There are staple things from my childhood that have shaped me to the way I am now, and these are the following, in no particular order:
- Lego which fuelled my imagination and my technical brain
- Sonic the Hedgehog which gave me my love of computer games
- Playing football every night for 2 years solid which gave me a better footballing brain
- Chris Rea, pumped into the car at every opportunity by my Dad, which probably gave me my love for guitar music.
This morning whilst driving into work I had to stop and fill the car up with petrol in a rather worrying and expensive cyclical routine of design things to extract out of the ground my motors life blood before burning it into water and carbon dioxide. After 8pm Chris Moyles played the newest track from McFly, the little pop wonders gone indie with their latest album releasing it themselves. Whilst listen to Lies I was thinking “Where have I heard this before?”
Well, towards the end, Chris Moyles started to sing “Auberge” which caught me out – could it be? Yes it was! They were talking about a little known Chris Rea track from yesteryear which uncannily sounds like the McFly tune.
The chorus and verse are almost identical in chord progression and rhythm. And it reminded me of something that I always forget: Chris Rea is not that unknown, even though I have only heard it centred on my dad either playing it or requesting it to be played. It is a source of fun for my sister and I, who would point out every time we heard a Chris Rea song on the radio, in a shop, or on TV. I like to think of Chris Rea as my families “thing” and it always makes me smile hearing him played on the radio.
It only gets boring at Christmas when that Chris Rea song is played… (note: this video was uploaded by my Father.)
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
In the middle of the North Sea Pt. 9
A Real, A Fake
As you will be aware there is safety and then there is offshore safety. The need for it is impossible to calculate and the preparation that is required for almost every section of the work it immersive. The calculations done to preserve a process safety point can only go so far, and the allowances for certain parts of the whole shebang to go... well, bang, are quite large to accommodate the fact that if it were to go bang, you'd loose... well, the whole shebang.
So, after lunch yesterday I went back to the HP Condensate and Refrigeration package, and sat down. I unfurled my P&IDs, got my note book out, dropped my pencil in some lube oil, and then stood up, stretched, yawned, and headed up the stairs to the roof of the platform. As I turned around the staircase to head upwards, a noticed a unusual sight.
Rain. Rain indoors. Quizzically I looked again, double taking the vista of water pouring from the roof. I bounded down the stairs and opened the door into the room to find a spray of water jetting from a seal oil cooler at tremendous pressure. It was rebounding back off the roof and into the power turbine pipework, instantly turning into steam on contact with high temperature steelwork.
I called the control room, and they sent out a man to investigate 9probbably not believing me) and he soon saw what all my fuss was about. He called other to his aid and they turned off everything and thanked me for letting them know.
But what if it has been gas rather than water? Or process oil rather than harmless old H2O? Might have been a different story.
The fake emergency was one at night where we all had to don our life jackets and hang about in a corridor for 45 minutes whilst the Emergency Response Teams had a little play with some fake injuries and fighting a fake fire. Not fun, you might assume, and you'd be right - but seeing that water jetting out of that pipe I am glad that they insist on these drills.
As you will be aware there is safety and then there is offshore safety. The need for it is impossible to calculate and the preparation that is required for almost every section of the work it immersive. The calculations done to preserve a process safety point can only go so far, and the allowances for certain parts of the whole shebang to go... well, bang, are quite large to accommodate the fact that if it were to go bang, you'd loose... well, the whole shebang.
So, after lunch yesterday I went back to the HP Condensate and Refrigeration package, and sat down. I unfurled my P&IDs, got my note book out, dropped my pencil in some lube oil, and then stood up, stretched, yawned, and headed up the stairs to the roof of the platform. As I turned around the staircase to head upwards, a noticed a unusual sight.
Rain. Rain indoors. Quizzically I looked again, double taking the vista of water pouring from the roof. I bounded down the stairs and opened the door into the room to find a spray of water jetting from a seal oil cooler at tremendous pressure. It was rebounding back off the roof and into the power turbine pipework, instantly turning into steam on contact with high temperature steelwork.
I called the control room, and they sent out a man to investigate 9probbably not believing me) and he soon saw what all my fuss was about. He called other to his aid and they turned off everything and thanked me for letting them know.
But what if it has been gas rather than water? Or process oil rather than harmless old H2O? Might have been a different story.
