Work on Madprof's workshop

MM, M=M, LMM, mmm, hmm?

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing about AI, ethics, how we engage with content etc - some of it for our company blog, like this:

https://www.dev.ngo/views/mm-mm-llm-mmm-hmm/

And more of it which I’ll be posting soon.

Reflections on AI from Wagtail Space

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I got to tune in to the wagtail space conference, and put some thoughts about how we use AI and other tech choices on our company blog

https://www.dev.ngo/views/reflections-on-ai-from-wagtail-space/

AI hallucination: The $1 trillion problem and why your gut feeling is still vital

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had a fun experience trying to get a quick solution working with an AI this week - and wrote about it on our company blog.

https://www.dev.ngo/views/ai-hallucination-the-1-trillion-problem-and-why-your-gut-feeling-is-still-vital/

Beyond the Hype: What we learned from our first two AI solutions in grants analysis

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a case study on our company website about how we’ve been using AI for document analysis, working with a large library of content, and some of the limitations of such a system.

https://www.dev.ngo/views/beyond-the-hype-what-we-learned-from-our-first-two-ai-solutions-in-grants-analysis/

At sea!

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 03:39:30 +0000

We’re sailing again!

It’s so lovely being back at sea, and David seems to quite like it too. He actually slept right the way through the night the first night! Amazing… (If only he’d do it again…)

AV work is going reasonably well. We’re doi

ng loads of training, as much as possible, but still trying to get everything working again too. It’s really hard trying to arrange work for people to do, who know nothing about A/V at all, and may not have even touched a sound, lighting, or video console before joining the team. Still, they’re all great people, and we’re having a lot of fun.

One very frustrating thing was that I had to fix the Deck 4 music and paging system. For whatever historical reason, that’s part of A/V’s responsibility, rather than the electricians. The rack is located in a loud noisy fanroom, full of dust and grime.

The rack isn’t very accessible, and getting in to the wires is really really awkward and scrapey.

It’s not massively well documented (another task on my list…), and I think several people had tried to fix it recently, so all the settings were messed up. In the end, I pulled out the entire system, took it down to our storeroom to clean and test and set up, and then brought it back and plugged it in. It all worked! Which was great. It just then took ages of walking around with the team getting them to tell me which zones were connected and had the right volumes, and so on. Not fun, and as it needs to be working before we arrive in the next port, it meant I had to do that for 4 days rather than work on any of our venues. Grrr…

The new portable ‘fender’ sound systems that we bought are a huge success. They work really well. I asked one of the new A/V team to paint ‘Logos Hope A/V’ on the side of them all so that they don’t get lost, or apprehended into some other department. I was expecting something ugly but functional. Instead I got this:

Really cool!

Anyway, to end this post, here’s a photo of David from when we took him to the kids water zone at the mall in Singapore. Wet as a fish, a nappy as wet as he, and as Becky puts it, “Happy as Larry”. (Whoever Larry is…)

LVM snapshots for a resetable machine

Fri, 21 Mar 2014 11:16:00 +0000

I have ended up maintaining a few websites which we are hosting on a machine off in Germany somewhere.

I want to get everything automated, so I have less work to do if something goes wrong.

I’m using ansible, which is wonderful, and have a nice set of playbooks I’ve written which take a raw CentOS install, and install everything, (php-fpm, nginx, etc…) set up the virtualhosts, install wordpress & joomla and all that for the sites that need it, etc.

Until today, I’ve been using a virtualbox on my local computer to test on, and it works great. I haven’t bothered with vagrant, as I tried it for a couple of days, and it crashed my whole computer twice, so I gave up. With virtualbox, it’s almost as simple. I have a virtualmachine which I can spin up, install stuff on, and then when I want to go back to a fresh machine, it’s a matter of turning it off, and clicking ‘restore snapshot’ to the snapshot I made when it was clean installed.

It’s practically instant, and just works.

However, running a virtualmachine on my primary work computer all the time does make everything else somewhat sluggish. So I’ve scrouged an old computer that wasn’t doing anything, and am now using that instead.

In order to get snapshots and restore points going well, here’s how I did it:

Install CentOS, leaving a bunch of free space on the LVM primary group.
Make a snapshot when it’s first installed
Restore (merge to) that snapshot whenever I want it back to original settings.
Reboot

To make & restore the snapshots, I’ve written the commands as scripts so I don’t have to remember the lg-whatever stuff. (vg_localtest is the name of the volume group I set up for the HD when I installed):

/usr/sbin/snapshot_make:

#!/bin/sh
lvcreate –size 100G -s -n original_snapshot /dev/vg_localtest/root

/usr/sbin/snapshot_restore

#/bin/sh
lvconvert –merge /dev/vg_localtest/original_snapshot && reboot

It works great so far. One improvement I’m making, since I one time forgot to make a snapshot, and so couldn’t restore to a blank slate without re-installing the whole thing (which, admittedly, only takes half an hour or so):

I’m adding ‘snapshot_make’ into a boot script, and then modifying it to remove itself from the bootscript once it’s made the snapshot. That way as soon as the machine reboots into it’s original snapshot, it will automatically re-create the snapshot.

