Durham Landing

Another photo from a morning walk with Trooper. This is overlooking Durham landing from the walking bridge.

Buoy-tastic

Here it is - attempt # 2 to make a weight that is hand-deployable, yet heavy enough to stay in one spot on the bottom. tricky, very tricky. Good thing it doesn't have to be hand-deployable by me. I can hardly lift the frame of this thing, let alone half of 150 pounds. Those gigantor chain links are HEAVY! Luckily, Tom and Ben C. could get it into the water with the help of the pulley on the A-frame - and it seemed to stay in place! Excellent. That was at Adam's Point though, several kilometres upriver from our actual research area. We'll find out soon if it'll hold out in Portsmouth Harbour...And yes, this is about as exciting as it gets for me. In fact, I think that the last post about a bag-o-milk was more interesting.

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.