It's been about a week since I've posted.
Don't worry. You haven't missed much.
Last week, we were waiting for the NPS office's IT personnel to return to the office this week so that they could create a login for me so that I could use a real computer instead of the bootleg Mac laptop that wasn't on the government network. Well, turns out they're gone this week too. But, a login was able to be made for me. I now can log in to a computer, Photoshop pictures, organize the photographic database, create 3D tours of the visitor center's exhibits (more on that later), and do basically anything...once my e-mail account gets configured. Supposedly that will happen before this week is out. So, next week I'll actually be considered a real employee.
Anyway, for the second half of last week, we kind of twiddled our thumbs, thinking up work I could do until I got a login. I did some online government small-craft aviation training, since I'll be doing some helicopter flights in my first patrol (starting June 5th, more details to come on that as soon as I know them; things run slowly...it's the government bureaucracy doing what it does best: taking forever to get things done). I tried to download Photoshop on the Mac laptop (failed). They gave me this past Monday off of work since there was nothing for me to do. Ah, well. This week has been good so far.
I was actually able to work on some shots from the Chena River expedition last Tuesday. Three of them are on my website, gregkinmanphotography.com, under Fine Art, entitled "Chena River, Granite Tors, Alaska." After I finished those, I've been working on a pretty cool project that will keep me busy for up to the next week or so.
So, the place I work at, the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center, is basically one of the largest (in terms of throughput) visitor centers in the Alaskan Interior, if only because Fairbanks is the only city that's more than a tiny speck on the map in all of the Interior. There's a substantial exhibit in the Center that has huge dioramas of various things Alaskan: summertime landscapes, autumn landscapes, winter landscapes, spring landscapes, videos of all these seasons, descriptions of what these seasons are like in terms of weather, flora, fauna, mosquito population (hint: high in summer), descriptions of Athabascan Indians (the Alaskan Natives indigenous to the eastern Alaskan Interior) and their customs, fishing, the land surrounding Fairbanks, why Fairbanks even exists (three reasons: Gold Rush, then oil, then the military), and much, much more. My job is to photograph the thing and then assemble the pictures into a 3D environment that can be embedded on the center's website, using a program called Microsoft Photosynth. It's a cool program that senses the 3D environment your panoramic/collaged images were taken in, and can create navigable 3D environments modeling them. It's basically your own guided tour of the exhibits. So that's pretty cool, and I'll be doing that for about a week until it's finished.
Next, I think my boss, Josh, has some database stuff he would like me to do until I start preparing for my first patrol, which is June 5th-13th, I believe. Right now, I know that I'll be flying to Eagle, Alaska for the first day, a little hamlet on the Yukon River that is the jumping-off point for all Yukon-Charley patrols. Then, training (for who knows what) in Eagle on the second day. The next three days will be spend flying around in a helicopter with archaeologists, documenting their digs. Cool stuff. Then, it's a three-day 200-mile round trip to Slaven's Roadhouse, a big two-story cabin on the side of the Yukon in the middle of wilderness. A nice place to stay for both 19th-century gold rushers and modern man. It's 100 miles there by river, which we'll cover in one day on a motorboat. We'll spend one day there and in the surrounding area, and then we'll come back to Eagle on the third day. Then, I go home. That math adds up, right? I hope the government planned this correctly...
Anyways, that's my life for the past week. It recently warmed up enough to melt nearly all of the snow and for me to ditch the old fossil-fuel burning truck and to begin using the calorie-burning mountain bike to get to and from work (and maybe even the grocery store if I can get my hands on some panniers). I might be buying a touring/cyclocross/all-around bike off of a co-worker after my next paycheck, so who knows. The only downside to biking is that when you stop for a breather (only happens when going up the side of a hill to the house where I'm staying), your sweat attracts swarms of abnormally large Alaskan mosquitoes. They're actually huge. I'll probably have to bring copious amounts of DEET as well as a head net to the preserve. Oh well.
More updates when things change/get more interesting/I have more news/information/pictures.
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