Monday 11 and Tuesday 12
On Tuesday I headed South again for a meeting with Schlumberger in the Sugarland complex. This is a fairly large campus and is used for R&D amongst other things. All of the buildings have blue roofs, blue being the Schlumberger colour, and seem to be limited to 2 stories high. The Forum, which is the building behind the flag poles, has conference rooms and a canteen. There is outdoor seating on the left which overlooks the lake and fountain. Behind the lake is a working drilling rig , used for training. They aren't allowed to actually drill any deeper than they have already so they fill the hole with concrete and then drill it out again.
We met with Han Yu, who is seen walking back to her office in front of the flag poles above. She has a system for interfacing with a WITS data source. This is an older style interface and I wrote and interface for the DOS version of this system back in the 90s. However that was fairly limited and specific and DOS. Rather than re-invent the wheel, we are going to use Schlumberger's expertise to handle the low level stuff and just pick the data from their buffer, similar to the idea for the newer WITSHTML . Unfortunately, despite fiddling around yesterday afternoon and last night I have not yet succeeded in getting my program talking to their library.
There are a lot of advertisements here for Medical services, compared to Australia, where there don't seem to be enough doctors, hospital beds etc. In addition, to the the bill board I mentioned at the start, there are ads on the radio and TV for hospitals and a lot of drug advertising. The law makes them list side effects, and these can be quite amusing even if the underlying intent is serious, especially when "death" is listed as a possible side affect. By the way, the billboard was for a clinic that specialises in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, run by a Dr Brown.
I have seen a few strange names about including a couple of billboards advertising the "Brown Hand Center". Care to guess what that is?
Monday was mundane. I went to work, had lunch, came home and stayed in for dinner, so no photos. Work was actually reasonabaly interesting as I started working on the live capture module. I set up a similation by reaing and existing data set in,one record at a time and then processing that record rather than reading the entire file and then processing all the records. I also fixed a problem with the ERD database plot. You can add and delete points on this plot when dispalyed in feet but there was a problem when the units were metres.
Monday was mundane. I went to work, had lunch, came home and stayed in for dinner, so no photos. Work was actually reasonabaly interesting as I started working on the live capture module. I set up a similation by reaing and existing data set in,one record at a time and then processing that record rather than reading the entire file and then processing all the records. I also fixed a problem with the ERD database plot. You can add and delete points on this plot when dispalyed in feet but there was a problem when the units were metres.
Only 4 of us went to lunch, but it was a nice meal at a Vietnamese restaurant. I stayed in for dinner and just had toasted sandwiches.
On Tuesday I headed South again for a meeting with Schlumberger in the Sugarland complex. This is a fairly large campus and is used for R&D amongst other things. All of the buildings have blue roofs, blue being the Schlumberger colour, and seem to be limited to 2 stories high. The Forum, which is the building behind the flag poles, has conference rooms and a canteen. There is outdoor seating on the left which overlooks the lake and fountain. Behind the lake is a working drilling rig , used for training. They aren't allowed to actually drill any deeper than they have already so they fill the hole with concrete and then drill it out again.
We met with Han Yu, who is seen walking back to her office in front of the flag poles above. She has a system for interfacing with a WITS data source. This is an older style interface and I wrote and interface for the DOS version of this system back in the 90s. However that was fairly limited and specific and DOS. Rather than re-invent the wheel, we are going to use Schlumberger's expertise to handle the low level stuff and just pick the data from their buffer, similar to the idea for the newer WITSHTML . Unfortunately, despite fiddling around yesterday afternoon and last night I have not yet succeeded in getting my program talking to their library.Richard took the 2 of us to lunch at a Pappasito's Restaurant. This is a high end Mexican chain and the food was delicious. I took a photo of the platter I shared with Han, with 2 Lobster tails, prawns, chicken and beef fajitas but I won't bore you with it. A different Pappasito's was the first place I ate on my first trip to Houston 12 years ago. After 30 hours or so travelling I was collected at the airport and taken to the restaurant where other Aussies and the Company presidents family met us. A liberal dose of margaritas had me falling asleep the instant my head hit the pillow.
I finished a new report once I got back to the office, which basically combines the remarks from all the daily reports for a well. The guys were cutting and pasting for hours to create the equivalent document manually, so they are quite happy.
Richard had mentioned that the 2 Russian engineers who turned up last week for a 3 month visit had bought their wives, one of whom has a toddler with them. The men are at a course in Calgary and the women don't drive and only one of them speaks English. They are staying at the same complex as me, so I got their apartment numbers and called in after work. They didn't want to go out to eat but were very happy to be taken shopping at the supermarket.
I sorted out some problems for a client back home and started trying to interface with the WITS library but gave up and went to bed about 11.30.
There are a lot of advertisements here for Medical services, compared to Australia, where there don't seem to be enough doctors, hospital beds etc. In addition, to the the bill board I mentioned at the start, there are ads on the radio and TV for hospitals and a lot of drug advertising. The law makes them list side effects, and these can be quite amusing even if the underlying intent is serious, especially when "death" is listed as a possible side affect. By the way, the billboard was for a clinic that specialises in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, run by a Dr Brown.
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