Re: The Joys of African (and other 3rd world) construction projects

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:
LP>> Wife and I just watched a Danish documentary movie about a restaurant
LP>> group that moved a Michelin starred restaurant from Torshavn (Faroes) to
LP>> a village in on the edge of the Disko Ice Fjord in West Greenland. The

On 2025-01-12, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
D> Why would they do that? Sounds like bad business to me. On the other hand,
D> I'm not running a restaurant. =)

>

D> Does your wife speak danish or did you AI-translate the subtitles?
D> Sometimes I can rip documentaries including swedish subtitles from
D> svtplay.se and then automatically translate the subtitles so that it works
D> for my wife as well.

My wife is EN (US) only. The movie in question had no subtitles. The
sound track was a mish-mash of English, Danish, Faroese, Greenlandish
and unintelligible. I think they had intended to pdut English subtitles
on it, but ran out of money in postproduction. Nevertheless, I could
explain to her what was happening most of the time.

Amazon Prime video gave us an interesting selection when we search for
"Danish movie" from the home screen, almost all of them with English
subtitles; one of them even had a dubbed-in English soundtrack.

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:
LP>> My company does a fair amount of engineering support work for the CTBTO
LP>> (the Preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
LP>> Organization) which maintains dozens of infrasound monitoring stations
LP>> in remote parts of the world. My business partner/boss likes to come
LP>> along on a site visit once in a while. Easter Island, Robinson Crusoe
LP>> Island, Alice Springs, Warramunga. (Not so keen on going to Djibouti,
LP>> Tristan da Cunha.) These maintenance/field upgrade visits are planned

On 2025-01-12, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
D> Wow! What ever they are paying you to go to those places, I am certain it
D> is not enough. You would have to pay me several 100s of thousands of
D> dollars before I would voluntarily travel there.

A lot of people have Easter Island on their bucket list, so a paid trip
there is not too bad. Robinson Crusoe is less well known, and the
airstrip is on the opposite side of the island from the village where
the hostel is located, so it is a boat ride. In both cases, the visits
to the instrumentation sites was only a two-hour hike with a pack donkey
to carry the tools and equipment. My partner is 5 years younger than me
and surfs and snowboards. He did have to get an OSHA tower climbing
certification to be useful for the equipment installation.

If I thought I could be useful, I would have offered to go on the
upgrade visit to Qaanaaq (a.k.a. Ultima Thule). Alas, my wife will not
allow me to climb towers.

We declined traveling to Djibouti and Tristan da Cunha, doing remote
support for the installers instead. TdC is very hard to get to. No
airstrip; access is a 7-day boat ride on a fishing boat from Capetown,
you spend 7 days on the island, and then you ride the boat back or wait
for the next boat a month or two later. And the schedule yields to
weather conditions. I think they have 3 round trips in the summer only.

LP>> years ahead of time. We supply radios for communications within a
LP>> station between sensor arrays. Towers are designed, tower sections
LP>> ordered and staged, cables are spec-ed to exact lengths. We do
LP>> predictions of radio signal strengths using Google Earth to review
LP>> line-of-sight issues. And field installation crews have carefully
LP>> planned spare parts, cable splice kits, power banks etc. There is no
LP>> BestBuy or Home Depot in the villages of Nunavut!

D> My father visited Nunavut once I think. Don't remember the circumstances.
D> He worked almost all his life for the same airline, so it was probably
D> some very minor test of a potential new destination or a marketing stunt.

>

LP>> It is a fun part of our project portfolio. The CTBTO is a UN agency
LP>> headquartered in Vienna. The contractors are a diverse bunch, that get
LP>> rotated a bit. We have worked with groups from France, Ireland,
LP>> California and Alaska. We got in on this, because our radios are the
LP>> most reliable they could find. I don't know what they will do when we
LP>> retire in a couple of years, but I am sure they are working on it.

>

D> This is worrying. Does it not worry you that you have the world government
D> as your customer? How do you deal with the ethical dilemmas that implies?

World government my ass. A government with no army? It is a debating
society. But even so, it does useful things. The global data collection
of the CTBTO has found many applications in all sorts of research.

(PS: I'd be interested in hearing about you life in the South Baltic
    area, but that seems too far from the topics here. Maybe email me
    - my info in the headers is true and functional.)