Modern times? No!

Participating in some very scenic event with twelve people these days likely results in gigabyte after gigabyte of digital photos. And distributing these can be a bit cumbersome. E-mail won't process them. They might be too big for DropBox or YouSendIt. How does one solve that? With an FTP site!

If you write a scientific article about something having to do with earth sciences, you often have rather large files with pictures. And co-authors, often spread out over Europe or even the globe. It makes sense, therefore, that research institutes have an FTP site. The VU had one. And the Norwegian Polar Institute too. But Plymouth doesn't. At least that's consistent; they don't even do central file storage, so for both storage and transfer you're on your own. Not very practical. I tend to rely on YouSendIt, but in Norway I took way too many pictures to be able to send them on my rather basic account.

But fear not: one of our hikers, Thias, has his own FTP site! And even though I have had issues in the past accessing it, it has, in the end always worked to put my pictures there, and to access the pictures taken by others. How ideal! Almost.

I tried to connect to his site. In vain. I tried and tried and tried. And in the end I gave up. I burned all my pictures onto CD (4 Cd's worth of snow!) and sent them to him by snailmail. So much for modern technology! I have had a bit of a preview on the other pictures, through Facebook, but for the full exchange I still rely on some chap in uniform lugging my data to the mainland. A bit disappointing! I am a bit of a Luddite in general, but in such instances I think progress simply hasn't gone fast enough.