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Ch-Ch-Chatting With the South Pole's IT Manager
Have you ever thought about working at a place where the main worry is keeping the equipment from getting too cold? An excellent detailed interview with the IT manager of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Getting service is a little tough. They try to maintain at least a year's worth of spare parts.
Includes an interesting set of photos.
watch Clark. And watch him close.
"My computer froze!"
Being in Minnesota, I am used to cold weather, but -104F! I wouldn't go out in that with clothes on, let alone naked.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
When the machines get too cold, they install Microsoft products.
Then Satan shows up and heats up the joint.
It has to be much, much easier to overclock machines when you never have to worry about overheating. Who needs liquid cooling when you can have polar cooling?
A high school buddy of mine went to the south pole a couple of years ago. Here's his blog.
I click the link, and the first image is of a very cold-looking guy standing next to the South Pole marker. Underneath it is a CDW ad that states "We're there.".
That may be the first time I've cracked a smile at an online ad.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Who lives at the south pole? Herschel the Hanukkah goblin you insensitive cod!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Well, I'm not sure how a smiley face is NSFW but whatever.
Personally, being that it was a balmy +5F outside this morning on my walk in from the car, I was seriously considering making my dreams come true and showing up in a school completely naked -- well, except for the yellow smiley face hovering over my dick.
Security software - BlackIce
Snow license Manager
Snow screen savers
Frozen Heads Software for the Macs http://frozenheads.com/
polar software for the helpdesk http://www.polarsoftware.com/
And of course Penguin everything
but the burning question: Does he type everything using the CAP lock ?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Isn't that a perfect situation to make use of Netburst-based Pentium 4 processors ?
All those pics are upside-down! :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This site (www.bigdeadplace.com/) is dedicated to the stories of what really goes on at McMurdo. It's a very funny read; I haven't gotten around to buying the book yet.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
At 80 degrees north in Eureka, Nunavut, Canada, you would need to point an antenna horizontally to communicate with a geostationary satellite.
There's a photo of an satellite dish antenna pointing horizontally at the south pole. Is communication with that satellite only possible during certain times of the day?
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
If you RTFA, you will find that they only have connectivity for about 12 hours a day using at least 3 different satellites. The article is pretty interesting, go ahead and indulge.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The reason the guy keeps referring to his people back in Denver is because logistics and support for the South Pole station (and McMurdo, too, I think) are run by Raytheon Polar Services, which is based in Colorado. The Antarctic program is run out of Washington by the National Science Foundation, but they contract out the actual infrastructure, operations, and other support.
How'd they get pictures of my parents basement where I live? Oh wait, pictures of Antarctica, never mind. Still cold in both places though.
It's sort of the weather. It's cold and windy during the winter, sure. But, it's also dark - completely and utterly dark for months at a time during the dead of winter. There aren't any lights on the runway, or air traffic radar either, so there's a good chance the plane will smack onto the snow rather than land. It's very difficult to compact and maintain the snow/ice runway during the winter. If a plane were to land, they would have to keep the engines revved up and the plane moving - if they were to stop and shutdown the skis would freeze to the runway and the engines would refuse to restart.
also bear in mind that any plane they sent up there would almost certainly have to go through McMurdo. They generally use modified C-130s for their heavy transport, and they don't have tremendous range on one tank of gas. So, you'd need to get a plane first to McMurdo, which has its own difficulties of winter flying, and then head to the South Pole.
None of this is to say that they can't fly in during the winter. If the station were to blow up, for instance, they'd get some daring pilots to head in for a rescue. A few years back there was someone on the over-winter crew that needed treatment for breast cancer (it was the doctor, ironically enough), and they did some dicey flights for that (to send supplies, then for an early extraction). It's mostly that they prefer to not have to, because it's logistically difficult and mighty risky.
Because Antarctica is covered by a giant ice sheet, and the ice sheet moves. As the ice sheet moves, the entire station and the marker pole drift away from the true geographic south pole. They have to stick a new pole into the ice every year, at the spot that is over the geographic south pole at that moment.
So in the pictures, one of the marker poles is probably from a previous year.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
This AC is actually in the same office at NPX with the subject of TFA.
