X hoch X

Sooooooo... what have i been up to lately. After school in Abu Dhabi i spent a one-month holiday (first one after half a year of working) in my home, Europe. Meeting family and friends. Fine. More will be blogged later. Gotta sort through the many photos i took first.

Then i got back to Bahrain for visa stuff, took only two days. Back to the sand. Driving over the bridge i saw a thermometer that was built in the car: 43 degrees. Not that much. The most i've seen so far was 48 degrees. Celsius. It's around 50 degrees in midday. And i had to physically work outside a couple of times at midday. Well, hot. Drink enough water. What can i say, the desert is still the desert.
After arriving here in the late afternoon i just learned from my boss that i'd go to the rig the next morning. Nothing unexpected there, same procedure as before. Was in the desert 26 days, two rigs. With good people, teaching me stuff. Then i got a whole of seven days in the city - new record! - before going to the rig again. But just for six days, replacing someone and then back to town for a couple of days. Then to the rig for two weeks.

That first 26 days in the desert i was doing the night shift, from 18 to 6, so for about a month my motto was:

Sunset - that is when my shift starts here.
Sunrise - that is when my shift is about to end.

I got back to town on 7/11 - damn, gotta get to an American 7/11 sooner or later on that day. To get my free squishee. Here in town there is literally nothing to do. Except getting some rest without engine noise, at least. I went to a shopping center. There at the food court i saw McDonald's poster with a Shrek3 promo and "Only in Cinemas" written around it. Hahaha, that translates to "not in this country".
Anyways, now is the most probably last time that my age is x to the power of x, x being an integer. Thanks for all the nice greetings, i try to answer them all, still working on it. Not that it was that many, but being busy here kept me from writing emails - i like to write long ones, if you haven't noticed... Got some great e-cards as well. Two with the always entertaining Hoops&Yoyo, hehe. One with a little green man wielding his lightsaber. Truly knows me :-)
But "den Vogel abgeschossen" has one with a sheep that brought me a parcel which exploded and had a living pig in side. Just a pig for luck, i guess. But sitting here in a country where it is impossible and illegal to get some pork that thing is getting a whole new dimension...
All in all i got greetings from Austria, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Croatia, France, Saudi, Oman (well, if you consider people's nationalities also from Bolivia, Sudan/Egypt and Lebanon), United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Belgium, Poland, Ireland in no particular order. Ain't the internet a nice thing. Thanks a lot.

Two days after that day a friend of mine also came back to town. We went to eat Thai food. Nice place, nice food. First time i sat in the "family section" of a restaurant here. Guess that white face's good for something, haha. In town i got the evenings for me - during the day i'm at the base. No weekends. Not much to do, anyways.

What else? Merely eight months after i got here i finally have a room in the place i was supposed to stay since the beginning. Ain't that great. It's almost as if they actually wanted me to stay now. Not too convinced, though. So here's my room.


What's so special about this picture? The wall! It's a real building, bricks, wall, and all, not sleeping in a container in town anymore. And i don't have to check out each time i go to the rig anymore. Wow... as i've said, took them only eight months more than in every other location i've heard of.

More will follow hopefully soon, got some pics - not many, mind you, don't want to get arrested and not much to see here, anyways - we'll see.

A question that came to my mind in the desert:

Are grasshoppers still called grasshoppers when they have no grass to hopp upon? I mean, what's the official name for those around here? Sandhoppers or deserthoppers would be more appropriate, i guess.

Drink a beer for me.
Cheers.

Pain

Today is sunday, August 5th, 2007. Says my calendar. So i am in pain now for ten days. Why? Does 7/27/07 mean anything to you? No? I'll give you a hint:

If that wasn't clear enough, here it comes in plain words: The Simpsons Movie has finally been released! Eighteen years in the making etc. I've watched the Simpsons ever since they were on TV, since i was about ten. I still got some newspaper articles in a box from back then. Even got the first Simpsons sticker album back in '90 or '91, complete collection with all stickers. Try that when you're eleven. And i've read the comic books since '97... not to forget, San Diego Comic Con 2004 where i met Matt Groening and all the other guys you so far had only known from the DVD audio commentaries (and various other interesting people like Stan Lee or Will Eisner, and was part of the 6500 people present when the title of Episode III was officially announced to the world...). So, yes, i was waiting for this movies from long before the first rumors were circulating that it'd finally be done - when Matt Groening stopped saying they would only make a movie once the series stopps being produced for TV. It got kinda official when Fox registered the simpsonsmovie.com URL. And sooner or later Simpsons people started talking about it and then the first teaser,...

