and sandwiches for lunch I fancied something a little more appetizing!

I flew into Bethel last night with Carl which was fun – he headed out of Tunt and towards the Kuskokwim looking for moose. Can’t hunt them in the area yet, but people like to keep a look out for them as they’re hoping the zone opens up next year. But, we saw two good size bull moose with big sets of antlers wandering around by themselves just 3-4 miles out of Tunt near the river, so it could well give the locals some nearby hunting grounds soon.

After unpacking a few things in the new apartment last night, I then walked into work this morning to see how far it was (only about half an hour), and got a pretty good sunrise whilst I was at it:

The was just a whisp of mist hanging around the district offices and the high school which added a bit of atmosphere – this is the pretty cool raised boardwalk section, pretty much a bridge, running towards them both:

Work went quite okay. I got all the Win 2k3 servers updated and scheduled for restarts tonight, and setup PowerSchool (SIS) for regular backups to NAS since it seems to be working quite okay after the migration to it’s new server last week. Backup solution starting to get there, though probably just an interim setup as will start looking at better ideas/alternatives once we at least have the core systems backing up each evening so we have something in the mean time.

This evening I was meant to meet up with a couple of guys from work and a couple of Apple reps who were in town to go over some things with the district but the restaurant was closed and guess the other they’d headed off somewhere else before I got there. But, gave me plenty of time to get to Swanson’s to buy some groceries and bits + pieces for the apartment. Got everything cleaned through except the bathroom which I’m going to work on now, and looking pretty good, if a little bare! Will be able to bring some more stuff up next weekend, and then Kat could maybe bring a bag up too as she’s due in town next week for a couple of days training sessions which will be cool.

NFL opening Sunday today, Kat’s thrilled Seahawks lost big time, but looks like it might not be a great season for them anyways. Some other good games though, and also got the Formula 1 and GP2 recorded this morning to watch the next couple of days when back in Bethel.

After the chaos at Yute Air on Friday, I bumped into Carl yesterday who offered to give me a ride back into Bethel this evening. He’d planned to go moose hunting straight out of town on Friday for the weekend but it fell through, so I’m glad I don’t have to deal with Yute again today! Means I have more of a rest here too, otherwise I’d have been flying back out again around 2p.m.

Packed up a few things to take with me to the new apartment, enough to get through the next week I guess. I’ll be able to look things over and figure out if I need to pick anything else up or bring from here next weekend. Least Swanson’s is really close to bring back anything I need to buy. Tried calling up GCI to get phone, TV and internet sorted, but you have to go to the Bethel office to do it – probably as the address given wasn’t showing up in the Anchorage call center! So, I’ll try to get that done tomorrow lunch time and hopefully they can get it hooked up sometime this week. Kat is due to come into Bethel the following week, so better have TV working by then

Made it back into Tunt okay this evening – definately a different kinda of weekly commute! Yute Air have just moved hangars a couple of days ago, so were in even more of a mess than usual. They now have 3 or 4 check-in counters with the ladies wearing Bluetooth headsets to answer the phones and a PA system to announce flights leaving, but still have about as much common sense and customer service skills as before. A couple are general pretty good, but getting told off for carrying my laptop bag out there when that’s what I was told to do after asking for a fragile sticker wasn’t great, and just turned comical when they were loading bags back onto planes than had just flown in and passengers were running out the terminal trying to grab them as the baggage handlers were clueless. Worst part is they’re still probably best of the worst out here! I used to like Yute as they never took themselves too seriously and realised they were a bush airline rather than getting a little pretentious and snotty like Hageland seem to have done.

I’ll be flying back into Bethel on Sunday, but hoping I can get some rest in the mean time. Nice to see Kat again, and Mia mauled me as soon as I got home. Guess that’s how you get attention from her when you enter the house – leave her for 4 days! But, will be nice to take a step back from things and then get ready for next week. Need to figure out what to take up for the new apartment and stuff which should be fun. Kat is meant to be in Bethel at the end of September for a couple of days training so will get to see it soon too – sure she could bring some bits + pieces up too.

