Sometimes, especially at night, I go out on the fantail and look at the tow cable, where it vanishes into the water. I try to visualize the bottom, four kilometers below, with a one kilometer square which is our area of operation, and the vehicle barely a speck somewhere inside it.
We've been experimenting with using Argo's thrusters to steer it around during towing. This allows us to make minor course adjustments, and hit targets that we would otherwise miss. This is tricky, but I'm getting the hang of it. (Major course adjustments are made by the ship, but there's a lot of slop, perhaps because of currents pulling the cable around. On a bad day, we joke that a school of squid must be partying on the cable.)
Also, on my recent watches, I've been babysitting the lab computers that are doing post processing of the images. Usually, this means running a bunch of scripts (which take several hours each), checking on how they're doing, and fixing whatever problems I can. This watch, while I was doing that, one of the Europeans I don't know (I think an Italian guy) managed to get the big plotter wedged. So I put on my sysadmin hat and relearned how to manage print queues and such, and after some groping, cleared the queues and fixed the problem. All in a day's work, I guess.
Argo was recovered and serviced during my day watch, so I spent all day working on scripts. These scripts will speed up access to the Electronic Still Image (ESC) data coming from Argo. The scientists can find the images they want by date and time, but they usually want to find them by navigation info, i.e. they want to specify X and Y coordinates and say, "Give me all the images in a 10 meter square around this location."
The problem is the sheer volume of data. We have tens of thousands of images already, and we're not even halfway done! So my scripts break up the target area (about 1.5 kilometers on a side) into "tiles" (100 meters on a side) and sorts the images into the tiles. So usually, a search can be confined to a single tile, and even if it has to cross a few tile boundaries, it's much faster than searching the entire set of images.
I've completed the "tile" scripts, one to create the tiles, another to populate the tiles with images, and a third to retrieve images by location. I've checked them out, and even written a statistical script to look at how good a job they're doing. Everything looks good!
My next task (at my own suggestion) is to write a SeaNet interface for my image retrieval scripts. SeaNet Communications Network (SCN) is an infrastructure for accessing and manipulating data, developed by a consortium of oceanographic institutions and universities, using HTML and CGI scripts. So, when we have an Internet connection (either ashore, or when the satellite link is up), everything we've done appears on the World Wide Web. Even when it's local to the ship, it gives the scientists easy access to the data.
This is going to take more studying on my part. I've already learned Perl (the scripting language), and now I will learn HTML Forms and CGI interfaces. This suits me, these are cool skills, it'll just take a while.
1200 - 1600 The weather has gotten substantially rougher. On this watch, the ship was blown off its course and completely out of the target area, and we spent a lot of time thrashing around trying to get back in line.
The ship's positioning system uses the two stern props (which are called Z-drives, they can swivel around to vector their thrust) as well as the bow thruster (which can swivel all the way around). The problem appears to be the bow thruster just getting overwhelmed by the size of the swell. There are a couple of strategies for crabbing (turning the ship's heading into the waves, so as to use the Z-drives to hold the ship in position while allowing the weather to push it sideways) which are more hands-on and tricky than just the automatic positioning, and it's not clear how well they'll work. We have to be careful not to get the cable snagged on a prop, which would be a serious setback to our schedule, if not a disaster.
The weather is too rough for taiji, and after a couple of abortive attempts, I've had to make do with the exercise bikes (both yesterday and today). The important thing is to get some kind of a workout regularly; it has a tremendous effect on every aspect of my performance, both physical, mental, and emotional. I notice that the people who don't exercise are complaining much more about being unable to stay alert during the day, being unable to sleep at night, and generally feeling lousy.
1200 - 1600 The weather has settled down, and we're running survey lines again, much to everyone's relief. Will says that, all in all, this mission is going very well (at least, as well as they ever do) which is good, but makes me wonder how bad things get on a bad mission!
I'm getting really good at piloting Argo, using the thrusters to scoot sideways when there's something interesting to see over there. Pierre, the watch leader, has a rather annoying habit of hanging over my shoulder while I'm piloting, like he's ready to take a bite out of me. I've taken to calling him (privately) the French Buzzard.
Today I was seized with a desire to go for a walk. Just a walk, anywhere, somewhere besides the lab, the control van, the galley, and my room. Wandering around other parts of the ship is not much of an option, but it's the only one available.
I read a little each evening, before going to sleep. Current book is _Virtual Light_ by William Gibson. It's good, an echo of his great _Neuromancer_ trilogy, but only an echo, not as powerful and intricate.
