Bag o' milk

I found this picture online on the first page of a google image search for milk bags (hence the mystery child in the background). This looks like the same kind of milk bag container that we always had at our house, except maybe in a different color. I've posted this basically so that my American friends know what a 'milk bag' is - and because I miss being able to buy milk in a bag.

Doe Farm, by the Lamprey River

I worry too much about this dog - does he look sick to you? Me neither. He looks a little bit crazy actually. He doesn't usually do this, but he had a little spaz attack for no apparent reason.

Lighthouse work

Val and I found ourselves back at the lighthouse again last Thursday and Friday. We complained about being in that dark lighthouse, soldering and splicing, while we could hear people having fun at the beach just a few hundred metres away. But then we figured that if you have to be soldering and splicing, it's better to be doing it with the sea breeze outside the door and waves washing up onto the rocks 10 feet away, rather than in the freezing cold electronics lab at CCOM (and I do mean freezing).



You may notice that there is a GPS (Global Positioning System) antenna mounted under a deck. And we're OK with it! Sure, the positioning will probably be pretty crappy, but we're not using it to find position - an additional signal that comes out of a GPS receiver is a very accurate pulse every second. For GPS to work, very precise timing is required to synchronize the satellite signals and the receivers. This works out for us because we're going to use the clever GPS timing scheme to synchronize the acoustic signals we're sending into the harbour.



Val made me take this picture of a splice we did between the GPS cable and ethernet cable. It's more impressive than it looks. Well, on second thought, it probably isn't.

John in Mozambique

Here's a shot of John sitting with the sonar that they've been working with. They are currently in Maputo, Mozambique. They're doing the survey work for a fiber-optic communications cable. Which, in my opinion, is desperately needed - the internet connection there is terrible. Our Skype calls keep getting cut off! Well, by the time the lightning-fast internet connection arrives, John and the rest of GRS will be long gone... to Tanzania, anyway. He should be back in Durham by early September. This six week trip has transformed into more than 7, and is expected to go on for at least another 2!

Morning walk

Trooper likes to wake me up SUPER early in the morning by chewing a chew toy really close to my head. This is loud and impossible to sleep through. If I open my eyes, or otherwise appear to respond, he licks my face. If I take the toy away, he starts to chew on the comforter or the edge of a pillow. But once I'm up, it's definitely worth it to see the sun coming up over Oyster River.

Congratulations, Luis!!

Luis defended his Master's thesis yesterday morning, and did a great job. He's now just finishing up with the formatting so that he can submit it to the graduate school for binding. His half hour lecture generated some interesting discussion afterwards, including how box cores and different acoustic frequencies might be combined in the future to come up with better estimates of the bottom type for classification. I think everyone hopes that they can deliver their thesis topics so clearly and calmly. Congratulations!

Fieldwork and Trooper

The past week and a half have been pretty crazy. We started testing the pinger positioning last week at Fox Point in Newington. It's a gorgeous spot, and it was nice to work there. On Saturday, Trooper came over to CCOM to help me test the RTK GPS. His job was supervisor, but he spent most of the time chewing on his kong toy.

We finally got the RTK working, it took quite a lot of running around, downloading drivers, picking up forgotten tribrachs and trying to get the laptop to stay alive long enough to set up the receiver. ( we ended up having to use a car battery and an inverter - it worked very well)

The actual survey at Fox Point was very hectic, with the R/V Coastal Surveyor driving back and forth in front of the pier, and Tom measuring sound speed profiles continuously over nearly two hours. Below is a photo of the GPS antenna with the Coastal Surveyor in the background. It was a beautiful day and it only rained a little bit.

Trooper

We were so sad to give up Cayo, but now we've finally found the perfect pup for us. Elisa told us that we should check out labs4rescue.com. She used to foster dogs from there, and said they were a great organization. They are rescue group that takes labs from high-kill shelters in the south and finds good homes for them. We found one called Leo the Lover on their website. His description said that he was friendly to everyone and just loved people, other dogs, and children. We got them to cat-test him - he'd never seen a cat before. He was scared of them!

We ended up changing his name to Trooper - this was a name that Jakob came up with. It's actually Storm Trooper. If you want to see more pictures of Trooper, he's up on my picasa site, the link is at the left side of this page.