A quiet day at work
23 August 2010 | Yarmouth, NS
After yesterday's nighttime arrival, today was a rather quiet, domestic sort of day. Showers, filling water tanks, some leisurely exploration of town by Anne, Evelyn, and Leslie, and a normal day at work for me.
The picture shows my primary "office" on board. The headset I'm wearing is a noise-cancelling model designed for use in light aircraft and I can't even hear the engine running when I'm wearing them! The laptop is my work computer but the upper screen mounted above it does dual-duty: When connected to my laptop it gives me a very nice two-screen work environment but spends the rest of its time connected to our ship's computer and displays all sort of navigational and instrument data.
Of course, as you might expect with gadget-man around, these two are far from the only computers aboard Northern Symphony! In addition to the work and ship's computers, there are a couple of personal laptops, an iPad, several iPods, and at least a half-dozen specialized computers embedded into various parts of our instrument systems, all with several different wired and wireless networks! While to a certain extent this is overkill because I'm an Electrical Engineer by training and a gadget freak, it is also very enabling: these systems all give me reliable Internet and voice connectivity which, in turn, enables me to work from the boat and thus makes possible this whole Grander Scheme.