All creatures great and small

We were hard at work. I was testing the plant to make sure that the equipment was working and was just about to take a break in the office, where all the caffinated drinks are stored.

"Hey, you know there's a snake under the jetty?"

Indeed there was. And what a snake it was. There were actually three snakes there, and the biggest one was probably around two metres in length. I think they were pythons, which is good because they're not particularly dangerous to humans.

Anyway, when the news got around, pretty much everyone went around and had a look. I estimate that we lost about 2 man hours of productivity due to that snake.

Snake, it's a snake!

Oh.

We had a bit of a problem with O-rings at our plant. The supplier of the filter provided O-rings which were about half a millimetre too small. Which was fine when you're filtering water, but when we tried to prove that the filter was good by putting compressed air in, it failed miserably.

Why are O-rings so called? Isn't the normal shape of a ring an O? Why not call them ring seals or something else? Isn't the term "O-ring" a bit of a tautology?

Never mind me, I'm just a computer systems engineer trying to make sense of the mechanical engineering world.

Gender

I was considering posting a blog containing the line: "I read the weekend
newspaper as a form of escapism. I want to escape to a place where the
number of females are equal to the number of males." Then I thought about
it some more and decided that this would be a rather sad comment.

The reality of construction sites, and to a lesser extent the entire
engineering profession, is that it is an extremely gender skewed
profession. The last statistics I remember was that 85% of undergraduate
engineering students at Monash were male. This was worse than the IT
faculty, and substantially worse than the Nursing Faculty, which is the
faculty most biased towards the fairer gender (about 60%).

Yesterday morning we were waiting for a couple of representatives from BOC
to come from site. "That person coming over today is a sheila, isn't she?"

Well, all the young single males on site ended up having a nice chat to
Tracy. Except me. Maybe I'm a snob.

Busyness

Things have been happening very quickly at work. I haven't had a lot of time to blog, even though a lot of bloggable things have been happening to me. I'm just going to blog via email for a week or so.

Beach balls.

End of school holidays last week for NSW last week. (Holidays? What's that?) Anyway, Ballina Pressie Church was holding a kid's day camp over the holidays.

A bit of background: the church is heritage listed. It has about 3m walls, and the roof is so arched that it's probably about 6m in the centre. It's a grey stone church, and there are three stained glass windows on the side. I believe it was built around the turn of the 20th century.

On Sunday the pastor of the church, Hamish, gave a short report on what happened during the kid's camp to the rest of the congregation.

"And one other thing we learned was whether or not we are allowed to bounce a beach ball around in church. Well, kids, are we allowed or not?

Of course we are."

So we bounced a beach ball around in church. Every time anyone bounced the beach ball ball we had to recite another word from our memory verses.

It worked pretty well, except for one old lady who, instead of bouncing the ball upwards, kept slamming the ball into the back of the head of another elderly lady about two pews in front.

The effects of lightning on copper phone lines

Here's a graph of download speeds over time. There was a flash of lightning about the time when the download speed drops out, and a rumble of thunder just before it picks up again.

Notice that there are no actual download speeds in KB/s. That's because dialup is depressingly slow.

English for tourism

I've been listening to ABC Podcasts lately. Just out of boredom. Heck, I've even been listening to Radio National as well. (They can be pretty interesting at times. Shock, horror!)

So I thought I'd listen to Radio Australia's "English for Tourism", a Chinese-language radio program to educate the Chinese how to talk to English speakers.

It's like those Open Learning shows where there is some kind of situational dialogue, and voice-overs explain what everyone is saying.

In Open Learning, the situations they used were dull and boring. Take a listen to this MP3 if you have the time. It has a bit of a twist to it.

(Sorry Liwu, the "Link" field isn't working for me. I've added it now.)

Back to work

Who said Melbourne weather was lousy? It certainly wasn't last weekend.

I spent a weekend back home last weekend. We watched the new Wallace and Gromit movie, which was actually quite amusing. (The Great Escape is to Chicken Run as King Kong is to the Wererabbit.) Came home to a massive pile of mail in my room. I didn't manage to pay one bill on time, but I don't think it'll matter much anyway.

Met up with Dad. Out of sheer coincidence, he was in a meeting in Sydney last week and managed to get back home to Melbourne at exactly the same time I was heading back. God planned this weekend well, with all the good weather and the joy of meeting friends and family on the same weekend.

I still woke up at 5:30 in the morning. The equinox has passed, so now Melbourne days are slightly longer than Ballina days, but it was a bit annoying to have gotten up early. Ah well, more time to appreciate home time I suppose.

Watched the soccer game on Sunday. Pleased to see our team beat the blue-and-black team 3-0. Seems that the quality of play has improved on both sides from when I last remember. Maybe I've just forgotten though.

Purchased a new computer. Much faster than the Windows 98 early-Pentium 3 machine we've been tolerating lately. Barely had enough time to set it up with all the things that were happening over the weekend anyway. Thanks to Li Wu for helping out with that.

I miss broadband.

Oh, and today I booked my flight back for November. It'll be on the first weekend, for the 5th and 6th of November. Work doesn't quite seem so bad when you know you've still got a home to go back to.

The dog.

A dog walked into the site yesterday. No collar, no form of ID. Presumably no site safety induction either. We had to call the pound. You can't just wall onto a construction site without a helmet.

P.S. This post was originally done using MMS from my mobile. Blogger/Telstra decided to post my phone number on the internet. Well, there's that idea out the window.