In Key West. Floriduh.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm spending much of this summer on the M/V Spree in Florida, as photo pro, video guy, deck hand, boat driver trainee, and Desalinator. The honorary title Desalinator, which is required to be said with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent, was given to me by smart-ass Captain John. It seems that some of my duties on the boat have to do with decreasing the ratio of salt to fresh water, as in washing the boat with fresh water, or maintaining the water maker system. I wear the title with pride. As for smart-ass Captain John, well, he also has a job that is related to reducing the amount of something, but that something smells considerably worse than sea salt. You can imagine some of the epithets I've given him. I hope he washes his hands, a lot.

Anyway, I'm in Florida... (no, wait, I am in Texas. I took a week off and flew back to Austin. I'm trying to catch up on things here before heading back to Key West). One of the things I wanted to accomplish on the previous trip to the Dry Tortugas was to post something to my blog via my sat phone. Sorry to say, I didn't have much luck with the sat phone internet connection. I'm using my Mac to connect, and though it does make a connection and transfer data, it is ridiculously slow and times out because of dropped packets. Arrghh. Iridium doesn't support the Mac, of course, so I'm left to try to figure it out myself. On Windoze, there is a special data compression/error correction DLL that is supposed to make Iridium data transfers reasonable. I'm guessing that one thing it does is tell the TCP stack to lengthen the sliding window size to accommodate the extra latency. I need to figure out how to do this on the Mac. I think I will bring a PC laptop with me so I can do some testing with it. So stay tuned... I might yet be able to post via sat phone. Though. It. May. Be. A. Very. Short. Post.

Another thing I want to accomplish is to do a blog post with a podcast of some of the video I have been shooting. I picked up an iPod nano to test it with, and with a little Final Cut Studio Compressor magic, I should be able to do that, though I sure won't be posting that with the Iridium.