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After the Gold Rush website was down on Tuesday, I got Greg to remote desktop in to a machine in Oregon to print out an order form on Wednesday. Long story short, after Jeff + I finished the bottle of Edradour, we had some rather nice Alaskan IPA to move on to:

There’s another 6 of those boxes left at Jeff’s for tomorrow night (Erin’s birthday) and then the Superbowl on Sunday. Should be enough… By 11p.m, we decided to head to Tunt by 10a.m tomorrow. I think the timeframe is flexible At least, I hope it is.

Anyways, I also left my scanner running through some of the 35mm film and had to share one of a team of dogs before the Akiak Dash:

It’s taking a little editing to bring out the best in these 35mm frames, but I’m loving the effect I’m getting, and these guys were just super cute. Not sure how I’ll handle seeing Mia again tomorrow.

A photo I took of Bogus Creek 150 starter Sam Crow over the K300 weekend has been featured in The Tundra Drums newspaper Even though my name was spelt wrong, I’m still pretty excited to get something printed on page 2 of a publication that goes out right across the whole delta.

Iditarod is only 5 weeks away and Sadie has somehow wangled her way in as a dog handler on the start line! Tempted to try and sneak in as a late volunteer too, but think I’ll play photographer and just enjoy getting to see everyone start, and next year volunteer early to help out.

My Canoscan 8800F finally made it through the mail system yesterday As I had quite a bit of studying to do last night for my VCP exam earlier today, I didn’t get much chance to play, and have then been out most of this evening with a guy in town from Phoenix Learning working on our student information system (PowerSchool) as he was wanting to bounce ideas for developing an iPhone app around.

So, without getting my hands dirty too much with regards to post-processing, here’s a few choice frames from the 35mm films I’ve developed over the last couple of weeks. First up, one of Audrey from Christmas Day back in England:

Not sure if this is a Kuskokwim 300 or Bogus Creek 150 musher pulling out the chute at the start of the race:

And a dog team getting ready for the Bogus Creek 150, with one guy obviously having a lot to say for himself:

I was quite impressed that a) I managed to develop film okay myself and b) once actually easily viewable were pretty decent. Not sure if it’s my photographic skills, the Olympus OM-1 having not been used in 10 years or cleaned in longer, or my developing skills (or lack thereof), but there was a distinct under-exposure and graininess on pretty much everything. Shooting ISO400 in black & white I would expect some grain, it could also be not reading that manual thing that came with the scanner Hopefully I’ll have some time at the weekend to really try things out, but there’s a birthday party on Saturday and then Superbowl party on Sunday, so that unfortunately means drinking may be involved…

After hanging around for 45 minutes this morning whilst the ‘test center’ got ready (read – a corner in the college library, was not impressed), I finally got to sit the VCP exam and passed with a score of 83 So, I’m now a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) in VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3).

Since the school board gave approval for $110k+ worth of equipment to migrate our entire datacenter to a virtual environment including full off-site SAN replication along with a pair of redundant ESX hosts in the event of a major failure as a complete disaster recovery location (without SRM), it’s all coming together nicely and should makes things a whole lot easier come the summertime.

As part of my ongoing attempt to avoid studying for my VCP exam on Wednesday (actually, I’ve covered 8 of the 11 modules and have a 2-hour revision session via telephone tomorrow), I finished off the last few frames of film and tried developing the two rolls of 35mm from the K300 last weekend. I was worried I’d lost the first roll as the rewind froze / numb fingers, and the rear popped open exposing the film. Turns out I only lost about 6-8 frames and most of the actual K300 photos are just fine. Most of those I’ve lost were of the fiddle dance, which is probably worse as I’ve lost my blackmail photos Ah well, live + learn (i.e. find an open pick-up truck and just sit in the drivers seat changing film like I ended up doing!).

Will try to find someone heading to the post office tomorrow that I can blag a ride with to pick up my Canon 8800F film scanner to actually get them on the computer. Pretty happy with how much easier it was developing the film this time, wasn’t as nervous, probably as I wasn’t expecting anything on one roll! Still, just shows the magic of film when you actually slide if off the developing reel and see the images sitting there Not quite the same as plugging a USB cable in and downloading to a computer!

