fouldsy.com

Weather report earlier read:

At 11 am this morning the the Kuskokwim Delta is reporting below normal and record low temperatures and rather rude and blustery winds that are generating wind chill as cold as 30 below zero.

Yes, yes it is rather rude of it to be so cold.

Did set a new record yesterday of -9F (-22C), and windchill was down to around -18F (-28C) earlier. Not much fun walking in to work after a week of snagging a ride with a friend that was house sitting so had a car

After just a little bit of work, the new website for the Kuskokwim 300 is now live Mike McIntyre from YKHC did all the graphics and layout design, which I think turned out great, and I then built the template into a Wordpress install and imported all the archived data from the old site. Still a few race results to finish importing, and there’s a bunch of photos to bring in too, but the majority of it is there and running pretty nicely.

Whilst heading to the meeting last night about the site, I did come across a new one though - I was transferred into another taxi I was heading out past Larson Sub, the other passenger was going up to Ptarmigan (completely different ends of town), so the driver called another cab to meet us where we would go different directions, and off we went. Little different, never come across that one before, but least I got my $7 worth!

And in other news, my guitar was apparently shipped out, but there’s still no charge against my bank account (no complaints!), and no tracking number Hopefully everything’s alright and it hasn’t actually just been canceled!

The last week was pretty busy as we had two guys out the office on leave which made for a lot of extra work being spread around. But, it was payday yesterday which made it worthwhile! Next week there’s an Apple trainer in so I can get in on that quite a bit, and will hopefully help out the site techs so they’re a little more self-sufficient out in the villages. I’ve also been doing quite a bit with VMWare with the view to consolidate most of our physical Windows servers in the district office into virtual machines. Given the cost of energy and the struggle with cooling (yes, I understand the irony of complaining about keeping a server room cool when it will be down to -20F outside in another month or so…), it makes a lot of sense.

I ordered in an acoustic guitar yesterday - a Fender CD220SCE. I keep checking the order status like a little kid waiting until it ships It’s ‘being packed’ at the moment. Hopefully it will get here sometime around next weekend. That could become mid-December, of course, though the mail into Bethel is pretty quick as it doesn’t then sit waiting to head out the villages like when I was in Tunt.

As I figured the spare room was a little bare, I ordered a bunch of photos in from Snapfish who I’ve used before, and got about 80 6×4 prints for a little over $10 including shipping. Got here within a week, so made a start on a photo wall. Not sure if I’ve seen it done elsewhere or just figured it seemed like a good idea in my head. I dunno, the Alaska area above works okay, but that’s probably because I’ve been to all the places so know it makes sense. I also did one of the lower 48 road-trip from the summer of ‘07:

Since I know where the places, it makes sense to me… The idea is to place photos onto the wall as they would appear on a map. Sometimes the best ideas are those that arrive at midnight after a few beers. Or not. Anyway, is better than just a bare white wall! I’m calling this a work in progress too.

Last night I had dinner at Ted’s as his wife is out of town so he could have some guys over to play Not going to mention who brought their wife along either… There were valid reasons I guess (think out til 3a.m the previous week where the wife wasn’t taken along…), and it was a good meal and bit craic. I then swung to another party for Angel’s birthday which was nice, though I was probably one of only two or three people that wasn’t doing a Praxis test at 8a.m Saturday morning! It was a good evening though, and the guys + gals doing their tests seemed to have done them without problems

Friday night Aoody + Suzi set up a karaoke night, which sounded like a good idea at the time We had a really good time, and definately needed to unwind a little after what had been more than a little challenging of a week. With Aoody being my driver, meant I didn’t go until he did, though the last few stragglers of us were in no real hurry, finally quitting around 3a.m. That’s when I remembered Aoody’s car doesn’t exactly have a working heater and so needs the windows down a little to stop it freezing up the windshield. 3a.m at 10F in a car with no heat and open windows. I felt sorry for Sadie + Erin stuck in the back more than anything! I guess their revenge was calling me at 10a.m the following morning and singing loudly into my hear, but it did precede a nice brunch at Alba’s and then meeting up later for dinner at Jeff + Angel’s. My Sunday was then filled with three NFL games and two DVD’s. It was a good weekend.

But, at least one good thing came out of work last week. Our helpdesk system sometimes kicks up some good ones, and this was a peach:

Problem Detail:
We had a staff meeting today in the SPED dept.  Part of the meeting was celebrating the birthdays of some of our staff with brownies and ice cream.  One of the staff is in Tununak, and participated via SKYPE.  Well he wants his birthday treat.  We saved him some.  Here is the problem, how can I send this to him via email, or fax.  Is there a digital way to send objects through internet servers?????  He wants to have his cake and eat it too.    
 
Action Taken:
After exhaustive research on the interwebs and discussion within the department, it has been suggested the only way is to bring a new cake to TAI (preferably double-chocolate with a nice frosting too) so we can explore all available options and, provided we don't get thirsty in the meantime, try to come up with a usable solution that doesn't involve dilithium crystals.