This looks like:

/usr/sbin/snapshot_make:

#!/bin/sh
lvcreate –size 100G -s -n original_snapshot /dev/vg_localtest/root
sed -ine ‘/snapshot/d’ /etc/rc.local

and then /etc/rc.local will look like:

#… whatever it has
/usr/sbin/snapshot_make

Merging directories with the magic of Python.

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 10:59:00 +0000

We finally got the last projects out of that monstrosity ‘Final Cut Server’, but one project at the end was a nightmare to export, and we weren’t sure which files from the end actually were in a different version of the project that we already had.

We essentially needed to merge two different versions of projects directories, making sure not to lose any files, and we didn’t want to lose the organization of the files.

Here’s a quick python script I wipped up to make it quicker.

With the 4000 odd files in the project, it took under a second to run, and it turned out we only had about 20 files which hadn’t already been merged. Much simpler to sort out.

The script took about 10 minutes to write and test. This is why you should learn to program. Hacking stuff like this up is easy, and saves *so* much time.

(Yes, you probably could do this with a couple of lines of perl or BASH, but what the heck.)

#!/usr/bin/env python
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
from os import stat
from os.path import basename, abspath
def run(*command):
    found = Popen(command, stdout=PIPE)
    return found.communicate()[0]
def files_in(dirname):
    return [x for x in run('find', abspath(dirname), '-type','f', '-print0').split(chr(0)) if x]
if __name__ == '__main__':
    from sys import argv
    try:
        sourcedir = files_in(argv[1])
        destdir = files_in(argv[2])
    except IndexError:
        print 'Usage:'
        print argv[0], '  '
        print 'Where you want to check if files in  are also in '
        print '(but perhaps with a different relative path)'
        exit(1)
    print '---------------------------------------------------'
    print '{0} files in {1}'.format(len(sourcedir), abspath(argv[1]))
    print '{0} files in {1}'.format(len(destdir), abspath(argv[2]))
    print '---------------------------------------------------'
    destnames = {}
    for destfile in destdir:
        destnames[basename(destfile)] = {'size': stat(destfile).st_size,
                                         'path': destfile }
    for newfile in sourcedir:
        base = basename(newfile)
        if base not in destnames:
            print newfile, 'is NOT in the new dir'
        else:
            destfile = destnames[base]
            if stat(newfile).st_size != destfile['size']:
                print '{0}({1}) differs from {2}({3})'.format(
                      newfile, stat(newfile).st_size,
                      destfile['path'], destfile['size'])

Ergonomic things.

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 21:07:00 +0000

I get wrist pain in … well, obviously, my wrists.

Man, that was a bit of a daft start to a post.

Especially when using a mouse, but also when I have to do a lot of typing. I do touch type, but not ‘formally’, with perfect full-hand position, and so on.

Anyway, to try and make things better, here are some of the things I’m using

Microsoft Natural 4000 Keyboard

One of the weird things about keyboards is that essentially, we still use the exact same design that was needed for swinging arm typewriters. Stuffing all the keys as close together as we can, in orderly rows, so that the arm can hit the paper in the same place every time.
Actually, though, our hands would be a lot happier somewhat spaced apart, and at an angle, rather than trying to line up next to each other.

I have been using one of these Microsoft Keyboards for over a year now at work, and although it’s not perfect, it is a lot nicer than regular cheap and nasty keyboards, and a lot cheaper than some other Ergonomic Keyboards.

I currently have it at home, as, since this is a bit of a quiet time at OMNIvision, I thought I should finally get around to learning a more sane keyboard layout than QWERTY. I’m learning Workman, which is a little obscure at the moment, but to me makes sense. We’ll see if it takes off at all in the future…

Kensington Trackball

The thing which makes my wrists hurt the most is using a mouse, so I’ve been playing for a while with using the popular alternative to mice: trackballs. This one is really cool, in that it has a built in scroll wheel. That’s normal on mice, but for no apparent reason, is kind of unusual on trackballs.

I’m not 100% sold on trackballs as the answer, I think probably as big a part of it as anything is having to reach way over to the side and grip at an angle. So I try to keep the trackball in the middle of the desk, and I have it also on an angle using an old empty CD spool.

