fouldsy.com

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.

Last night I was out for a pizza + games night which was good fun, and met some cool new people. It was then Halloween carnival at ME school (K-2) today, but I was conveniently in work at the time of the carnival upgrading out e-mail server But, I did let one of the ladies borrow one of my Sunderland football shirts (haha, 2-1, sad day to be a Mag!) so hoping that didn’t end up little kiddy puke or spilled orange juice all over it!

As I was hanging out at the office, figured I’d snap my current desk setup - MacBook Pro with a 30″ Apple Cinema display and Jabra Bluetooth headset into the phone system which works right through the building and out-buildings (though not convinced that’s always a good thing!).

Very comfortable work environment, though still a little weird to be running a monitor bigger than any TV I’ve ever owned! It came in about 3 weeks ago, and when I disconnected it today and ran off the 15″ MacBook Pro display it felt so weird with so little screen to work with But, I did get a 6×3ft poster printed for sponsoring the K300 dog-sled race by purchasing a mile (I have mile 44!) which is going up in the BNC building as a good advertising idea. The HP DesignJet 800ps is pretty nice - up to 42″ wide paper on a roller.

I’m off to a wine of the month Halloween party tonight which should be interesting. I’m not entirely sure I want to step out the apartment in the costume I’ve been given… I’ll see if someone can get a photo of me. I’ve also made up some ‘finger food’, which again I’ll try to get a photo of as I’m quite proud of

I went for my physical today as part of being hired by LKSD. Seemed a little silly to pay $100 for a doctor to tell me my blood pressure was fine, breathing okay, and could do with losing some weight. After 90 days employment with LKSD I get full medical coverage, but guess since I’m not likely to drop dead anytime soon according to the doc, whilst nice to get I hopefully won’t need it

On Saturday I helped with the K300 stall at the Saturday Market in the Culture Center which was cool. The new merchandise has just come in, so will probably be a bit busier next time, but did meet some really nice new people and got invited for breakfast on Sunday with some of them. That was really fun too, hopefully I can get together with them again soon, and Alba’s is definately one of the nicer restaurants in Bethel!

Wind chill down to -20C doesn’t make for fun walks to work at 7.30a.m. And if you’re a duck, you’re clucked, cos the river is freezing. In the middle of October.

Yesterday evening, only 10 feet or so along the edges of the Kuskokwim here in Bethel was frozen, now there’s ice pretty much all the way across. Hopefully no-one tries walking it.

I officially hate W-4’s today. My day wasn’t as bad as the skipper of the boat in the distance though:

I like people that are putting candy on their desk in the run-up to Halloween

The past month has been a little of a struggle. It was my birthday last weekend (no, I wasn’t enjoying being able to drink in Bethel and ended up passed out and forgot about turning 25), and thanks to those that mailed or e-mailed cards, but maybe with getting older it just didn’t seem to have as much meaning. I’d kept it to myself at work until I ducked out early on Friday afternoon, but guess the last couple of nights have made up for a bit of quiet one last weekend after having dinner with friends both evenings. Has been nice to drink again if nothing else (definately have needed a beer or two lately), and I was quite impressed that I rolled into work at 8a.m yesterday without any problems. My hearing from the karaoke was worse than my head from the beers.

We’ve had snow the last few days, though the weather is warming a little today. Had a good 3 inches or so and the temperature was down to 20F or so some mornings. A little early for all the snow, but after the messed up weather over the summer, who knows how the winter will be. Maybe I can get my snowmobile up to Bethel next weekend…

I brought a few boxes of things up from Tunt a month or so ago and have had bits + pieces mailed in too so guess this is home now. Starting to feel like it, though not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing. Living in Bethel might not have been my first choice of locations, but it’s not too bad, and at least there’s a little more going on during the weekend. I can also pick up the phone and have takeaway food delivered 15 minutes later. Work is keeping me busy too (in a good way), so my time is getting filled in quite nicely. Will finally get paid this week too which certainly help out!

All being well, I’ll also be heading back to England for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year. As much as living in Bethel isn’t too bad, don’t think I could spend the holiday period here! Work is fairly flexible too as they’re wanting to ensure there’s at least some people around during the summer to gets things done. Looking forward to getting back to Durham again (though maybe not all the flying involved in it), and dad’s already working on Sunderland tickets for Boxing Day!

I’ll try to keep things a little more updated than the past month as things settle down.

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.