Back home again. Just finished a short job in
Oman for an Omani oil company.It quite amazes me how
Oman has changed and opened up since I first worked there in the 80’s. Back then, although some companies were trying to break the PDO/Shell monopoly on the country, they seemed to be fighting a loosing battle. Now there are lots of companies in there and exploration and development has really come on.
Oman is a country that deserves success.
The crew was the same that I had been on for some time – the crew with the dreaded IO System 4. They upgraded however, to an IO Scorpion for the job.We all had high hopes for the Scorpion, after all IO have had plenty of time to get it right.Sadly, although it did do better then the System 4, it still has problems.That it still had problems when recording one line and only 480 channels does not bode well for its future. I was very disappointed in it.IO to their credit though, were receptive to comments I made about it, so who knows, they might get it right yet.In my opinion though, FWIW, they made some fundamental mistakes early on that are probably internally politically difficult for them to remedy.The first is using a Windows OS to run the user interface, and the other was to allow kiddy programmers, all full of MS vim, vigor and brainwashing to write the code for it.It’s got everything from ‘Wizards’ (good for managers, accountants and 15 year old school girls) to graphical ‘flows’ – good for SFA.
It’s time they started to talk to the old time Observers (there are still a few left, believe it or not) as opposed to listening to boys who may well have degrees in playing games, but know nothing about Seismic.
Anyway, enough of that. Time for a beer.