Wowpen Joy

At home, I tried for a while using another trackball I got on ebay, as it was cheap, as it was second-hand. It also wasn’t very reliable, so it ended up being more frustrating than helpful. I then looked at Vertical Mice - mice which are designed to keep your hand in the ‘handshake position’ more naturally than the twisted flat position of normal mice.

A lot of vertical mice, like ergonomic keyboards, are pretty expensive. However, on ebay there were a lot of these incredibly named ‘WowPen Joy’ mice. The name itself is enough to put you off. Anyway, I thought I’d try and see how one was. It’s actually very nice. It is kind of small, but still works fine with my big hands, I just use my middle and ring fingers to click, not index and middle.

Super fast review of the past few months.

Sun, 08 Sep 2013 15:31:00 +0000

Foolishly, perhaps, we thought this year would be a quiet one.
A couple months on the ship at the start, then back in the UK until August, Teenstreet in Germany, and then back home for the rest of the year.

There’s a quote regarding the fallibility of apparently structurally sound plans of humans and rodents which might be appropriate around here.

When we finished our time on Logos Hope, we were in Bangkok. Our organisation was holding a conference there at that time, so we helped out with the A/V techie arrangements for that. When that was over, Becky headed home to Carlisle, and I went North for a week or so as cameraman, filming and visiting with one of our teams in the region.

After I got back two weeks later to the UK, We had a couple of weeks ’normal work’, before I had to go to Ireland to run sound for an Event in Cork, as one of our other Sound Engineers needed to go back to Korea for surgery.

After getting back to Carlisle, we had about two weeks before we’d scheduled a couple of weeks in Cyprus, to take the Christmas break we’d missed on the ship, and take some time off, in lieu.

Two days before we were due to leave Cyprus, my Grandmother in Birmingham passed away, quite suddenly - although not totally unexpectedly - and so we returned to the UK with my parents and brother for her funeral.

We were then in back to Carlisle for a few weeks, before travelling over to Germany for Teenstreet.

While we were at Teenstreet, the arrangments came together for a filming project my Dad has been planning for a while in Cyprus, so instead of coming back to the UK, we headed over to Cyprus again to help with that, myself doing the sound recording and Becky the shoot documenting and general assisting.

We’ve since been back in the UK for just about three weeks, and so wondering what’s going to happen next.

Right now we have our friend Ant, staying with us, and he inspired me to start blogging again. This may not be the most exciting post in the world, but it at least starts to cover the great gap of the last several months.

You should check Ant’s Thoughts About Job.

Documentation, and how balanced audio cables work.

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:39:00 +0000

I finally had a bit more time this morning to write a bit more in the A/V manual. There’s lots of bits and pieces of documentation on board, but no comprehensive single getting started manual. So I’m writing one, bring together bits and pieces from all over the place, sorting out what documentation there is, updating schematics, etc.

Anyway, here’s the rough version on the article I just wrote about how balanced sound cables work. It’s pretty much my standard explanation of Balanced Audio, and aimed at people coming to A/V from a non-techy musical background, rather than for Electronics Engineers.
You may find it interesting. Then again, you may not.

---–

Sound is basically vibrations in the air.

TODO: more details, pingpong ball analogy?

Inside an (SM57) Microphone head.
That is the bit of plastic and the coils!This translates really easily into an analogue electrical signal: you simply turn the air vibrations into voltage vibrations.A Dynamic microphone does this by having a small bit of paper (or plastic) which vibrates with the air around it, and pushes against a very small copper coil which, moving inside a magnetic coil itself, generates a very-very-very small amount of electrical current.

TODO: more pictures.

This gets dumped down a wire, which gets amplified by (you guessed it) an amplifier into a very big amount of electrical current, which then drives a big electromagnet inside a speaker, which pushes another copper coil around, which is attached to another big bit of paper (the speaker cone), which causes the air around the speaker to vibrate – with the same vibrations that the microphone vibrated with, just bigger.

Simple, isn’t it? (well. Kind of.)

Balanced Audio Cabling

The trouble with simply dumping an audio signal down a cable, and picking it up at the other end is that your signal line, and return (usually ground) will pick up noise (say from A/C mains electricity, fluorescent lights, dimmers, mobile phones, etc) along the way.

Here’s an original signal:

And here’s some noise:

And the result:

This is a Bad Thing™.

So some clever engineers, back in the deep recesses of time figured out the following:You could take a signal, and before sending down the wire where it could pick up noise, invert it:

If we add the signal to the inverse, you get a grand result of nothing (e.g. -3 + 3 = 0).

Now, if we throw these two signals down a pair of very similar cables twisted round and round each other like crazy, then they’ll both pick up noise pretty much the same as each other:

Note that 3 (the original) + 1 noise = 4,
while -3 (the inverse) + 1 noise = -2. NOT -4!

