3 January, 2007
by by Ntsikelelo NtshingilaOne duty stands daily in our lives every morning in this base(Skivvies)that is to sweep, mop and clean the floors, toilets, kitchen, and the games room. This is done after breakfast from 7:00am to 8:00am. Today I was sweeping the kitchen which was not hard work like mopping the passageways. After this duty I went back for a nap and I found myself in deep sleep and I woke up 2minutes late for work, we start working at 9:00am since our discussion yesterday. We started today by having a meeting in which we discussed all the things that we need to do in the given space and time, our meeting lasted for about 2hours where we covered discussions on the setting up, testing and assembling of the equipment for the AWS(Automatic Weather Station), the F.M radio station where we discussed on setting workshops for the people in SANAE improving the station itself by linking the phone with the actual transmission, loading the Linux program and upgrading the Pentium 3 desktop and all the programmes that would be interesting to broadcast these include news, sports and documentaries. We always have interesting discussions in our progress meetings where sometimes you get one or two members not agreeing on something and that creates tension which leads to demotivation and frustration, luckily today we had everything under control, our meeting was long but very smooth and straight to the point.
We brainstormed on interesting factors concerning the radio station and we formalised the layout of going about doing the workshops and accommodating each group in the base. There is particularly one guy called Kevin who is very interested in the radio station so much that we have already given him a 3hour slot from the discussion we had today from 4:00pm to 7:00pm.
I had to write to Siphiwe one of our colleague in Cape Town, asking him how far has he gone in sorting out the interest of the documenting of our expedition by a company called Pitch Black. So we have to know the answer soon so we can know how to continue with our work. So we all have plenty of duties to do eg, I have to write this diary, do skivvies daily, I had to put together a desktop computer which had all parts stripped off, I have to record interesting audio which may not or may be used for the actual documentary, I have to collect all MP3's from everyone in the base to be used in the radio station and find someone to create a logo for the radio station.
The radio workshop will be training 8 groups from the 5 January 2007 and each group will have it's training done in 1 hour, so we will be training 1 or 2 group a day so we can cover as much as we can in a space of 3-4 days. We have been landed tons and tons of movies today by a guy called Fritz, he has gigabytes and gigabytes of movies so I don't think we will be bored at all for the next month. There is a heavy storm outside and the wind is literally shaking the whole base, it's like we are going to take off and head for the cliff next door, I hope the have extra reinforcements on this thing. They announced today that we have water restrictions there will be no showers until the storm finishes and we don't know when will that be. I guess everyone will be stinking for a while, apart from that everyone enjoyed themselves watching 'The Shining'on a big screen video projector which is donated for a limited number of days by V2(media in Holland). This just gave our expedition team 10 points in favour of our presence in the base.
Here are some of the critical issues we discussed today:
1) The shooting of my music video
2) Doing the PR for the public service announcement
3) Writing to Siphiwe on the forwarding of 10 or more radios needed for distribution in the base and how far has he gone with sponsorship
4) The filling in of the IEE form by Thomas Mulcaire
5) The formalising of the copy-writing of our documentary
6) The shooting of premedidated interviews
7) There will be another movie viewing tonight at the TV lounge called 'Groundhog Day'(still using the video projector)
8) Extending the boom pole that will be the stand for the wind turbine to above 2.5 metres because the proppelers take a bit of hight
9) Creating different slots for the radio station eg,news and sport slot, documenteris etc
10) recording the different jingles for the different slots to be broadcasted
I hope I have documented everything done for this day if not you can add...
More fire! 1st Born