The Shoals Marine Lab is a magical place. The director's house sits on a hill overlooking the anchorage and the gulf to mainland. After dinner last night, I walked around a bit and then came to sit on the deck and watch the sunset. It was gorgeous. After sunset, I watched for the planets. Venus was visible almost immediately, then Jupiter, then Mars, and, when it got dark enough, I believe we were also seeing Mercury. We drank a very nice Bordeau and stayed up until midnight chatting about Shoals, UMass, and Cornell.
Willy had given me what he thought was the quietest room. Quietest? You might think the island would be quiet, but there is an extremely high density of gulls nesting and they might a frightful racket even during the night -- especially when the moon is full. They woke me up only once and I was able to get back to sleep relatively quickly -- after taking just a few minutes to look at the stars.
This morning, I woke up at dawn and walked around the south side of the island. The gulls were unhappy for me to be out so early and so one made a bombing run on me. They are suprisingly accurate when they want to take a crap on you.
Arriving at the south side, I took a series of photos to make a panorama of "Star" Island, which is owned by the Unitarians and managed by a non-profit corporation, used primary for conferences.
I am somewhat interested because it might be a cool place to do an ELNA Landa Kongreso some year.
I then met up with a couple of students who were gathering data for their field research project. I watched them while they made their observations and then we walked back to the lab for breakfast.
I met with Willy for a couple of hours this morning to talk about the networking and computing needs of the lab. I then met with the guy who's been pulling fiber between buildings. Willy had been complaining about a problem (which I had observed as well). We began looking at the topology of the network and the log messages on my computer and found a pattern that might have been responsible for the problems. So we made a change to the way the airport basestations were configured -- and broke the network. Because of the way they were configured, it took me another hour to figure out how to get stuff working again. There is still a problem with the network -- I think there is a loop someplace. Or something is misconfigured. In any event, it was time for me to go.
I caught the "Pumpkin J" back to the mainland and drove home, arriving home before bedtime. It was a short, but exciting, adventure. Back to work tomorrow.
StevenBrewer