The fake emergency was one at night where we all had to don our life jackets and hang about in a corridor for 45 minutes whilst the Emergency Response Teams had a little play with some fake injuries and fighting a fake fire. Not fun, you might assume, and you'd be right - but seeing that water jetting out of that pipe I am glad that they insist on these drills.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
In the middle of the North Sea Pt 8
Tourism: Would you?
In a rather interesting discussion about the future of the oil fields and the proposed future of these oil platforms that we, the unwashed oil workers, scale day in day out my colleague came up with a rather startling idea, and one that not only had I not thought of before, but also was surprised to not have heard it flown before.
So, imagine, in 15 years time, when the oil is gone and the workers have died/retired/moved to china/Arabia, the big companies and the small companies will have a choice. Sell the scrap, blow them up, or turn them into offshore wind farms. Or, as it was put to me today, how about a hotel? No, not like the Christopher brookmyre novel, One Fine Day In The Middle of the Night, where such a thing takes place but with the added bonus of terrorist, but as a day trip type thing where people can come out and have a look around and see what it was like to work out here.
They will see the oil deck, the pumps, the pipework, the heights, the living conditions, and take part in a muster drill. They will be taught about Piper Alpha and the changes made, and most interestingly they will get a chance to taste total seclusion.
Imagine it as the mine heritage parks of the future. Would you come out to see them? Imagine I paid for you to see them, would you do it for free?
In other news I counted the steps from level one of the platform to the roof of the plant I am working on - 139 steps. That's 12 floors or a high rise building. Now you can see why this is the only place that I can loose weight.
In a rather interesting discussion about the future of the oil fields and the proposed future of these oil platforms that we, the unwashed oil workers, scale day in day out my colleague came up with a rather startling idea, and one that not only had I not thought of before, but also was surprised to not have heard it flown before.
So, imagine, in 15 years time, when the oil is gone and the workers have died/retired/moved to china/Arabia, the big companies and the small companies will have a choice. Sell the scrap, blow them up, or turn them into offshore wind farms. Or, as it was put to me today, how about a hotel? No, not like the Christopher brookmyre novel, One Fine Day In The Middle of the Night, where such a thing takes place but with the added bonus of terrorist, but as a day trip type thing where people can come out and have a look around and see what it was like to work out here.
They will see the oil deck, the pumps, the pipework, the heights, the living conditions, and take part in a muster drill. They will be taught about Piper Alpha and the changes made, and most interestingly they will get a chance to taste total seclusion.
Imagine it as the mine heritage parks of the future. Would you come out to see them? Imagine I paid for you to see them, would you do it for free?
In other news I counted the steps from level one of the platform to the roof of the plant I am working on - 139 steps. That's 12 floors or a high rise building. Now you can see why this is the only place that I can loose weight.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
In the middle of the North Sea Pt 7
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Hello. I am in the middle of the North Sea. Well, slightly left of where I was last time, but I think that still counts as the middle. Been working for a day and a half now and I am already bored out of my head, so I started thinking about things to write about, but sometimes these posts write themselves.
- MUSIC is much of the derision when offshore with endless repeats of radio stations that are commercial bound to play 6 tracks each hour and have one other track space for some Dire Straits. This time however no Radio Gold shite, but Radio 1 and Radio 2, which I much more approve of. Infact, I have just heard the new Keane track and the new Automatic track, which really excited me both ways. Others in the room were not too fussed.
"Is that those fucking poofters Keane?" says an inbred reprobate. Minutes later "That's pretty good, who is that?" It's the same song, and the question was asked by the same guy.
"Why are they signing about a dead bloke" says another class act about the new Automatic tune "Steve McQueen" which is really good and a lot like yourcodenameis:milo which is no bad thing. I think, good question, listen harder to the lyrics, until some pipes up "Nah, Steve Mcqueen, does he no play for Inverness Caley?" Groan.
More to follow I can only imagine.
Hello. I am in the middle of the North Sea. Well, slightly left of where I was last time, but I think that still counts as the middle. Been working for a day and a half now and I am already bored out of my head, so I started thinking about things to write about, but sometimes these posts write themselves.
- MUSIC is much of the derision when offshore with endless repeats of radio stations that are commercial bound to play 6 tracks each hour and have one other track space for some Dire Straits. This time however no Radio Gold shite, but Radio 1 and Radio 2, which I much more approve of. Infact, I have just heard the new Keane track and the new Automatic track, which really excited me both ways. Others in the room were not too fussed.
"Is that those fucking poofters Keane?" says an inbred reprobate. Minutes later "That's pretty good, who is that?" It's the same song, and the question was asked by the same guy.
