Technology
Sometimes technology really can suck, but other times it's absolutely amazing. I was looking at some old pictures of this place last night and thinking about the guys who originally came here over 100 years ago. I don't know that they even had rudimentary radios when they first came down here. They certainly weren't making calls home to check in with families and stuff like that. Now I can sit in my dorm on a laptop with wireless internet and send emails or instant messages to any point on the Earth in a second. Talking on the phone is a little bit of a challenge only because there is a slight delay because of the distance so it's easy to walk all over each other when talking. It's amazing how fast signals can get home though. We use one of the Optus(I think one of the D series) satellites for our main connection to the outside world. We can't "see" that satellite from here on station. So we have our satellite uplink on an island, called Black Island, about 20ish miles from here across McMurdo Sound. So all of our signals travel across a microwave link to Black Island, then are beamed up to the Optus satellite from there, then come back down to Earth in Belrose Australia. Then it hops on over 7,000 miles of undersea fiber that comes ashore in Los Angeles. It's routed over to our headquarters in Denver, which is where it spills out into the real world. So all of our phones have Denver area codes, and it "looks" like our internet connections are coming from Denver. So all of the spam sidebar ads I get are for lawyers and insurances salesmen in Colorado. Haha! So those signals travel 10,000+ miles and our latency is around 700ms. That's 3/4 of a second for data to travel all that way! Technology is awesome!
This seems like the perfect time to show you some pictures of Black Island. No one is out there during the winter but our satellite engineer is able to monitor and control things from here. Well there was some fan that went out and that left only one fan left operating or something like that. So they needed to make a traverse out there to fix the issue. It's only like a 10 minute flight, but we don't have helicopters this time of year so they have to drive. They stayed out there for a couple days, fixed what they needed to, then came home. This was a week or so ago, so they were out there while we had the that final sunset. So there are a couple pics from there of the sunset too.