I've only been here for a month, but I love it. It's weird. You must have a high tolerance for everything: extremes of temperature, people, daylight or lack thereof, variety of food or lack thereof, limited hardware and software choice, members of the opposite sex, etc.
The new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Elevated Station is way cool for a geek. It's like an extraplanetary outpost. Yes, you can go outside whenever you want, but you also take full responsibility for your well-being for even the most mundane of tasks. I snowmobile out to remote buildings with gig-E switches in -60F. I got drafted into a fire response team to help protect myself and everyone else here. I can get called for a fire alarm 24x7x365. And of the three Sundays I have been here, I worked two, doing 13 10-hour+ days in a row.
And after 15 years in the industry, working for Big Blue, SUNW and others, I really enjoy this work environment. It combines extreme adventure with unique technical challenges. Not to mention associating with women who can fuel huge military aircraft and weld.
And I'll be here until November 2008. I suspect that after this article (.25Million hits in 24 hours so far), my job won't be too hard to fill once I move on to a land where birds fly and grass grows.
Regards from 90-South,
The Fingee
PS V-word = "deathbed" I hope that's not prophetic down here.
There is only one Geographic South Pole, but the sign now has the legend on both sides. One side faces the station, the other side faces away, with a view of, essentially, the polar plateau in the general direction of the departure-end of the skiway.
Also, from looking at the Pole markers in each picture (we get a new one every January), it looks to me as if the #1 shot was taken in either March, 2004 (around sunset) or September, 2004 (around sunrise), and the #7 shot was taken this summer season, sometime since mid-October, 2007. If the #7 picture were high enough resolution, you could see my signature on the aluminum plate on the Pole itself.
It's more than just cold and windy in the winter. The temperature floor for an LC-130 (C-130 with skis) is -50C. Even in the summer, they don't land when it's colder than that. The various hydraulic systems (including the ski-retraction mechanism) don't work well when it's too cold. As for "leaving the engines running", they do that in the summer.
To come down here in the middle of winter, they would do what they did in April, 2001 for a medevac of a different doctor, send a Twin Otter from Canada. It has a shorter range than an LC-130, so it has to fly down the Americas, hop over to Antarctica at the Drake Passage, refuel and switch from tires to skis at Rothera Base, then fly to Pole and refuel here. They do that at the beginning of every season, then reverse it to go home.
The situation you mention was in 1999, and involved an air-drop of supplies from a C-141, then a C-130 showing up about two weeks early, in mid-October, weeks after the sun rose. The Twin Otter medevac was in full dark and around -80F.
All that being said, yes, it is difficult, and it is risky. It had better be a matter of life or death to bring a plane here between late February and early October. If the station did blow up, and there were no immediate life-threatening injuries, there are plans to be able to survive for weeks/months in either the B-wing of the new station (it can be split in half for a catastrophic fire in the A-wing) or in other buildings that can be heated without depending on the main power plant. The winter crews are large enough that it would take five or six Twin Otter flights to evacuate the station. That would be incredibly tricky to accomplish. An air-drop would be orders of magnitude easier, especially since until 1995, they used to do that every winter.
McMurdo Station is always hiring.
:P :\
Ask yourself what kind of stuff you want to tell your grandkids when you're old. Then sign up
I'm dying to winter down there--just to say I've done it--heck, I'd apply for the janitor job if that's all that was available. They don't seem to have much need for security consultants
If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) Vitamin D (D3, 4000-10000IU/day) is your friend. SAD appears to be a symptom of vitamin D deficiency and supplementation of D3 (not D2, which is harmful in large quantities and ineffective in small quantities) can be very effective at resolving it.
Vitamin D deficiency has been implicated in many other diseases of civilization and correcting the deficiency (getting the value above 60ng/ml) seems to help with lots of issues, from osteoporosis to low HDL levels to atherosclerosis to depression to cancer (reduces tumor growth rates).
There are more than 200 kinds of vitamin D receptors in the body. It does an astonishingly large number of things, and most people who don't work outside are severely deficient. Working on the South Pole is the extreme of that case.