Last weekend I also booked flights in to Anchorage to see the start of the Iditarod which I’m really looking forward to! It’s something I’ve wanted to get to the last couple of years, and figure I have the time + money now so may as well. There’s a few other friends going to be around for it too, so should be fun. Just making it a long weekend, flying out of Bethel on the Thursday evening after work and coming back on Sunday, but will be a nice little Spring break.

After being invited over for dinner, Erin + Angie wanted to go see Honey Barbara play at the Longhouse so Sadie + I tagged along. I was expecting to be over-dressed given I’d gone straight to their house after work, but it turned out Honey Barbara were playing at an inauguration party for Obama, so there were folk in full dress suits or tuxedos and evening dresses (not all at the same time…) Turns out I played it quite right with the dress code, though it totally felt like we were gatecrashing a private party! We all sat at a table and kept ourselves to ourselves for an hour or so until the band finished playing and then sneaked out like naughty little kids! A fun evening though.

I got a few more photos of the K300 weekend up on Flickr, so ended up with like two dozen decent shots. I also have a CanoScan 8800F film scanner on it’s way here to allow me to scan in 35mm and 120 film so can see how some of those turned out too.

A busy couple of days. The K300, Bogus Creek 150 and Akiak Dash all got started yesterday afternoon without problems, with the Akiak Dash finishing by around 8.30p.m and the Bogus Creek winners starting to come back at 8.30a.m this morning. The K300 leaders will arrive in the next few hours.

I struggled with cameras, but got a few good photos. DeeDee Jonrowe starting out the K300:

Martin Buser coming out the startline (currently leading coming out of Tuluksak at the moment):

The guy that’s won the K300 more than anyone else, Jeff King:

On to the Bogus Creek 150, a young musher leading the way:

Casie Stockdale on the mushing her team out the chute, with Marvin Evan on the left:

By the finish, Casie would come home 8th and Marvin 4th. Next, Sam Jackson already needing a cigarette break on his way to a 9th place finish:

A couple of dogs patiently waiting on the startline for the Akiak Dash:

Then the en masse start of the Akiak Dash as all mushers pull away at the same time:

More photos and full-sized images in this Flickr set.

Last night there was a fiddle dance as a fund raiser for the K300 which was fun. Not quite a ceilidh, or the type of music I usually listen to, but don’t think I embarrassed myself too much by dancing! Was worth it anyway. There were a good few people there and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

I’m currently fighting with a few little niggles on the website ready for the results to start coming in once the first mushers head out at noon. Getting a little nervous as to how it’s going to hold up, especially given one of the visitors that has come up to watch the races… I’m hoping to get some good photos too, though the weather is fairly overcast, so will see how it goes.

I wandered up to the race HQ for the K300 to see how things were going and took in a couple of photos along the river along the way. The slough has a lot of standing water on it, so much so you can see one of the boats almost submerged as the bottom of it is still frozen in the ice:

Further on, the lonely + still empty startline with the sun rising behind it:

The races are currently scheduled to start at noon tomorrow now. At least the wind + rain have stopped and the temperature has dropped back to 10F so things will start to freeze again. Still just leaves glare ice everywhere, even I struggled to find my sea legs and slipped twice on the way to the store. The K300 itself will be shortened, removing the Pike Lake loop, and hopefully all mushers can get underway tomorrow.

Made it back to Bethel okay, though was not a good flight if you didn’t like flying. Was a little windy. Dan Walker was flying back from Anchorage too and gave me a ride back home which was great as there were very few taxis moving around. The weather here is just terrible, school has been canceled for a couple of days, and it’s just solid ice down on the roads and sidewalks. It’s so windy I was being blown across the ice outside my apartment, and I was probably 300lbs with all two great big bags in tow! All the apartment is creaking and groaning, and the door on the cargo container outside my bedroom keeps being pulled open and then crashed closed, so that’s not much fun.

The K300 races have been postponed, there’s a meeting in the morning to discuss options, but there’s not a lot that can be done. It’s simply too dangerous to run at the moment. Depending on the weather they might set out on Sunday, so will just have to see what the weather brings tomorrow.