Views
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Microsoft Office 2007
I have been using Microsoft’s 2007 version of their office suite for a little over six months now and while i have managed to become accustomed to some parts of the “ribbon” there are other parts where it is sheer torture to use for anybody with a good working knowledge of the older version.
One example [...]
Will it break $100.00 this year?
Technorati Tags: oil prices , Turkey , Kurdish separatists
The title is referring to the price of oil. At $90.00 per barrel as this is being written it would be foolish to bet against it. With the turmoil in the Middle East being added to by the Turkish government’s decision to pursue Kurdish [...]
Thirty reasons women have things easier than men
1. They got off the Titanic first.
2. They get to flirt with systems support men who always return their calls, and are nice to them when they blow up their computers.
3. Their boyfriend’s clothes make them look elfin & gorgeous. Guys look like complete idiots in theirs.
4. They can be groupies. Male groupies are stalkers.
5. [...]
Things you may not have known
Technorati Tags: strange facts , human body
The human body contains enough phosphorus to make the heads of 200 matches, enough fat for seven bars of soap, and enough iron to make one nail.
The human body has over 45 miles of nerves.
The human body has over 600 muscles, 40% of the body’s weight.
The human [...]
Personnel department computer system
Technorati Tags: personnel department , personnel shortage , computerized systems
While on a crew run by one of the biggest name seismic outfits recently I was surprised to hear that one of the staff had been bid for multiple jobs at the same time. Bidding in this manner is not unusual but what [...]
Fur flies over Miss Universe
Technorati Tags: PETA , animal rights , Miss Universe
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and some of the other raving loony animal rights types are campaigning to get the reigning Miss Universe, Japan’s Riyo Mori, to stop wearing animal furs by accusing her of promoting cruelty.
Ms Mori, 20, a ballerina [...]
Office 2007
To those who are using company computers the issue of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007 may not be in your near future, especially as larger companies are not climbing over each other to upgrade. I recently bought a new Dell to replace the IBM ThinkPad that I complained about in a recent post and decided [...]
Safety Culture Today
Seismic has changed a lot during my years in the industry. In the late seventies there were no such things as HSE reports or stop cards. Management seminars and meetings were about production, costs, logistics and quality. These days HSE plays a very big role and takes up a lot of time both in such [...]
IBM ThinkPad T60 by Lenovo
I recently bought an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T60 to replace my four year old Dell Precision laptop. You would think that moving from a 2.0 GHz Pentium M to the latest dual core 2.15 GHz processor and going up in RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB there would be a major difference in performance [...]
Partial News Reporting or PC Bias?
I was on a crew in Ethiopia’s southern Ogaden region in April. I left the crew just three days before an attack by ONLF (Ogaden National Liberation Front) rebels, a muslim based group from the pictures shown. The attack killed sixty-five local employees (the people that the rebels claim to be fighting to liberate) and nine of [...]
Pullout from Iraq
Although I generally tend to disagree with the majority I have to admit that I am in agreement with them one the subject of pulling out of Iraq. I do, however, have a very different reason for thinking this way. Most people want to get the soldiers out of harms way or want to stop [...]
Political Correctness
I met up with an old friend last night and we talked about a lot of things. The more we spoke the clearer it became that we are a pair of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs is probably the wrong choice of words as we are not quite extinct yet but we are definitely part of a dwindling [...]
Online Purchasing
I wonder how many of you out there have problems with online purchases while you are on the crew. I just had another payment rejected by one of the big online payments processing groups. My firewall just came up for renewal or, more accurately, informed me that it would soon be up for renewal.
I decided [...]
Absolutely SFW | Reg Developer
Just a quick one on the subject of safety. Click on the link below to go to The Register and have a look at their article on workplace safety. I have included a choice quote below. Does this sound like any of the HSE people you have come across? Go over there and read the [...]
HSE in Seismic
Once again I am back to the subject of HSE and its insidious effects on the industry. This episode is brought about by a HSE representative who massages the books by saying that people visiting the doctor on the crew and receiving medical treatment do not constitute medical treatment cases.
How on earth does this get [...]
Tesla Roadster
While I have worked in the seismic industry for more than 30 years and believe that everybody who makes a living in the oil industry should drive a big block V8 powered gas guzzler I have to admit that I do like the look of this electric roadster.
Looking at the car you would never [...]
Only in America
Where else would you see something like this?
Firewall Performance
I recently uninstalled Outpost Pro’s Firewall from my laptop because of performance issues. Outpost had just announced a full suite of firewall and antivirus and I had been thinking seriously about giving up my old antivirus program and moving to the suite when the performance issues started. I really liked the superb control allowed by [...]
Male & Female definitions
buttfemale – the body part that every item of clothing ever manufactured makes “look bigger”male – what you slap when someone scores a touchdown, home run, or goal. Also good for mooning
commitmentfemale – a desire to get married and raise a familymale – not trying to pick up other women while out with [...]
Reality check
I had seen this as a poster some years ago on a seismic boat before I noticed it the other day on a web site. The girl might or might not have been different but the message was the same. It does give us something to think about.
Keep this in mind when you are drooling over [...]
Restaurants guilty of sponsoring "extreme eating" say food police
Here is one of the type of headline that really galls me. What kind of garbage are these people expecting us to swallow now? Are we to believe that, in a world which sells more diet books than ever before and has headlines such as this all too often, there are still people who are not [...]
Banks: It’s their profit, and your loss
I just read an article about the so-called service that banks provide today. In the seismic industry most of us get paid by wire transfer. How long does it take for the banks to credit your account? I live in Indonesia and the central bank there has the first chop at it, followed by my bank, [...]
We want your photos
The picture at the left was uploaded to the gallery by one of our readers on the very first day he registered. I find it hard to believe that with so many new registered users nobody out there has any pictures they would like to share with the rest of us. We add a [...]
They own you
Do you think are a free man? Think again. Companies out there are working hard to patent your genes.
How many of you out there realize that there are companies patenting genes from your body. These patents are being granted and are enforceable so that the company owning the patents, in effect, owns you.
Once a gene [...]
Nice view!
What a cracking pair…on both of em.
Camp Move
The scene above shows a typical seismic camp move in the Middle East.
