So what would you say you do here?

More than a few people have asked me what I'll be doing down in Antarctica. While I think there was a little line about a systems administration position in one of my posts, it was well hidden, and many of you might not know what the heck that is anyway.

So my official title is "Senior Systems Administrator." Basically, I administer computer systems. I'll be taking care of the virtualization farm, backups, email servers, file servers, file transfer servers, various other servers, and front end computers for general and scientific computing. Mostly Windows boxes, but also some Macs and Linux boxen. I imagine I'll also help the network and communications engineers as I know a little bit about those things too. My boss has also asked me if I would help the antenna riggers with antenna maintenance.

Most of the work I've been doing over the past years has been pretty specialized. I've mostly been working on the computing involved with ground systems for spacecraft, or instruments that fly on spacecraft. In addition, the other thing I've worked a lot with is high performance computing clusters-big fast computers. So this job will be more like the things I did earlier in my career. It should be interesting!

In addition, everybody helps when it's needed, so hopefully I'll get to learn and work on lots of other things. Everyone also cleans the station, washes dishes, and shovels snow. So I'll be busy, but will hopefully still have lots of time to explore, ski, operate some ham radio, and blog.



Popular posts from this blog

Weekends...

Image
I've talked about what work days are like, but I thought I'd explain how weekends work down here too. Most of the time we work 6 days a week, and have Sunday off. Every once in a while, about once a month or so, we'll have a 2 day weekend. On Saturday we'll work our normal jobs for half of the day. After lunch, we clean up our offices and work spaces and then head to the galley around 2pm for the weekly station meeting. At the station meeting there is a recap of the week, a look at what's up for the next week, news from around Antarctica, and "gentle reminders." Gentle reminders are where anybody can bring up anything that they think might need to get done or changed, things that are bugging them, etc. It's a good way to keep resentments from popping up in our small and isolated community. At the end of the station meeting, we all draw a slip of paper out of a bucket with our job for "house mouse", which is the weekly deep cleaning of the
Read more

Final post from Antarctica?...

Image
This will probably be my last post from Antarctica. The ship arrived yesterday with the summer crew, the first time we've seen it since June. There are a lot of people on station now, and it seems very crowded and noisy. The winterovers have been hiding out in each other's rooms, kind of shell shocked by all the excitement. The next week will be super busy as we turn the station over to the summer crew. We head back to Punta Arenas on Saturday, with a 4 or 5 day passage up the peninsula and across the Drake. Then a day of flying and I'm back home. Courtesy of Charles Keating Thanks so much for reading, and I hope that this blog gave you a sense of what my experience was like down here. I'm sorry that my blogging tapered off towards the end, but as they say down here about the end of the season, I was getting a little toasty. I'll see you all in a little bit, and take care in the meantime... P.s. Above is a time lapse of the ship arriving yesterday courtes
Read more

Chchchchanges...

Image
It has been overcast, snowy, and the wind has been blowing a sustained 50-60 knots going on six days now. Everybody is a little crazed from it, and coupled with being end of season tired, people are stepping lightly around each other here. In spite of the weather, there are definitely a lot of changes happening around Palmer Station. For the last couple of months, all we've seen is the occasional leopard seal hauled out on an ice floe, and a couple of resident sheathbill scavengers that hang around station, but lately there has been a lot more wildlife around as the days get longer. Lots more giant petrels , kelp gulls (I think I got my id right), cormorants , and various other seals. I'm really hoping the penguins come back before we leave. We get Adelie, Chinstrap, and Gentoo penguins here. It definitely feels like spring is around the corner, even with the terrible weather we've been having lately. I guess I shouldn't be complaining about the weather, it is Anta
Read more