Anyways, why pain? Because i am in a country without cinemas! And don't give me that "just download it" or "you can watch it later on DVD" bullshit. Of course i will purchase the DVD once it's here, but it's The Simpsons MOVIE, for fuck's sake! We've had the Simpsons on TV screens for almost two decades but this is meant to be seen on the silver screen. Noone who says watching a movie on a laptop is just as good will ever understand me... oh my, this forsaken country.
The only thing i could do on the 27th was head over to the official page and take a look around. I don't want no spoilers, but i had to get something. So i watched all the trailers again, even if they give away some of the good jokes. I also created myself as a Simpson character, quite a funny feature. The link they sent me didn't work but i took a screenshot in a familiar environment:

Familiar yes, even though i've never been to that place right down the block, where you can drink your misery away... but now i have. Gotta admit, i might have a bit less hair now and i'm no longer so slim, but the yellow recreation of myself is accurate enough. Try it out, it's a fun feature.

So i'm left with the hope that the movie will still be playing in cinemas once i get back to cinemas.

Cheers
CGA

• "How did the pig tracks get onto the ceiling?"
• See Our Family. And Feel Better About Yours.
• A Hard Place.

...all i got here is the two seasons (got only the first episode of Who Shot Mr.Burns?, luckily i know the adorable person whodunit...) i found on DVD on my last visit to Madrid - hence i can watch them in English original version or in Spanish - and the background of the angry mob that i have on my laptop now...

Blood is thicker than water

#this should've been blogged about two months ago

So, not too long ago my aunt from New Zealand dropped by in Dubai. As it was on the weekend i could happily join them for a day of family reunion. How nice! And how typical for this kind of lifestyle. One lives here, one lives there, you meet in the middle - of the world. Hehe.

It was also the first time since November that i've talked German again. Obviously it was no big deal getting into it again. But during the day it happened to me three or four times that i caught myself saying a sentence in German and then realizing that i took an English one in my head and just translated it word-by-word. Thinking in English, weird. But i guess that was also when i was explaining my job for the first time in German. I don't know most of those technical/engineering terms in German, and i've just learned them them in English!

Oh well, too much text already. I'll give you some pics now.

The road to Dubai. Bloody cab driver tried to ripp me off.

My swiss unlce. Hehe. We get along well.
The classic "excuse me, could you take a picture of us, please?" shot.
And here's my aunt :-)
Le cool.

Gotta find that shot of the three of us wearing old-school sunglasses back in Murau, taken on their last visit to Europe.

Dubai tourism.
Swiss Burge ;-)
Happy face in the fake fort.
Pictures of people taking pictures. Hah, i was faster! Also take a look at the classic - read: non-digital - camera.
Asian lunch.
YAPS.
(yet another postcard shot)
Beautiful light. The way to the 360 bar at sunset.
Auntie&uncle in the infamous 360 bar. They liked it, too.

Family shot.
Mall bin.
Ski dubai. Indoor skiing. Top fakeness.
Fake St.Moritz. Real Swiss man.
Not related to the rest - this picture was taken in a Japanese "Alles 20 Schilling"-shop in Abu Dhabi. Just liked the weirdness there. And of course i bought some stuff. The chain is real Japanese, according to the Japan-loving friend of mine who brought me there.

So much for that, blogged long time after it happened. To explain the title, i'll tell you what a Bolivian friend of mine told us, just before he got into the car that took him to the airport to go back to Bolivia:
"Never forget, your family comes first!"
But then again, the last thing he said was "Maybe i'll never meet anyone of you again, so i'll see you in hell!". Good man.

Cheers.

Do What You Do

Hello-lo,

so, as promised, a blog with a little bit about what it actually is that i do here all this time in the desert. I mean, my work.