"Why are they signing about a dead bloke" says another class act about the new Automatic tune "Steve McQueen" which is really good and a lot like yourcodenameis:milo which is no bad thing. I think, good question, listen harder to the lyrics, until some pipes up "Nah, Steve Mcqueen, does he no play for Inverness Caley?" Groan.
More to follow I can only imagine.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Mr ChemEng 08: The Tale of Chemical Engineering (Part 3 of 1)
It is rare for a crossover type post on this blog but when Jonathan mentioned early last month that he had worked on a post about his experiences towards the end of his university career it interested me greatly. Initially because it promised to be highly aggressive, vitriolic, and also well written, but whilst it has still a stinging meaning for those close enough to understand the sleight word play and who is being pin pointed, it was much less an attack but rather a measured critique of some people and their blinkered status to all that is around them.
I sometimes wonder about this. At school I was not in the cool gang, and those who were young and went to school understand what that means. I was on periphery during my early years, skimming the tops of the ned culture because of my lack of friends in my practical classes. I was, by definition, uncool, and a bit of a geek (you wouldn't have guessed that the person writing an internet blog would be a geek now would you?) and I didn't mind it that way. It meant that I could get on with my other uncool friends and we had a particularly better time of it, being in the classes higher than the rest and hanging out in the other side of the school grounds.
In my final year of high school it was less pronounced as we all converged on the same rubbish room for banter and pool, sometimes the tables would be swarmed by both cliques, and other times there was an invisible line drawn. Only when doing PE were there no boundaries other than Good at Football and Shit at Football. A teacher once told me that things were going to be different at University.
No. When school is divided up there were only three groups of boys. There were the "neds" who had stayed on at school, getting highers and intermediates just to make it into college, and then there was my group, those who were treading water after getting unconditionals. There was a third group of in-betweeners who had no anchorage; they had the mental capability but did fuck all with it.
At university there was a total of seven different cliques who stayed separate throughout the years but mingled twice a year at various booze filled drunken misnomers where everyone pretended to be friends with each other, whilst the next day darting eyes and nursing sore heads miles away from the heady banter of the twilight before.
There was my group. We were smart, self contained, and kept ourselves to ourselves, eating lunch, going out, playing FIFA and going to the gym on our own. We kept our heads above the water academically and did pretty well out of it.
Then there was the Comedy Group. One of those in this group won Mr ChemEng according to Jonathan – they were the latecomers, the ones who purported to being dumb, but aced many tests and passed every exam (save for a few).
There was also the Sporty Ones, which overlapped in later years with the comedy ones. These guys are the true bastions of ChemEng, mastering the impressive balance between go getting sports achievements, brown nosing with lecturers and passing every exam well.
The "too cool for Uni" group always sat at the back and had a good grasp of inter-lecturer banter. They all professed to thinking each other was a "cunt" but always hung around each other. They too passed the exams, though slightly less well than the previous groups.
The further three had more in common than most, and probably blur into one group. The Geeks (not us amazingly) managed to pass every exam and do every assignment without fail. The Outsiders never really fitted into any group, coming close to my own group (and for a while were probably part of it). The Others are those who dropped out or failed to turn up – the heady stereotypical student types.
This segregation didn't happen to the year above ours in the same way and I can't understand why. It might be personality clashes – I didn't really like anyone from outside my group more than just an acquaintance.
It might be a waste of blog to say all of this as it is centred quite healthily on my own experiences, but I can say for certain that it is not exclusive to university as there are cliques even in the work place. Impressively, I have managed to breach most, getting on email lists for jokes and in on the loop for gossip, which makes a refreshing change to most of my past experiences. The worrisome part is that I might become what I derided in the first couple of paragraphs, those who are too deluded to notice that the reality they are seeing is not the true picture.
To finish this meandering post I shall recount a tale of my past, which neatly echoes Jonathan's post. I bought a year book for my years at high school, and I featured heavily in the photos and wrote a badly written article for it. My profile was an okay length and my photo count was quite high. It is the little things that you notice, like how those who won the awards for best looking were involved in the development of the year book, those who won the funniest we those who were the least funny, and those who crafted the book of such a high quality only featured in good photos and had glowing profiles written about their "impersonation skills" which were so good no one even realised they were doing them.
If I had been allowed to vote for Mr ChemEng it would've been probably Steven McMaster. He did academically well, hated the course, hated everyone on it, and was offered too many jobs with obscene pay rates – nothing epitomises the ethos of the degree more.
