It seems that my last post (since removed) upset some people.
It was intended to provoke a reaction, and by some accounts, I guess it was successful.
The equipment vendor involved claims to have a solution to one of the issues with their equipment. To date I have seen little information though. Maybe there will be more when I get back next month. I guess I will just leave it at that.
Despite the not to be mentioned again issues, the last trip was certainly better than the one before. The crew is working through some very challenging terrain, and making quite good progress. Things could always be better of course, and perhaps if advice given was taken, then things could be. By the time I get back, they should be in more interesting areas, with challenges of their own – sand dunes being one. It has been some time since the crew, and in fact I have worked in dunes. It’s probably going to be a bit of a struggle to start with for all of us, but it is the nature of seismic crews to manage anything thrown at them. They aren’t necessarily happy about it, and nor they should be, but seismic crews do venture where no man has gone before. A bit like Captain Kirk I suppose, but without the Enterprise.
During my last break, I got interested in Android tablets and wrote a small app for, of all things HSE. And no, I have not suddenly turned queer and embraced cosmetic safety in all its gory glory. My approach remains quite pragmatic – I believe the essence of safety is common sense, not hiding in an office writing 200 page reports about the dangers of wanking in the shower.
That being said, camp inspections are important and a lot of a rep’s time is taken up in write-ups of inspections. This is where my new app comes in. It runs on an Android Tablet and allows the rep to easily and quickly generate useful incident reports. I call my system SeisStop, as it is loosely based on Stop Cards as invented by Dupont. It is two parts – the Tablet App and a small application on a PC that allows for editing and printing the incidents recorded by the tablet.
The Tablet App allows you to take pictures, make notes and tag the usual issues.
Drop down lists make for easy selection of areas, departments and responsible party.
(This one is not the crew BTW, but me at home, I probably should tidy up)
The PC part (not shown here) allows each report to be edited and printed. One big thing is that the pictures are tied directly to each report. Much better than having to sort it all out later on.
It worked well for me and I plan to develop it further, possibly to a commercial stage.
I am working developing more apps that should be of interest to reps and contractors. The only downside was that the Tablet I have (Acer A1-810) is not easy to read in bright sunlight. This is an issue common to most tablets I have seen. It just meant I did most of my camp walk arounds in the early morning.
I highly recommend the Acer Tablet though. It performs very well and is priced very reasonably.
For those interested in these things, an update to SMTAN2 is available which adds some extras in the Statistics page. See here:
http://seismatters.com/SMT%20Analyser2.html