Well things have finally moved along. We are on the water headed out for our long long long cruise. Apparently we have about 8-10 days of transit time before we get there which is both nice and kind of a bummer. Nice because I love the way the ship moves when we are under way. It is one of my favorite feelings and definitely the best way to fall asleep in my opinion. The bummer part of it is that there isn’t very much happening during transit. No deckwork because nothing is going into or coming out of the water. Not very much system work because none of the systems are being used. There was a little bit more going on yesterday (the day we left) because turning all of the systems ON has the potential for trouble but everything started up the way it was supposed mostly and any little hitches were figured out pretty quickly. So here I am with 12 hours of shift ahead of me (make that 11 hours and 31 minutes) and really nothing to do. Yikes.
One thing I have been doing in my downtime here is doing a lot of reading about Linux. For anyone that knows me I’m sure you can sense my excitement…sigh. I am pretty unfamiliar with such things and most of the systems on board the ship are run through Linux so forward I go. Surprisingly I don’t mind learning how to DO things in the system. It is kind of fun even though I am bad at it but I can see the potential power available through it. My difficulty is that it is a new language and I flounder around for a while before I can get things to work. I can usually figure out what I want to do and which commands do it…but it takes me a while to figure out the right way to actually type in the command. Order and format. Geez. At least one of the techs here set up a virtual system so I can flounder and flail to my hearts content without being able to screw anything up (thank you Trevor you are a GENIUS!!) and that has helped me practice using it (and be WAY more comfortable knowing I can’t destroy anything important). But reading about it…oh my is that ever dull. I manage to get little tibits of useful information here and there and I’m sure it will come in handy…eventually.
More next time,
Elizabeth