I sometimes wonder about this. At school I was not in the cool gang, and those who were young and went to school understand what that means. I was on periphery during my early years, skimming the tops of the ned culture because of my lack of friends in my practical classes. I was, by definition, uncool, and a bit of a geek (you wouldn't have guessed that the person writing an internet blog would be a geek now would you?) and I didn't mind it that way. It meant that I could get on with my other uncool friends and we had a particularly better time of it, being in the classes higher than the rest and hanging out in the other side of the school grounds.
In my final year of high school it was less pronounced as we all converged on the same rubbish room for banter and pool, sometimes the tables would be swarmed by both cliques, and other times there was an invisible line drawn. Only when doing PE were there no boundaries other than Good at Football and Shit at Football. A teacher once told me that things were going to be different at University.
No. When school is divided up there were only three groups of boys. There were the "neds" who had stayed on at school, getting highers and intermediates just to make it into college, and then there was my group, those who were treading water after getting unconditionals. There was a third group of in-betweeners who had no anchorage; they had the mental capability but did fuck all with it.
At university there was a total of seven different cliques who stayed separate throughout the years but mingled twice a year at various booze filled drunken misnomers where everyone pretended to be friends with each other, whilst the next day darting eyes and nursing sore heads miles away from the heady banter of the twilight before.
There was my group. We were smart, self contained, and kept ourselves to ourselves, eating lunch, going out, playing FIFA and going to the gym on our own. We kept our heads above the water academically and did pretty well out of it.
Then there was the Comedy Group. One of those in this group won Mr ChemEng according to Jonathan – they were the latecomers, the ones who purported to being dumb, but aced many tests and passed every exam (save for a few).
There was also the Sporty Ones, which overlapped in later years with the comedy ones. These guys are the true bastions of ChemEng, mastering the impressive balance between go getting sports achievements, brown nosing with lecturers and passing every exam well.
The "too cool for Uni" group always sat at the back and had a good grasp of inter-lecturer banter. They all professed to thinking each other was a "cunt" but always hung around each other. They too passed the exams, though slightly less well than the previous groups.
The further three had more in common than most, and probably blur into one group. The Geeks (not us amazingly) managed to pass every exam and do every assignment without fail. The Outsiders never really fitted into any group, coming close to my own group (and for a while were probably part of it). The Others are those who dropped out or failed to turn up – the heady stereotypical student types.
This segregation didn't happen to the year above ours in the same way and I can't understand why. It might be personality clashes – I didn't really like anyone from outside my group more than just an acquaintance.
It might be a waste of blog to say all of this as it is centred quite healthily on my own experiences, but I can say for certain that it is not exclusive to university as there are cliques even in the work place. Impressively, I have managed to breach most, getting on email lists for jokes and in on the loop for gossip, which makes a refreshing change to most of my past experiences. The worrisome part is that I might become what I derided in the first couple of paragraphs, those who are too deluded to notice that the reality they are seeing is not the true picture.
To finish this meandering post I shall recount a tale of my past, which neatly echoes Jonathan's post. I bought a year book for my years at high school, and I featured heavily in the photos and wrote a badly written article for it. My profile was an okay length and my photo count was quite high. It is the little things that you notice, like how those who won the awards for best looking were involved in the development of the year book, those who won the funniest we those who were the least funny, and those who crafted the book of such a high quality only featured in good photos and had glowing profiles written about their "impersonation skills" which were so good no one even realised they were doing them.
If I had been allowed to vote for Mr ChemEng it would've been probably Steven McMaster. He did academically well, hated the course, hated everyone on it, and was offered too many jobs with obscene pay rates – nothing epitomises the ethos of the degree more.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Insanity Crash: Only In Aberdeen
Before I post a reply to Jonathan's post, I thought I'd share something quite funny. I work in an Industrial Estate and the closest places for food are Burger King or a little sandwich place called Take5. Or, if you so wish to die of coronary heart disease, the trucker burger vans, of which there are many.
So today I drive past one on the way into to work and see the owner stocking up pulling boxes of sausages/burgers/bacon/fat/death out of his boot. And what car is he driving?
A convertible BMW 3 series coupe. Only in Aberdeen.
So today I drive past one on the way into to work and see the owner stocking up pulling boxes of sausages/burgers/bacon/fat/death out of his boot. And what car is he driving?
A convertible BMW 3 series coupe. Only in Aberdeen.
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