I help people drill a hole. That's it. Drill it to wherever they want to drill it. And tell them what's down there (yes, we only drill down into the ground). If you want to read on, i will go a little more into details.

To start you might want to familiarize yourself a bit with what's the situation on a rig. A good overview can be found in the book "A Primer to Oilwell Drilling" - a standard issue by some American oil organization, you might find it in your local library. A nice'n'easy read, a good introduction to what's going on at the rig. Kind of a standard work. You can read it, i actually had to, as part of my training.

And to those of you who've sent me seasonal greetings last december - it's already more than ten years that i don't care about "happy Julfest" anymore, but anyways, thanks for thinking of me :-) - it might cheer you up that my job is basically about setting up christmas trees.
Well, if our job is done they put a christmas tree on top of it and yeeehah they start producing, most of the time. Each time i go to/leave the rig i pass by some of them on the road. And no, i still don't care about Julfest.

For all animal lovers: Ain't it some funny place, a rig. We got a mousehole, sometimes also a rathole, a doghouse and a monkeyboard - next to the fingerboard.

But back to my job. They drill a hole, using a bit and after that some 'tools', so some pipes with more sophisticated stuff in them. That's where we come in. We, me: I am an MWD, in short. Or an LWD. Full job title might be MWD/LWD engineer. MWD refers to the drilling parameters, LWD to formation parameters. In other words, MWD data tell them where they are drilling to and how it's going so far, and LWD data helps to see what's down there.

We bring our own container, the 'logging unit', to the rig. Our own little room. Before we put our tools in the hole, they gotta be programmed. So we connect a cable from the PC in the container to tools through a hole in the outer pipe. And programm into the tool what we want it to do. In some tools we have to load lithium batteries which is quite a physical task, screwing them in with a, how to say, 1.5m long screwdriver-thingie... when we're ready preparing we're ready for pick-up. Which means the 'bottom-hole-assembly' will be screwed together on the rigfloor. Since most of that is our tools we are there to tell them how and make sure everything's allright. And we check how they screwed it together to get some more parameters. Depending on the job we also might have to put our radioactive source into our tools (yup, i'm a radiation worker now, with a fancy - well, not quite - badge on my chest measuring how much i'm taking. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Neutron, keep'em coming...)
Then they run-in-hole, i.e. they keep on screwing more drillpipe on top of our tools etc. and push it into the hole until they reach bottom. Not much to do for us whilst running in hole, but as soon as they reach bottom they start drilling, hence our job really starts. We're getting data.
So how do we get data? Our tools are sending a signal through the mud in the drillpipe, using pressure waves. On surface we got sensors to get the signal into our logging unit, into the computers there.
So most of the time we sit in our logging unit, monitoring the data and giving them to the client. Sitting in front of three monitors. As a friend of mine said "So, it's a totally Dilbert job!". Well, as long as everything is fine, yes, i guess so. Doing or twelve hour shifts - two MWDs at the rig.
But if something goes wrong, the signal is bad, you gotta do something. And each hour, more or less, depending on how fast they drill, you have to interact with the rig crew, get them to do what you need. Call them, and oftentimes go up to the rigfloor and talk to them (shouting, if things go bad). So much for that.

When they finish drilling they POOH! (pull-out-of-hole), so our tools come up again, we have to be there to supervise. And check our tools. After they've been laid down - keep in mind, heavy pipes, all done by crane etc. - we connect our computers again to get all the data that have been recorded downhole - more than what was sent up through the mud waves. In general, we produce logs from all data we acquire. Long vertical displays with some funny curves on them. Very important data for our clients.

Part of our job is also installing and de-installing all our sensors on the rig, deal with the rig crew, get the forklift driver, ...

Some words about my ten weeks here in Abu Dhabi: That was school, so university-like training but from the company. Getting up early five or six days a week, taking a one hour bus to our training center, classes and practicals from about 8:30 to 16:30, then going back. And about two or three exams each week. But fun. We were a class of 23 students, one or two instructors, good instructors. I've had fun. And now i successfully completed school.

Actually, right now i just came from the beach :-) ehehe.