This is really cool, because if we add these two signals together, we don’t get 0 anymore, we get no original signal, but you do get the noise (doubled).

So we’ll use our amazing maths skills again, and divide this doubled noise in half. (2/2 = 1).

at quinta again

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:16:00 +0000

Back from Spain. It went really well. Really great people, and it was cool helping to support technically all these guys who are so excited by what they’re doing.

Quite a surprise that some friends from Cyprus were particpants at the conference! So it was quite cool meeting up with them!

We’ve been back a week now. Becky was with some friends down south, and I was up in Carlisle finishing off some projects, and then we met up again on Friday, here at the Quinta.

Last time I was here, was for a few days break after my first 2 years on Doulos. I’m now here with Becky for a couple of days debrief with our home-office, and talking to some of the new people who are joining the company in september about life on board the ships.

It’s again quiet, relaxing, and also very good hanging out with some of my friends from the Doulos who are living and working here now.

I managed to spend catch lunch with my brother and some friends in Birmingham on the way down.

Here’s a crazy story:

Trying to buy tickets to get here, straight from Carlisle to Quinta would cost 40 pounds+… but if I booked Carlisle to Birmingham, and then Birmingham to Quinta, it cost 26.

I do NOT understand why. I blaim computers. They’re evil. It’s all a conspiracy.

We only have a few weeks more at Carlisle, for now, and hope to fly to Cyprus in about a month. Probably.

Then, hopefully, God willing, etc, to come back here for a few years starting some time in the summer.

We’ll see how that all goes.

So... Blogging.

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:10:00 +0000

Today marks 2 months of Becky and me being at OMNIvision, up in Carlisle. Time… is weird. It has gone so fast, and yet it seems like we’ve been here for only a few weeks, and yet Doulos is like another world away in the past.

I guess there will be another 200 odd people around the globe feeling the same way right now… and about 300 people every year have been feeling that for the last 30 years.

Our work is a bit random - we hardly know what we’ll be doing, one day to the next. We spent a lot of time in our first week or two pulling wires out of a big OB truck, then about 10 days sorting out books, inventorying, etc, then a few days moving a server rack across the building, including making and crimping all the new cables/extensions. Then a bunch of random small editing projects, a live concert in Manchester (me on a camera, Becky as my “cable monkey”), Becky is working a lot on admin stuff - figuring out some of the shipping arrangements for equipment, and writing the OMNIvision manual, and I’ve been doing some cleaning, sorting, lighting design, editing, fixing stuff, inventorying equipment, measuring cables, pulling electric cables through ceiling spaces, writing 30 second advert clips, and so on…

Yes. Quite busy.

And yet, not… it feels in some ways a lot more relaxed and slow than Doulos… yet also it feels a bit like I have less free time.

Becky and I live about 20 minutes walk apart, and neither of us have cars. The Office - where we go 2 mornings a week - is 15 minutes one direction, and the Studio - where we work the rest of the time - is 20 minutes the other direction. Busses are slow, somewhat irregular, and expensive, so we’re spending a LOT of time travelling. Also all the regular domestic stuff - cleaning, cooking, washing up, etc, takes time. On Doulos, I’d frequently be working until 6.15, pop down to the dining room, grab a plate of food, and the continue working while eating my meal. Same for lunch, and often Breakfast. Here, a meal can take over an hour. I guess it’s good, helping me to slow down… but BOY is it frustrating.

Like yesterday, I hoped to get a video project edited and finished… but then after Prayer Breakfast at the Office, I got a lift to the Shed (where we keep the vechicals), and picked up some equipment there, then got a lift to the Studio, and it was already 12.30. At lunch, there were a whole bunch of announcements and talking… and then with computers taking a long time to work, and Final Cut Server being a pain, I didn’t actually get to editing until 2.30pm!! And then Final Cut Pro decided to act stupid and to forget half the work I did with the Multi-Camera Editing tool (which otherwise is VERY cool…)…. So I only really got about 2 hours work done. Still, I’d done enough prep work with the lighting to make the keying and stuff a fairly easy job. I spent most of today editing too, and so that’s another piece basically finished.

...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:29:00 +0000

I found out that some of our panels were modified by someone in the past to do … interesting things.

Home built new video-patch panel. Waaay more sensible, understandable, and usable.

AV updates, mid drydock.

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:13:00 +0000

Before:

After:

I think it looks a little better. Still messy, but at least understandable. Pretty much everything is plugged in now, and from preliminary tests, we appear to have somewhat better clarity in EVERYTHING, and some of the video signals are visibly higher signal-to-noise with much less interference.