The last couple of days have been pretty busy at work, but again in a nice way I’ve been able to jump pretty much right in and just start getting jobs done to help out which works well, and I’ve been pleased how well I’ve handled working with the computer systems again given the couple of years I was out the game. Managing Windows servers isn’t too bad either I was wanting to lean away from Windows management, but as it’s not the day to day to grind of dealing with client machines and end-user problems arising from Windows nuances, it’s actually quite okay. There’s also 7 brand new X-Serves for various roles ready to go in, so that should be fun too.

I got an apartment sorted today, I signed the lease and picked the keys up earlier. I went with one of the houses I’d seen on Tuesday from Jimmy Guinn, as the other places I’ve looked at have either been a little way out from the main areas in the center of town, or $1200 without utilities making it pretty expensive. But, I’ll be able to get straight into this apartment next week and get a little more settled.

Hopefully tomorrow is good day to round off my first week, and I’m booked to fly back to Tunt with Yute in the afternoon – weather is meant to be clear and should get me back into the village without too much of a wait hopefully. Certainly a different commute home on a Friday afternoon!

All in all, a pretty good day Work was interesting, but good fun. I got some office space sorted (I’ll be living in a cube!), and started looking over the current setup. The other guys there were real friendly + helpful and we started going over the servers they’re running, and tomorrow we’re all going to get together and start to work out what my responsibilities will be in terms of maintaining the core server functions leaving the other guys to concentrate on the actual server role. Shouldn’t be too complicated and makes things a little easier.

There’s 11 Windows Server 2003 systems, a mix of Dell PowerEdge 2550′s, 2650′s and 6850′s, as well as half a dozen Mac X-Serve servers with another 4 brand new ones sat in boxes ready to go. There’s also a ProLiant E5405 Windows Storage Server 2003 acting as a 2Tb NAS, with a VTrak E610f 6Tb NAS just hanging out that isn’t up and running yet. So, not hurting for storage space! The trick will be aggregating all the backups from the multiple servers onto the storage devices. First task will be moving one off site I guess. But, this was a photo I snapped at lunchtime – the district office is the green building on the left, with Bethel Regional High School on the right:

I also saw an ad in the offices about a house for rent so called up this evening – turns out the guy has a bunch of houses around town and came picked me up and toured me around them which was real nice of him. He had one apartment in a tri-plex right down by the river near Swanson’s, so fairly central, pretty much fully furnished and including all water, heat, sewer and electricity for $1150 a month which I took. Is a nice little place, nothing too fancy, but clean and tidy and somewhere to sleep! Is literally right at the end of the trail from Tunt up to Bethel just off the river so stupidly easy to get to if I ride the snowmobile up in the winter, and being right near Swanson’s, one of the major grocery stores, will help too. He’s going to sort out a rental agreement and bring it round tomorrow so I can move in next week (cos I’m going to have soooo much stuff to move in…). Real nice guy – Jimmy Guin (not sure on the spelling), and he’s a contractor around Bethel so would fix anything right up if something broke.

But, I swear I’ve never met so many people with English connections or stories! 8.05a.m a lady came with a MacBook that wouldn’t power up – had spent a year or so teaching in Newcastle. Ted, the technology director, had grown up around the north east and visited last summer. And then Jimmy’s daughter and her husband and currently living in Liverpool studying for her master’s degree! Have met more folk with connections to England than when I was living there

After waiting around in Tunt due to a thunder + lightning storm rolling around, Carl called me up and we got of Tunt around 9.30p.m. Pretty cool flying in a Cessna 172 for the first time and I could hear all the radio chatter too which makes it more interesting than on the bush flights when sat up front and just have the drone of the engine to listen to! He gave me a ride into town which was really good of him, and the B&B is really nice – they’ve only been open about a year and is probably one of the nicest places you’ll find in town Their Wi-Fi is pretty fast too!

Hoping to get some sleep ready for an early start tomorrow. Getting pretty nervous as kinda tired now with waiting around so long in Tunt, and just want to get started and the first day out the way!