The Tidepools - As seen from Wilshire & Fairfax

By: Rob Sklenar

     My Sunday didn't begin much differently than it usually does. I got out of bed, made some coffee and took Lily, a Jack Russell terrier, and her tennis ball over to the Labrea Tar Pits park. Besides the dog, ball and coffee, I also took my cellular phone. I had already forwarded my home office line to it. You see I was also on the expedition to the tidepools just north of San Diego at the same time.

     I decided not to join the group that was actually traveling, but rather planned to join them on-line, serving as a "home base" for some web production. I expected to get a cell phone call from the group between 7 and 9 AM and planned to author pages, edit images and do what I could to help the other explorers get their experiences onto our web site.

     Returning from the park about 7:30 I slid into a my normal routine, watching every Sunday morning talk show starting with "Meet The Press" (7-8 am) and then "FOX News Sunday" (8-9 am). Still no call from the expedition. I decided to make a little breakfast and halfway through it (and halfway through "Face The Nation") the phone rang and it was Rob Lindstrom, reporting from the site. They were planning to upload some images shortly and apparently everything was going extremely well. I fired up my computer and began putting links on the Digital Explorer's web site to live pages and began posting the template pages Phil Merrill had already created.

     About a half hour later I called Phil and he told me they were having a little trouble connecting the laptop computers, through the cellular modems to the FTP server. It brought back memories of standing outside in the snow with Doug Filter trying to get a good cell at the top of Mount Wilson and chasing upload gremlins after we had authored pages at the Red Rock Canyons.

     This time it was different, though. I wasn't the one desperate to get it to work, this time I was the one desperate to see what they would upload. The anticipation and experience wasn't that much different, except that I was sitting in my usual office chair, staring at my HP Pavilion driven Sony Multiscan 200sx waiting to see the images appear in the FTP directory. Incidentally the Trinitron Monitor was now displaying "This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cookie Roberts" in the lower right corner courtesy of my new Hauppauge WinTV video capture card which doubles as a television tuner.

     I then got the call below from Rob Lindstrom. The explorers were moving camp as the tide was coming in and they were in danger of getting pinned against the cliffs. I realized it would be some time until we were posting images and I was seeing what they were seeing.

     Overall I still felt I was part of the expedition, participating and working hard to make it work. I guess that's its own reward and I can't wait to see the images, hear the sounds and read the experiences...even if I'm doing it during game 6 of the NBA finals between the Chicago Bulls and Utah Jazz (4:30 PM tip off).