We bought two new audio patch panels too, Behringer ones. Strangely, Behringer also seem to do unbalanced patch panels. Fortunately, the shop had both, and I noticed. What on earth would anyone want unbalanced patch panels for?!

I also had to butcher the two panels which we were replacing to get enough parts to fix a third panel which was very glitchy. Here are some of the internals which are slightly broken.

You can see a bit of corrosion on the top contact - even with jackplug cleaners and everything, the equipment is just plain old.

Today, hopefully, I can do the full system tests (need to borrow a oscilliscope and reference signal generators…), and then get the whole thing boxed up and leave it until the end of drydock. Then I can work on more fun projects. Videos, song composition, etc.

That’s all for now, I’ll post more shorter posts later, with more pictures.

Life carries on...

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:06:00 +0000

So. Short post.

We’re in KK, Malaysia. Beautiful place.

A whole bunch of people left, and a whole bunch of new ‘uns joined.

The crazy Swedish dude left my AV team and headed home, after two years on board, and now I’ve got a new American the team. It’s fun training him, although kind of strange. I’ve taught AV stuff to so many people now. It’s hard to remember what I’ve taught to whom. I’ve got a basic Doulos AV curriculum, finally, but it’s difficult to get it all together. Theres so many little bits of randomness.

So now the team is one Korean, one Brit, one American, and one confused-not-quite-sure-ean(me).

Amongst the new recruits is one of my friends from the UK, which is very cool. She seems to be enjoying the ship so far, and is working in the “Accomedation” team, cleaning the inside of the ship, doing the laundry, running the bookshop cafe, etc.

Anyway. So. This was intended to be a short post, and mostly informational…

Yeah.

It’s my girlfriend’s birthday tomorrow. The whole present-buying-birthday-celebration-rituals-cultures-thing terrifies me. Like, I dunno. Something about my INFP/TCK nature, I guess. I want everything I do to be meaningful, and genuine. Especially with those who are really dear to me. That’s the INFP side… But also, I feel like so many things (such as buying presents on birthdays, putting up signs, cards, etc) are very superficial, and just a crass part of some culture.

I want to buy presents that are really real - not just bought “because” of the birthday. Yet I don’t know if buying presents *for* the birthday, like, “doing the birthday thing” is also a way of being real, within a culture?

I don’t totally relate personally to any culture, really, and find almost all cultures have things which offend me, and which I don’t fit into.

Also, on the other hand, more practically, I know that there is an element I also probably ought to have of simply “Daniel, just grow up, accept the fact that you’re not all that great at buying presents, so get over it, stop making all these stupid theoretical excuses and work harder than everyone else to actually do it well, and on time. Stop being so lazy.”

Bolts and other bits and bobs

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:10:00 +0000

Ever wonder what a stainless steel bolt looks like when it completely rusts into oblivion?

Well. Now you know. This fell off one of our lifeboats. Makes you feel very secure, right?

This is the latest addition to the AV room:

It’s getting quite full, these days. Well, it has been for YEARS now. Any time we want to change anything, it gets quite major and complicated, trying to shuffle things around. Basically, I was fed up of having our stationary drawer jam because of too many tools inside it, so had the carpenters make us this. Makes me feel all reminiscent of the keyshop. *sigh* good old days.

Here it is, in place. As you can tell, the room isn’t all that tidy, still. Just SO MUCH STUFF! Other additions, the mug hooks on the wall, the per-day form hooks too, and also a removable wall-mount for the fan (which always used to just sit on the floor and get kicked…)

and lastly, we’ve FINALLY got the slot on the door for request forms!

exciting! I’ll post pictures of the opposite side of this amazing slot soon. It’s small, subtle, elegantly engineered and discreet. You’ll love it.

TV stuff

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:29:00 +0000

Here’s a conundrum for you.

If you’re not interested in video, then this may be boring as anything for you.

Then again, you might find it facinating.

OK. Here’s the deal. A conference, and it’s Mandarin. The main speaker is American, and speaks no Mandarin whatsoever. So he has a translator. No problem. Now say you have an audience of 300-ish, and are using live video to show the speaker on TVs around the room so people can see. OK, again, no problem. But, since the speaker and the translator decided to stand far apart, if you show a shot wide enough to get them both, they’re so small on screen that it’s totally pointless putting them on screen. Usually, I believe, it’s normal to just go for a close-up of the speaker. So, then, if you have audience who are all old people and probably somewhat hard of hearing, they’ll want to lip-read the translator at least somewhat. So. What to do? Cutting back and forth between two cameras is too much work, and tiring, and probably more annoying to watch than anything else.

