Our group went all across and around the Olkhon Island, and we even got to do some ice skating on a smooth part of the lake.

In these months the ice is thick enough for cars to drive on, so that's the main mode of transport. The drivers can be pretty crazy there, our guide told us some of them go upwards of 100 km/h on ice lol, that sounds very dangerous.

But we also traveled on airboats a few times -- also a fairly unique experience.

2/2

#travel #baikal

At the end of January we traveled to Lake Baikal with @bugaevc -- our first time there, and generally in such cold weather. Imagine plane landing at ~4 AM your time and the flight attendant announcing "Welcome to Irkutsk, the temperature outside is -40°"

We were well prepared though and had a great time! Lots of gorgeous scenery and a huge variety of ice types and formations. 1/2

#travel #baikal

One of the students in our lab just spent an hour trying to figure out why a new member's LDAP account wasn't working in our GitLab. Turns out that in a recent update, usernames starting with "ai_" stopped working because... they are "reserved for GitLab AI entities"