The weather has moved in, not really here in Resolute, but up where the racers are. This means we won't be able to fly today and more annoyingly the checkpoint crew out on the ice will need to spend more time up there! Still there's little we can do here. I was quite looking forwards to the flight up to the pole, but I should still get to do that whenever it happens. Fortunately we still have some Jack Daniels left...

Last night I was working on the gallery back-end again. It's really coming on quite well, and has some nice AJAX, web2.0 style features. But it doesn't all work yet, and the chances are it won't work properly in IE, as I designed it in Firefox. For those of you who are part of the WTRD, I may use the same code to power our site once finished - would make it much easier for people to share their photos!

Surf at Croyde

I'm still feeling jealous that Rosie and Mike got to go surfing at the Weekend, and at Croyde too, with 2-3ft clean breaks. I cannot wait to get in the water on the Saturday I get back. They made a fantastic photo-diary of the day as well, which left me smiling - anyone who has Rosie as a friend on facebook will be able to see it - and even more jealous of their day out.

On a surfing note, and relating to yesterday's data loss scenario I might as well point out that I also accidentally deleted the PBSC website :( and so will have to reinstate that when I get back home. I did make a new logo though, which I pinched and edited from a Canadian Heritage "Safety in Polar Bear Country" leaflet. It is currently the only thing on the PBSC website so check it out.

Casper's Pride and Joy

So, I accidentally deleted yesterdays blog. I'm a bit of an idiot. Fortunately I had a backup of the first two entries, but alas not yesterday's.

As is recall, nothing happened yesterday anyway and I wrote some rhetoric on how nothing happened. And showed you a photo that Casper took and was particularly proud of. I'd hate for you to miss out, so I posted it again today.

As for exciting goings on today, all our teams reached the checkpoint and are due to start again on schedule tomorrow. More interestingly we watched that episode of Family Guy where Peter gets a physical and the Doctor spends ages saying things like, "These test results are worse than I thought! *pause* My son's history test, he got a D-minus" and so on.

Up here in the Arctic at this time of year you get sunshine 24/7. This is really disconcerting as your never know what time of day it is at all. On a number of occasion I find myself getting up to have a mid-morning coffee only to find that it's almost 7pm and nearly time to have dinner.

Today was particularly long however as we were up early to ensure all was ready for the Checkpoint Crew to fly out to the Third Checkpoint for the Polar Race. They were scheduled to fly at 9am, however nothing is fixed up here and they finally departed at about 10pm! We still haven't had the confirmation that they have successfully landed even now at 1am the next day. I'm sure everything will be fine.

Jeremy Clarkson

We did get the see the Top Gear guys depart for their Arctic Truck vs. Dog Sledge challenge thing, and I still haven't got round to getting a picture with Richard Hammond (the other are too grumpy for me to even contemplate asking). The trucks are pretty tough looking and although the local Inuit crowd had a good laugh when they arrived, the drivers are really pleased so far with their performance.

Most of the rest of my day today was spent sitting in Race Control manning the phones while the rest sorted and re-sorted all the gear for the checkpoints. Hence the progress with this, the blog functionality built and soon the picture gallery as well. That's my mission!

Welcome to the newly re-designed modbychris.net website.
Of course, it's far from finished at the moment.

I am currently based in Resolute Bay, Canada - within the Arctic Circle working for the Polar Race 2007 and during this time there has been a fair amount of free time during which anything to stop the onset of "cabin fever" is much appreciated.

So I will be spending some more time here over the next little while and hopefully have an interesting site. Of course I first have to code the blog (but thats done as you are reading this!) and picture gallery sections, and get some nice dynamic content going. But first I just need to decide what I am actually going to put up here!

I never really saw the point of blogging, but I never get the inspiration to write a diary and I never remember what I have been doing from one day to the next - and with a bit of luck there's some people out there who'll find it interesting!