I tried to be a bit clever and “TVish” this time, but I still am not totally pleased with it.
If the speaker and translator decide to move around a lot, remote cameras just will not cut it.

Can you fix this?

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:27:00 +0000

“We dropped this. I think it’s broken.”

“Can you fix this please?”

Handover

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:51:00 +0000

I’m tired. I’m stressed.

I won’t pretend to hide it.

I’m pissed off at the system, thoroughly fed up of how things currently are - in my work, my life, and in many things around me.

Yet, still, most things are going fairly well…

I’m now the “AV manager”, and discovering more and more how disorganised and messed up it is.

We have small forms in the drawer under the computer which are used during the sunday service on board, we give out the little forms, then people can fill them in if they want to, so that they can give to the weekly offering (usually to help a local ministry, or work in India, or similar) direct from their on board account, rather than having to use cash.

Anyway, this morning, the guy running the service came up and asked for them.. We had 10. Not good enough! So, I told him a few ideas of who he could ask for more, but this was at half an hour before the service, on a Sunday Morning. Not the best time to go looking for people to do random work like that.

We need to have once a week or so someone to check how many we have, say on a Friday, and then to get at least 200 before the Sunday morning.

Not a big deal, right?

Well, no, not a problem at all. Just the problem is that there are *hundreds* of little issues like this. Every day. And *NONE* of them are written down. When I started, there were no current weekly checklists or anything.

I don’t want to become a lists and rules based dictator, but how on earth else do you manage to get everything done that needs to be?

When I took over this job, there was maybe 1 hour of discussion between me and the predecessor about stuff, but none of these little details were noted. Each day day I find mord

And it was the same thing when I became waterman, 2 years ago. There’s no consistancy! As soon as people leave, things get dropped.

It’s why ships tend to have such strict and over the top and detailed procedures - everything gets written down.

Anyway. It’s just intensely frustrating. I’m so bad at admin, so weak at organisation, so forgetful about details, so easily overwhelmed by situations, so inexperienced at leadership, so unknowledgeable about everything technical I should know about, so young!

I guess in one way it’s kind of exciting. I mean, whoopee! So much stuff to learn! So much I can improve!

Yet it’s kind of hard to say that and not at least have some irony and sarcasm in it too.

Yes, it’s good to be stretched and have all this improvement to do, but at the same time, it’s “live”. We’re not playing with blank bullets. Every round is for real.

Every time I start a video playing in a programme, it’s not school, not training. People are in the programme, watching, and notice if things don’t work.

Getting to know me, or not.

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:07:00 +0000

Good morning, blog. Although, actually, it’s more like evening, seeing as how it’s 7pm and everything.

It’s probably morning somewhere in the world.

I have a friend on this ship who has a fetish for “Awkward moments”. I’m sure he wouldn’t like it to be called a fetish, but whatever, he really loves them. He savours them, as a connesour, specially saving them up and preparing them, finely planning moments of Awkwardness in the same way that a conductor of an orchestra prepares the finale of a grand opera.

He’ll often say stuff intentionally to make people uncomfortable.

So I asked about a week or two ago, why?

And his response was something like,

(a) it’s fun,
(b) I enjoy seeing how people really are.

And the second one is the bit that I took issue with.

He said watching how people react when they don’t know how to respond gives a great insight into them, and let’s you see them without the pretence and acting that accompanies so much of human interaction.

What’s there to take issue with?

Well, seeing people when they don’t know how to react, is that really how they “really are”?

It seems to me to smell slightly of the whole humans-are-nought-but-animals thing.

And also, the “You know the real person by seeing how they behave under pressure”. - Likewise, the same.

There is some truth to it, of course. It’s much easier to act nice and give a good image when you are relaxed and can concentrate on impressing others, or on behaving well, than when things are stressful and you’re under pressure and don’t have time to think about what to do next.

Others have also said that you know how someone is by what they do in their spare time, or when no one else is looking, and so on.

Some people seem to do well under pressure, and be able to think quickly and clearly. Others don’t. Some people find it easy to find jobs to do and to use their spare time productively and pro-actively.

So… it’s often very useful to know how someone behaves under pressure, but I don’t think it really shows who they “really” are.

This would have been all nice and theoretical, and all that, except for this week.

I got sick.

And, it turns out, I don’t act very nice when I’m sick.

Usually, when I’m healthy and fine and everything, I tend to use a lot of hyperbole, sarcasm, and irony in my general day to day language. It tends to be (I hope!) fairly good natured, and over-the-top enough that others realise it’s not intended seriously.

“Could you play this CD for me?”
“Nope. It’s completely impossible - the computer can only play CDs on Thursdays.”

and so on.