I got a piece of cake out of it Her ticket was submitted half in jest after her earlier “where’s the any key?” question which got a half-decent response I guess, but has now decided to hold back on future abuse of the helpdesk otherwise when she has a genuine problem, she might not get a sensible answer…

As I’ve been doing quite a bit of coding with the new K300 website, it’s given me a chance to listen to some of the new albums I’ve got recently. ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ by Oasis is obviously fantastic, and was pleasantly surprised when iTunes suggested ‘Forth’ by The Verve. Figured I had all their albums, didn’t even realise they’d got back together! Think I need another couple of listens to make my mind up on that one. Ray La Montagne’s latest, ‘Gossip in the Grain’ is a little bit of a change from ‘Trouble’ but there’s some real standout tracks. Finally, Snow Patrol with ‘A Hundred Million Suns’ is nice, simply as the deluxe version on iTunes included a couple of feature videos (one about 35 mins. long), which really add a bit to things. Musically, it’s almost an extension of ‘Eyes Open’, which is fine as I loved that album too.

Anyways, I’m eyeing up an acoustic guitar next weekend when I get paid… I think two years without one is enough.

I haven’t exactly ended up with the quiet weekend I had planned, but I haven’t minded one bit After hanging out with friends on Thursday and Friday night, I was then out at ‘Just Desserts’ at the Cultural Center last night, a fund raiser for the Bethel Arts Guild. There were some really good acts, including ‘Bring on the Thunder’ that was pretty much Jack Black and Tenacious D! Traci Buckle, a first year teacher from Eek I met last weekend, also performed and was really good. Can check out some of her stuff on iTunes. A local guy, Palmer, also recited ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee‘ which as fun, as he was dressed in musher’s gear and had a sled on stage from Casie.

A few teachers attending an in-service in Bethel yesterday had got weathered in so were staying with Sadie, Angie and Erin, so figured we may as well make a night of it after the Just Desserts gig. After a couple of drinks at their house, we then wandered over to Jamie’s (who had some very nice Teachers scotch, something I haven’t had in a long time!) and then onto Sarah’s where even more teacher people were hanging out. With the clocks going back an hour, seemed liked a good night to stay out late!

Met up to have breakfast again this morning and Sadie and the girls said the teachers had all left for the airport hoping to fly out, though they didn’t really know how many actually stayed there last night! They’d just left the door unlocked and let people get on with it. Can’t imagine that working somewhere other than Bethel really! We then found out you can actually fit 4 adults in the back of a car - least I didn’t have to walk home.

I’m now working away on the new K300 website which should be going live in the next week or so. Mike McIntyre from YKHC has been busy working on the design and I’m now figuring out dropping it all into a Wordpress template and managing the back-end to allow various people involved in the race to be able to edit parts of the site themselves whenever they want. Is starting to look good and working nicely. The poster I printed out last weekend for Casie turned out pretty well now it’s in the BNC building - she sold a couple of miles pretty much right away whilst putting the poster up, so hopefully that’s continued too!

I got a bunch of benefits stuff through the mail today. After 90 days employment, the district benefits kick in, and they seem really good (at least what I understand of it). Provides pretty much full medical, dental, vision and hearing coverage, although the fact that “gender or sexual reassignment” and “sexual disorders, including but not limited to frigidity” are explicitly listed as exceptions and not covered at all does make me wonder what the hell some people have been trying to claim in the past Does get cold out here during the winter I guess…

This week I’m hoping AT&T get the new Gladys Jung elementary school hooked up to the fiber line so I can move our NAS backup server over there and do true off-site backups. It’s a little cold right now to walk to an external building moving a 2Tb external drive with a sync’ed copy of the previous night’s backup from the NAS server. It does, however, occasionally have it’s plus points:

What’s the saying about ‘red sky in the morning’…? It certainly blew in with a cold wind and snow this afternoon. But, it was a pretty impressive sunrise at around 10a.m this morning.

It’s nice being able to see the mountains from Bethel, certainly a change to the bleakness of Tunt. Occasionally you could just about make out the mountains on the horizon with a healthy dose of imagination, so looking forward to being able to get out on my snowmobile this winter and take a few more interesting photos.

First time since moving out here a couple of years ago, but I’m flying back to England for a couple of weeks around Christmas and New Year. I got the okay from the boss today for the dates off (handy, since Nikki booked the flights a week or so ago…), so I’m jumping on a plane straight out of work on the evening of Dec 18th, getting into Teesside on the Saturday morning, and then flying back home to Bethel on Jan 3rd. I’ll be a little tired with going straight into work on the Monday as it’s Sunday afternoon before I’ll actually make it home (with a 9 hour loss from England…) But, will be really nice to get back to see family + friends for a while and get a break from Bethel, and will then give me a few days in work to get some things done with the bulk of the staff gone. Dad’s figuring out Sunderland tickets for the Boxing Day game against Blackburn too which should be fun too!

Saturday night was good fun with an early Halloween party. Sure someone got a photo of me dressed up as an oriental dude, and the taxi driver didn’t really seem to care I was dressed like an idiot But, my ‘finger food’ went down well:

Pretty easy to do, and a cool effect! Just some hotdogs, french fries for finger nails, and then the bones from chicken drumsticks or whatever Sprinkle sparingly with tomato ketchup and you’re done!

The kids thought they were pretty neat, though I can’t claim credit for them (yeah, like I have the twisted mind to come up with that!). I found them in the weekly Instructables newsletter - here’s a link to the info page.