Cheers
CGA

Money Money Money

So, where did i eat on friday, two weeks ago? I had lunch at Sagar Restaurant. Just around the corner from my flat. A Indian place. Hence, full of Indians and the food is spicy - even the "non-spicy" stuff and somehow the sweets... anyways, u can have a nice meal there for as little as nine dirhams. Good one. So how could i top that for dinner? I went to Burj Al-Arab. Supposedly the fanciest hotel in the world, seven stars (BS), etc.
Of course going there that evening wasn't a spontaneous decision because you have to make reservations in advance. Otherwise they won't even let you get close to the hotel. It's on a fake island just in front of Jumeirah beach in Dubai. We arrived there with our crappy local Abu Dhabi taxi, just in time. Didn't want to let us go in with that car at first, but we nicely explained our situation and showed them our reservation papers. Was fun, driving up the bridge to the hotel during sunset, in some cheap Asian car, stopping in-between all those Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, Porsches etc. But we got there.
Well, what can i say, it's nice, i like. I mean, like everywhere in Dubai the place just shouts out loud "money money money" but it's nice to look at. They just used expensive materials everywhere, so nowhere u can find a spot that looks cheap. With nice water effects, springs with colour, gold in a lot of places, giant aquariums filled with exotic fish just as a background, a 180m-high lobby...
The dinner was fine. Buffet, really nice food. I took my time to eat and enjoy. It wasn't oh-so-special, but quite all right. Good food. And actually not that expensive. I mean, compared to fancy places back in Europe. You can easily spend more money there. That's a nice thing here in Dubai, it's quite affordable.
Don't get me wrong, staying overnight in in the Burj is expensive, the cheapest room is about 1000 USD per night. But having dinner was okay.

Btw, the 'my pics' page is working again. Hmmm, at least it worked fine yesterday, now i cannot access the server anymore :(
I'll continue with some photos, just to spice that blog up a bit:

All dressed up.

Ned hinschauen.

Not a rolls-royce, not even a Benz, but we still fun. One-hour drive to the Burj.
Sun is setting, Burj is getting close.
Even closer.
Benz&Royces all over, the hotel fleet that'll pick you up from the airport if u booked a room.
Not focused, ready for dinner.
The dinner party, all from my class.
Eat. With style?
The lobby in the background.
Date palm tree.

German:
A: Travnicek, auch in Österreich wachsen wunderbare Früchte. Sagen's mir was für Obst Sie gerne essen.
T: Datteln.
A: Na, was anderes.
T: Bananen.

Yup. that's only half a lobster on my plate.
Sushi time.
Oysters. I did it. They weren't still alive, at least they didn't move when i dropped some lemon juice on them. And still, uuuuaaaah, disgusting. Been there, done that, check. Same as with medical pills, can't swallow without chewing at least once, so i had to bite'em... not quite as you're supposed to do it. Read "My Uncle Oswald" for instructions.
Just posing.
Looking up in the lobby.
I love using mirrors for pictures.
And finally yet another Austrian product on display... although i haven't seen Red Bull ads or PEZ in the Burj :-)
That's what it looks like when you're going to your room on the 26th floor, passing by the guy with the desk waiting for your room service needs.
Simply physics, i guess, using water springs like optical cables, to transport light...
The lobby.
Up from the lobby.
Waiting in the lobby.
Posing in the lobby.
Leavin...
Big Burj.

My postcard view.
Me and the Burj.

Well, that's that. I've eaten in more expensive places, but that's not the point. It was night, all right, we had a good time.

Be happy.

Cheers
CGA

(No) Photo Update

Hello-lo world,

Ooops, no update of my blog in two weeks. Got a lot to write about, nice things happened.
Just tried to update my photo page (see 'my pics' link on the right) but something changed on the server, seems that i'm missing a script or two... so before i geek out, it just didn't work. My pics are on the server, so if you like click-a-di-clicking, here's the folders:
March
April
The new ones are the fiels that start with 'DSC...'.
I've been to the Burj Al-Arab for dinner two weeks ago. Fanciest hotel in the world or something, a lot of money there, more later.
We went bowling and had a crepes (french kinda pancakes) party a couple of days ago.

Weekend starts, gotta go.

Blood is thicker than water.

Cheers
CGA