Well, the thing is, recently I’ve started to tend to mix double meanings and more biting sarcasm into what I say, and, usually, it doesn’t mean anything - to me.

Ie, “hey, the programme schedule says you’re doing a song later, but you haven’t put a form in saying you want any microphones or instruments or anything, so it’s just a Capella, right?”

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:12:00 +0000

Greetings, Gentle reader, and welcome to the latest episode of brummie@sea.

Before we get much further, here is a photo of yours truly:

Taken in Fukuoka, Japan. Nice place. Very clean, efficient, tidy, quiet. Kind of reminded me of some of the more sane and modern parts of London (not that there are too many parts which combine both of those adjectives).

We’re now actually in Kanazawa, which is further north.

I’ve been quite busy this port, as the second waterman has been on a team staying and working off the ship for the whole port. I was also learning a lot about the audio-visual stuff on board the ship, how to use Final Cut Pro, sound balancing, and so on. Fun stuff. We had some of the people from our company’s technical/production side out for a week or so, and doing some training for us.

Since then I’ve been working on the ship’s edit suite making a couple of video projects (a Taiwan report video, and a video about the work the ship did in Philippines to show in Korea).. Final Cut Pro is very very nice software.

Especially once you get rid of the silly one button mac mouse, and put a proper 2 button+scrollwheel on the beast.

I’ve also been working quite a lot on just refilling up the ship with water. We had to pretty much replace all our water with Japanese water, due to strange regulations here, and that was all a bit complex.

I stayed up quite late one night running around the ship with the I.T. guys, when they re-built the network system, rebooting and reconnecting the DHCP client sessions on every computer… We now have internet web access on every ship-computer (not personal laptops). That is really cool.

I am probably going to be changing jobs fairly soon, I don’t know where yet. Possibly into I.T and Videographer, or something like that. Maybe working with the Audio-Visual team running the sound and stuff programmes on board. I’ve been working as a waterman for almost a year now. On Doulos that’s a long time. I just looked in our logbook the other day, which I started us keeping. The first entries are from August last year. Amazing.

I applied for the job of Technical Administrator. It would be quite interesting, and a big challenge too. A more technical ship work, and I could learn a lot of administration skills that would be useful in whatever job I end up doing in the future.

Doing all the video and all that these last two weeks, and hanging around with the IT guys a bit, I know that that is where I enjoy working most. I love doing video editing, and IT configuring and installing and all that work is so much more satisfying than water stuff. I miss programming a lot.

I miss linux, actually. Now THAT’s a geeky comment.

But whatever job I end up doing here, it’ll be useful, and also a good change. I’m really tired of the waterman’s job. It’s a great job, you can learn sooo much. And it’s very interesting, very much responsibility, very much independence. More independence than any other job on the ship, probably. Still. It’s time for a change. I’m tired of the midnight phone calls, of thinking about the ship’s water and list and draft 24/7. Of being “on call” whenever I’m on the ship. Of working alone, truely alone. Even working with the other waterman, I still miss being part of a team. I don’t much enjoy being a leader. I prefer to be a team player. Able to relax with others who know as much or more than I do, and able to pass the ball around, rather than just holding it myself, or watch my partner/assistant run with it the whole time.

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:11:00 +0000

This has been a fun week… most of it. Exciting, and all, anyway. We had a damage control drill, in which the fire attack team had a chance to play with our big emergency submersible pump (big blue thing, about the size of a child and the weight of a man) which had to be carried down to the engine room, and dropped into a tank of water, and then they had the fun of emptying a few tons out of the porthole, and then the rest we transferred into another tank. Great fun for them, very good that they finally get a chance to work with that pump (it’s a monster!). And the tanks, of course, mean work for the watermen! :-)

We had two tanks which were on schedule for being worked in (we emptied out one of them a month or so ago, and had deck teams in there scraping off the old dead cement, and we last week got the new cement on all the walls.

So we had to open up this empty tank again, and open up the other tank, and get everything ready for that. This meant the usual sitting for a few hours in a bilge/tanktop covered in slime and grease and oil with various sizes of wrenches/spanners getting the manhole open.. This one also created a few more problems though, as some of the nuts were really old and totally seized up.

I had to find out how to get them off. I tried everything I knew how to do (various lubricants, hammers, spanners with extensions, and so on). My next and final option was to grind the thing off. As this is in a bilge, with oil and all about, it’s quite dangerous to do grinding, as you have sparks all over the place. So you need “Hot Work permits” which are paperwork to make sure you follow all safety procedures, have another guy on firewatch while you work, have fire extinguishers ready, etc… The chief mate suggested I try using just a oil burner/torch and heating up the nut around the edges, to try and expand it and so free it up. This would also require Hot Work permits, but would be safer, and also a lot easier, if it worked.

