Connections

An open question.

Why is it so difficult to find F connector wall plates? You know, the kind you need for satellite TV. Is there some law about importing them or is the case (as it is often) that I just haven't found the one shop in all of Nusantara that sells this animal?

Allow me to explain. A while back I decided to renovate the house. Part of the renovation involved installing cable outlets in all of the rooms so I could enjoy TV in any room without  without having a bunch of unsightly cables lying about or having holes drilled in my window frame. A noble plan. I also have a mother-in-law suite on the property, that I may decide to rent out in some alternative future. Its nice to have the connections in place so that all the tenant needs to do is buy the decoder. I'm happy to say that the cables are now where they need to be. The issue is the connections. The only available wall sockets here are whats known as a Belling-Lee type. The satelite provider (Indovision) uses F connectors. The two don't mix. Moreover I've been unable to find an adaptor. Its been grimly amusing visiting upteen hardware stores, electrical suppliers, stereo and home entertainment shops and getting various versions of the blank stare. Reminds me of the great toilet adventure of a few years back.

The only workaround at the moment is to build my own "PJ" cables which have F connectors at one end and Belling-Lee connectors on the other. Tedious but I don't know what else to do.

Blue Lobster

I just thought this was kinda cool. Blue lobsters are missing a pigment. This would look very neat in an aquarium.



Apparently this occurs on average of one time per 4 million lobsters. Unfortunately they turn pink upon cooking which means you will never get one on your plate (it's considered bad luck to cook them anyways).
The cbc has more on this if you are interested.

Photo clipped from the cbc

Little Quests

I have this strange urge to make waffles. However I've been stymied (so far) in my search for a waffle iron.

Where does one find a halfway decent waffle iron here in Indonesia? The ones I've seen so far look that they were made to cook exactly 1 waffle before dying.

The thing is there are dozens of brands of sandwich makers out there. Odd (to me) that none of these suppliers have thought to include plates to make waffles instead of sandwiches.

Hmmm

Life goes on.

Pigs Ears

Whats going on with catering these days? Did they forget to pay their bills?

Last week it was tripe. Basically pig guts cut up and served in a stew. Yesterday pig's ears showed up in the galley for lunch. You could see them hiding amongst the cut wieners and garbanzo beans. Apart from my dogs who really looks forward to Pig's ears after a hard day on the skid deck?

Today we had the leftover pigs ears in  sauce with the trotters thrown in to thicken it. This is a seriously worrying development. Whatever happened to pork chops, pork loin, bacon, or even ham?

Nervously anticipating the tails and snouts - what parts of the pig can't be eaten? Damn pig is doing more dead than it ever achieved in life.

An Oilfield Rant

I was rudely interrupted from a much needed repose to prepare equipment because some rig out on the ocean somewhere could not get their pipe out of the hole. Just when I planning a nice little trip home I had to rebook all my flights....such is life.

Drill pipe gets stuck. It gets stuck for a number of reasons. There could be differential pressure across the wellbore, shales swelling in, poor solids control, or any other number of reasons as to why the rig can't get the pipe out of the ground. Usually when drilling rigs get stuck they need wireline people to get them unstuck or backed off. Its about the only time when the drilling supervisor is happy to see us.
Part of the challenge in freeing stuck pipe is to select the most appropriate means of cutting the pipe above the stuck point. This means choosing the right explosive for the job. Furthermore little foresight is applied by drilling and completion people in terms of designing a completion than can be recovered if necessary.  A drilling or completion string may have a number of restrictions in it that complicate the pipe recovery process. The burden falls on the service company to provide a cutter that can satisfy the customers drill string however screwed up it is.

So here is a Drillers Dream Cutter

Can cut any size casing, tubing or drill pipe.
Able to fit through a 2" restrictions
Requires no explosives or dangerous chemicals
Includes a free point device as well as correlation device
Can be rigged up easily with no special power supplies or personnel

Unfortunately such a device is still within the realm of fantasy. In the meantime we have to go through the tedious explanation of why you can't use a 2 3/8" cutter to cut 5 1/2" drill pipe. Eventually this message sinks in and our clients re size their expectations as to what is actually doable.

The next difficulty is to determine where the pipe is stuck and to convince the client that he needs to cut above the stuck point if wants to have any chance of recovering any pipe. You would be surprised at how many millions of dollars of drilling hardware are lost in the well every year because Drilling people can't understand this simple concept.

Details. You can never have enough. Its surprising what you don't know and how that can make or break a job. A lot of time can be saved beforehand if only people knew the ID of a piece of assembly was 2.25" and not 3.5". We had to run a drift just to confirm an ID because some guy in town couldn't be bothered to gauge an assembly.

Hindsight is always 20/20. I think that the oilfield has the most disproportionate number of armchair quarterbacks in the world. Anyone with 2 years experience on the rig thinks that they are an expert and I think I heard more sentences beginning with  "we should have" than I have since that last time |I was out here to free stuck pipe. Service contracts are not written for should haves. They are representations of what level of risk that operators are prepared to accept  - if you are worried about losing a 50 million dollar well then you "should have" built that into your contract.

And finally....CYA (cover your ass). The acronym CYA almost completely sums up the entire exploration industry. Never leave yourself in a position where you can be held accountable for anything. Although this means that the job safety review will be a 30 page document translated into 2 languages for a 10 minute operation this is the way things are trending in the patch. Cutting through the bureaucracy means self-exposure and I can't afford the risk.

Get used to it. No wonder the price of oil is hitting $100 dollars plus.