On Keppel's 'incident'

Something funny happened last night. While I was sleeping soundly, apparently a bout of rough winds and seas occurred and caused some damage to rigs moored near the dock.

When I got in the following morning, there were some people discussing about the damage that had occurred. It wasn't really serious so I didn't think much about it.

Tonight it made the news, with the reported showing grainy pictures taken of some of the 'damages' to the helideck area. Apparently one of the rig shook loose and had a 'meeting' with the rig next to it. Really unlucky too as that rig is almost near completion. One of the senior drafter says these things happen always near the end of a project; can;t afford to slack even a little bit.

Today I learned a bit about the Anchorage. I thought it's some fancy place with a fancy sounding name, until one of the drilling section people told me it's just a parking space in deeper waters off the port. They go there to do some of the more demanding tests that require deeper waters. I wonder if they jack up the jackups to full operating draft? The seabed must be quite solid for this to be possible, with so many jackups being built here.

Been helping out with B302 project, so called a comfort luxury accommodation module based on semi design. The significance of this didn't really occur to me until I was invited by my boss to sit in on a little presentation done by DNV concerning noise and vibration. Apparently, they find that the rules and regulations surrounding noise and vibration limits for offshore vessels (they call them MODU - mobile offshore drilling units) are so stringent that they EXCEED that of luxury cruise liners, sometimes with quite a significant margin. So ladies and gentlemen, the most luxurious and comfortable vessel on the high seas is none other than oil rigs (that follow the NORSOK standard)! A little surprising, no?

Well granted, the 'luxury' and 'comfort' is evaluated using noise and vibration limits - you won't find casinos and other creature comforts here save for TV and rec lounges. Another interesting thing I discovered is that some of the regulations call for cabins which are so silent that privacy becomes an issue; if you do not insulate the walls enough, you can participate in a conversation going on next door because it's just so silent!

One way to solve this problem is to increase the sound insulation between cabins, but on certain situations this is simply not feasible due to the amount of insulation you would require, so another solution is to add in 'white noise' as a psychological way of artifically increasing the noise inside the cabin, which is done in luxury vessels: they would increase the noise slowly 1 hour before a planned concert then after that, gradually decrease the noise back down. The artifical background noise effectively masks any detrimental effects of the concert noise, although they did not specify what kind of background noise this was (white noise? pink noise? those fancy anti-phase noise cancellation noise?).

Today I saw some of the engineers looking up stuff that I myself was looking up when I don't understand something. Makes me feel less stupid, haha. I guess most of us, especially the newcomers, are still picking things up as we go along as this is not a field we studied in.

And today's fruity day so they gave us 4 bananas this time around. I guess the ancient greeks would call them aphrodisiacs; as for me, I haven't had banana in a long time, simply because for some reason when I came over to Semenanjung Malaysia, all the bananas sold here are those 'berangan' strain, huge and not really nice. I grew up eating traditional bananas grown in abundance in Sabah (small, very yellow) and its near impossible to find in Melaka, although I do spot them in Singapore. I guess it's not a famous trait or it's probably not grown locally and is imported from elsewhere. Whatever the case, I miss my Sabahan banana =P.

Oh ya and for the benefit of those in the future, Sabah has this interesting fruit called Tarap. Here is the picture:

This fruit is unique to Sabah/Borneo island and can be best described as...something like a jackfruit (nangka). Albeit the insides are much smaller than the jackfruit and the outside resembles a velvet-y textured porcupine as is evident from the picture above. If you go to Sabah, you must have a taste of this unique fruit and take lots of pictures, because it'll be the only place you'll ever find it.

My mom used to bring me to eat these at the nightmarket. I didn't really appreciate its uniqueness until today. I still remember lobbing the seeds of the tarap pass a ditch to the other side, proudly telling my mommy that in 10 years time we can go back here and harvest these fruit to eat for free.

That day never came.