It's a beautiful sunny, calm day. Argo has developed a problem: several fuses blew in the Jetway (shipboard power supply), and the forward thruster is dead. So we began recovery at the beginning of my watch, which means I didn't have to be there! I took advantage of the opportunity to do taiji in the warm afternoon sun, just lovely. Several other folks were doing their exercises too (mostly walking or jogging circuits around the bow), which makes for a nice sort of camaraderie.
Video entertainment for the evening: a Discovery documentary about the Troll, a "sea skyscraper" oil & gas platform in the North Sea, and an episode of Black Adder (Video Dave's tape), which is great! The main movie for the evening is "Bad Boys" which no one there seemed really interested in, but it's one of the captain's new acquisitions, so it got played. Since I'd gotten my hair brushed, I left after about five minutes. (In case you haven't figured it out yet, hair brushing and video watching go together for me, it's the only time I have my hands free and idle for any length of time.)
During the day I'm trying to figure out the SeaNet specification, which is marvelously convoluted. Everything depends on everything else in subtle and nonintuitive ways. Oh well, they don't pay me for my fashion sense!
1200 - 1600 Saw more biology today, rattail fish and dumbo octopus. The dumbos seem to have two states: at rest, they "bloom," curling themselves into a shape like a pronged flower, strange and beautiful; when disturbed by Argo's lights, they "squirt" into a thin cigar shape, and cruise away, flapping their ears.
Taiji this afternoon under a sky scattered with scraps of ragged cloud. (I get off watch at 4:00, and dinner starts at 5:00, so that idle hour in between seems to be the best time for exercise.)
Dinner was great, vegetable stir fry over rice, and some kind of egg pancake things, that reminded me (and all the other Trekkies) of those flying alien blobs that clamped onto Spock's back, so everyone who thought of that started commenting on it and grossing out everyone else at the table. (Don't play with your food!) In general the food is very good, they always try to have a vegetarian option, and often the main courses are quite tasty. It's usually the high point of the day.
Anyway, I got off watch and went to sleep, which is not easy with the bow thruster roaring continuously, but I managed. When I got up for breakfast, it was still bellowing like a minotaur, and I thought briefly that the crew is right, it really is working pretty hard.
Suddenly the roar cut off. Strange. Then in the (relative) quiet, the intercom crackled to life: "Captain to the bridge!" Uh oh. Life may shortly become more unpleasant!
I found out after lunch that the bow thruster is actually okay. What happened was that the Global Positioning System (GPS) P-code, which gives fine navigation information, stopped working. People have been futzing around with it all day, but the consensus seems to be that the software expired, since the problem happened right at midnight GMT.
You see, GPS is a satellite navigation system designed by the US military. Ordinarily, civilians only have access to regular GPS, with a resolution of maybe fifty meters or so. That's too coarse for our survey, so the crew had to go through the rigamarole of getting the P-code unit, which is not too difficult to do when you're in the US.
Being in foreign seas is a different matter. The P-code unit is classified (to some degree) by the US military, and a replacement has to be hand carried by someone with a particular security clearance. The team leaders are talking about getting some admiral to bring it to Okinawa, where we could go to pick it up. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, on my day watch, we've been trying to have the bridge crew steer the ship manually, which doesn't work nearly as well, and the resulting lines are waggling all over the map. We will have to see whether this approach is really worth doing.
Myself, I'm deep in the throes of debugging my SeaNet code. It's very frustrating, because I have to edit the code on one computer, copy it to another (the server, which has the HTTP server but no editor), and test it on a third (which has the HTML browser). I made some progress, but not much, and went to bed all tense and frustrated. Yuk.
While we're trying to get the GSP P-code problem fixed, Dana (navigation scientist) is cobbling together a system that combines the data from the sonar transponders (accurate, but low update rate) with the regular GPS (coarse, but fast update rate) in order to generate a data stream that the ship's dynamic positioning (DP) system can use.
In the meantime, the ship is being piloted manually from the bridge, using the transponder net for navigation. How well this works depends on who's doing the piloting. The mate on our watch doesn't seem to have the knack for it, his lines wander around a lot and even loop sometimes. When the captain is on the bridge, though, the line immediately straightens out and stays accurate.
This has got me thinking about phenomenology and the connections between people. In the control van, all we see are stitched lines of red light on a monitor, and from their movements, we know immediately whose hand is on the bridge controls. All you see are lines of characters on a screen, and you know my thoughts from half a world away. Pretty cool.
I always get philosophical when I read John MacDonald (this one was _The Green Ripper_, one of the Travis McGee series, an oldie but a goodie). Reading him makes me want to write better.
Today is Hump Day, halfway through the mission! Even though they're talking about extensions, so I might not get back in time for the Maypole dance and Beltane celebrations, it's good to hit a milestone. One month down, one month to go. Watch this space for further details.
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