Why Remote Access is not progress
This week has been a busy one for WDCS, and for me personally, and it’s only Wednesday so far.
One of the joys of working in the not-for-profit sector is that everybody just kind of mucks in and helps with whatever needs to be done. This week has been a lot about that. First of all, we’re working on a video for a new campaign we’re launching (shhh, don’t tell anybody yet) and I’ve been up to my eyes in video editing and animation this past week. Hey – check out our page on YouTube for our Stop Bloody Whaling videos at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk2SfDpBsNM - and watch out for the new video next week!
Elsewhere, we have two teams who have just started fieldwork projects; one in Salt Cay over in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) studying humpback populations (you can read Sue Rocca’s Fieldwork Blog here: http://uk.wdcs.org/fieldblog/; and the other led by Simon Keith is just kicking off in the Moray Firth of Scotland. Hopefully he too will be posting to the Fieldwork blog this week, so keep checking back.
So before, during and after fieldwork teams go out, it’s a busy time for us technical people. There are computers, cameras, GPS units and other silicon wizardry to check and if necessary repair – quite often after the team has left base, as was the case this week. Sadly, the rise of the Internet and remote access technology mean that I didn’t get flown out to TCI for a week to fix the GPS unit - it was all attempted remotely at 3 in the morning over a dialup connection. There was a time when fixing a GPS in the Caribbean could easily have taken, oh, a week to 10 days? But not they have Remote Accesss protocols over the Internet we can just log in from home! Ya, great. I mean, not all technology is progress, is it? Sadly, turns out that the software drivers for this particular beastie just weren’t going to play ball with Windows XP SP2, so they are currently down one GPS unit (see, I don’t think a plane ticket was an unreasonable ask).
What else? Oh, a small network outage at HQ in Chippenham, more work on the new website (it rocks – and it’s coming soon), and - hey did I mention I have a cold?
Just another regular week saving the whales…
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