As I was getting ready for this (with the deadline being the drill the day after), the chief engineer suggested just using a “Nut splitter”, a really cool tool I’d never seen before. Basically it’s a chisel with a threaded end, a bolt on the end, and a case to drive it through the nut, as you tighten the bolt. Very cool indeed. So I found this device, and amazingly, it worked! Very nice indeed. I was chatting with the Engine Foreman afterwards, and he suggested a few other ideas involving chisels (and hitting the bolt in the right places to expand the right parts). So I have lots of new stuff learned. Cool. I’ll put it all in the “Waterman’s Bible.”

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:29:00 +0000

I’m typing this from the dry food store, miles and miles down in the depthful belly of the ship. I don’t know if depthful is a real word, but if not, I have just coined it. Please pay all royalties to me, chocolate is the preferred currency.

OK, so what am I doing in this previously mentioned food store…? Well, we’ve been having a few problems on the job.

Over the last few months we’ve been emptying out ballast tanks, (the water tanks down at the bottom of the ship which keep her stable) one at a time, and then sending a deck team in there to do routine maintenance (routine, as in, once every 4 years or so per tank).

Anyway. We just got to the last tank in the series, and so needed to fill it up with water. For some reason though, every time we tried to use the pipe to send water to the tank, the pump would get very hot and trip the electrics. We could see a very high pressure build up in the pipe by the pump, so it looked as if there was some kind of blockage in the pipe, which was not allowing water through it. We went into the tank last week or so, and looked around for any obvious problems, feeling inside the pipes as far as fingers would go to make sure they had not got cemeted over in the maintenance. No problems found though…

So we asked the engine room guys to have a look at it, and they sent a very professional welder/plumber. He took a “snake” (high pressure hose with a thing on the end which bounces around and smashes to bits any kind of blockage or rust.
Anyway… it got stuck in the pipe. So he called me, and then he went into the tank to take the pipe off and look for his snake. BUT… forgot to check which pipe. The wrong pipe got taken off…. So he took off the other one. Not his fault, he didn’t know the tank had two pipes leading into it. We couldn’t see any problems, so he put them back.

Presumably the problem was further up the pipe, closer to the engine room.

Presumably so was his ‘snake’.

So, we opened up the other tank, brought a HUGE emergency submersible pump and attached it up to transfer between the two tanks. This pump is a very serious pump. It’s designed to be hooked up, and chucked down a staircase into a flooded hold to pump it out, kind of thing. It took 3 of us to carry down to the food store here where the tank manholes are to put the pump into. We had to use all kinds of ropes and stuff to hoist the thing down. We attached it, and set it going. It was a bit complicated, as we had to have one guy at the suction end of the pump, to make sure it was OK, one guy at the discharge end to make sure it didn’t swing around and kill someone, one guy running between to make sure the hose was OK and didn’t explode, and one guy 3 decks up with a radio to switch the electricity for the pump on and off (there are only 3 connection points on the whole ship for this creature).

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 13:41:00 +0000

Slightly weird news is that I’m going to be waterman. Means no more work outside really, hardly any physical work either. No more gangway watch either, mind you. I start right after sabbath week. It’s the job I didn’t want as it means being on call in evenings, but for the next lot of ports, as they are quite developed, we should always have water from a main, rather than trucks, which is better. So I won’t be on call all evening.

There are two watermen, the old one is leaving and I know the new one requested me about two months ago already. Then today I was told to work with him for the day, so I did, and then this evening the chief mate told me that as soon as sabbath week is over I will be the new waterman. It’s a job I know I can do, and some of it will be interesting. Like doing all the key-repair/locksmith stuff, but yeah. I dunno.

The chief mate knows I don’t really want to be waterman, and he knows I want to move to another department as well eventually. So he could have given me the job because they need someone, and it actually isn’t that hard, and I’ll be able to fill the second position until they find someone who wants the job. I’ll enjoy the locksmithing part, as long as I can find some good books about it, and can get enough work time to do it in. I’ll learn how to pick locks. And I’ll have a slightly more flexible schedule than now.

Also I have the go-ahead to make the Doulos intranet computer system, which should be a fun diversion. So I will kind of have full internet access sometimes for a while, to do research and get the software I need and stuff.

Oh, and I’m playing tambourine with the gospel choir. Kind of fun, but utterly exhausting in the right arm after playing solidly for six minutes straight.

As waterman, I’ll be able to play clarinet in my office, which is far away from everyone. I don’t like playing in my cabin, as there are always watchkeepers in next door cabins asleep, or in my cabin, and it’s hard to find other places which are free. I’m currently playing a lot in hold 1 which has so-so acoustics.