I Wonder Why

HSE has become an important part of life in the oil exploration business but I have often wondered why it is that many of the HSE people seem to have things backward. Instead of looking at crews that get through without any HSE incidents the HSE people concern themselves with why accidents happen. Full story »

New sensor supports oil exploration

Sensor Systems claim to have made a the first advancement in almost 50 years in seismic sensors.

The new device, an all-optical, fiber-optic omnidirectional geophone, requires no in-situ electronics, copper conductors, or electrical power. It incorporates a self-contained optical interrogation unit (using an optical time division multiplexing methodology) with integrated laser sources; all of the system electronics reside in the optical interrogator. Receiver electronics demodulate the optical signals from the geophones, translating them into digital electronic signals. A fiber optic telemetry cable provides the data path to and from the individual geophones. A single optical interrogator can address up to 128 individual geophones.

Full story »

Spending Your Way Out of Trouble

The world’s financial problems came about by having a government push financial institutions into providing home mortgages to people who would not be allowed to hold a credit card in a third world country. These mortgages were invested in by a wide range of outside companies without anything approaching due diligence. These companies include insurance firms and private pension funds who should have known better.

Long after it was obvious that there were looming problems with the so-called “sub-prime” mortgages investors (generally using other peoples money) continued to buy in. When the penny finally dropped there was such enormous exposure from financial institutions that many of them needed to be bailed out with government money. It sort of makes you wonder why these firms payed big salaries to their financial people if they couldn’t see this one coming. Full story »

Great Service From Amazon.com

A recent experience with Amazon’s service people has left me smiling. Generally I have rather low expectations for service from online sellers but this was one occasion when the service was genuinely excellent.

I had ordered some books and had them sent to my address in Indonesia using the cheapest method, which has worked okay many times before (though slowly) and the first shipment (out of two) arrived in about the normal time frame of about five to six weeks while the second shipment, which had been shipped the same day but probably from a different location, was nowhere to be found three weeks later than the first shipments arrival. Full story »

Sudan Pictures

WNPOC Sudan (18 photos)
13 June 2007, Juba

Global Warming Scam

I think that it is high time that the public started calling the media on the garbage they are spewing about global warming, sea level rises and all of the associated ills which they are making up as they go along. Take a look at the old pictures and quotes below and make up your own mind. Full story »

Nokia E71

My all-time favourite mobile phone was my old Sony Ericsson P910i but SE’s later phones just don’t match up in features or ease of use. I replaced the P910i with a Nokia E61i after the scroll wheel got wrecked by an idiot in airport security in Jakarta knocked the phone off the scanner in his haste to look at the duty free booze I was carrying.

The E61 was okay for text messaging and such but I had a hard time setting it up to send and receive email no matter how many times I rechecked the settings. The other problem was the sheer width of the phone making it difficult to find a belt pouch for it. It fit into the pocket of a work shirt but I had it drop out when I bent over, luckily without breakage, just a couple of scratches and a dent on one corner. The E61 was solid with a steel battery cover and a large battery, making it good for those long conversations with clients when things go wrong. Full story »

Vibroseis versus Dynamite

I’m currently on a 2D job which is mainly flat but it does have one portion in the middle which has some hills requiring bulldozer cutting. The client emailed me the other day asking about using vibes in the hills as somebody at the office had asked if it wouldn’t be better to use dynamite. On this job dynamite is not a realistic option as importing the stuff is difficult and drills are just not available to get it down to a decent depth so I needed to answer in such a way that he would be able to convince the doubters.

The first thing that I normally do in these cases is look for an expert opinion that has been published in a respected journal but as I looked around the Internet for any sort of scientific comparison between vibroseis and dynamite on flat terrain I came up empty, far less a comparison on steeper grades. Full story »

New Server Home for Seismic Talk

I have not made any posts for some time as I tried different software to run Seismic Talk and a couple of different hosting accounts. I tried using another gallery style as well with the images hosted on another service but could not get things set up to make it easy for other people to add albums to the gallery. After some time it was apparent that the other systems could not come close to the user friendliness of Wordpress and Gallery2 with the WPG2 bridge making them work together harmoniously so I just updated the old site with a bit of a facelift and got all of the other bits up to date.

Seismic Talk is now hosted on a new account with its own IP address. I had tried to set it up on a Virtual Private Server but kept running into issues with file permissions causing automatic updating of plug-ins and the system itself to behave badly. This was not the fault of the hosting company, their equipment ran very well and served the site up faster than ever before, but one of the quirks of virtualization software in conjunction with the site software which even the best service in the world could not fix.

I could have gone back to updating things manually but laziness is a factor. The automatic updates work well on this new server and the speed should be okay even on a shared server as the system information always shows a low load factor for all of the different services and hardware.

The hosting company that I am using now did a fantastic job of moving the site with only a few small tweaks needed to get everything functional in its new home.

Hopefully now that things are set up I will be able to spend more time adding more posts for you to read.

Airport Security

I thought airport security was over the top when I couldn’t get into an airport because I was carrying a windproof lighter as “It could be used as a weapon” but this is just plain downright ridiculous.

Brad Jayakody, from Bayswater, central London, was stopped from boarding because his Transformers T-shirt depicted a robot with a gun. Now I know that the Brits have become all new age sensitive and namby-pamby about guns but this was a picture for crying out loud. A picture of a cartoon show robot that kids all over the world watch.

Mr Jayakody said he had to change before boarding as security officers objected to the gun, held by the cartoon character.

Airport operator BAA said it was investigating the incident.

Mr Jayakody said the incident happened a few weeks ago, when he was challenged by an official during a pre-flight security check.

“He says, ‘we won’t be able to let you through because your T-shirt has got a gun on it’,” Mr Jayakody said.

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’.

“[The official's] supervisor comes over and goes ’sorry we can’t let you through and you’ve a gun on your T-shirt’,” he said.

Mr Jayakody said he had to strip and change his T-shirt there before he was allowed to board his flight.

“I was just looking for someone with a bit of common sense,” he said.

It’s a cartoon robot what threat is it to security or offensive to anyone at all.” Full story »