I have finally managed to scrape together a few spare minutes to attempt to write a little more of an update, as looking back it has been a couple of weeks. I would make the usual "time flies" comments but I imagine any regular followers will be well tired of that line by now, so we shall just take it as read. It's been a while so the old memory is a little vague on what exactly I did the last couple of weeks...
One job I did undertake was inspecting an underground system at a gold mine, that was pretty interesting. That's the second time I have been under ground now, it's quite an experience. I think this mine is down to about 1000 vertical meters down, which is about 4 KM to drive, and takes about an hour to get down, depending on how much traffic is around. It gets surprisingly warm down there, especially when the aircon in the vehicle is intermittent... but however, we made some discoveries as to how the system could work better, so it was a worthwhile exercise.
I think the rest of that week was mostly around Gladstone from memory, the odd bench repair here and there, and a couple of other antenna installation jobs. We had a bit of a tower job to do at one of the mines, all was going well until my pocket started ringing. Usually I don't have a drama answering the phone up a tower, but this particular time the phone got caught in my harness and by the time I realised what was happening it was merrily sailing on it's way 30 meters to the ground. Needless to say, it ended up in a thousand pieces. Luckily Dan managed to recover my sim card, and surprisingly enough I managed to piece everything back together enough to actually connect it to my computer and remove all my data from the phone itself. That really is a testament to the bullet-proof quality than Nokia handsets are known for.
This last week I was back at the mine chasing dozers and trucks and all sorts of other equipment around trying to repair faults. Mostly just the usual "rock hit aerial" problems, but there was the occasional interesting one. Anything in a dozer tends to get a pretty hard time, as they rattle their way around everything gets shaken up, including the drivers brains it appears. This makes for a lot of intermittent faults, where everything works perfectly when you test it stationary but the moment they try to drive off it all goes haywire. I have spent many hours chasing my tail over faults like that at times. I went to have a look at one dozer, parked up in the usual "safe LV park", and was working away when there was a dull "thump". The dozer driver looked at me and said "did you see that mate?" I replied that I hadn't, and he pointed at my truck. A large rock had fallen from the wall of their "safe" area and rolled right into the rear corner of my truck, removing the bumper mounts in the process. It's probably a good thing it hit the wheel rim as otherwise it would have done more damage. I managed to bend it back into shape and a couple of cable ties should solve the problem for now.
Other than that, not a lot to report at this stage, just the usual work eat sleep pattern. Next week should be interesting, I've heard on the grapevine that we could be doing a fair bit of driving, but I won't know the details until I get to work on Monday. I finally caved in a bought a new phone yesterday, my poor old N97 has finally got to the point where the continual crashing is more than just a mild inconvenience. Hopefully the new one doesn't follow suit, but so far I have been pleasantly surprised with its performance.
Anyhow, despite the lack of depth in this update I am going to leave you with some photographs, I will endeavour to construct something a little more entertaining next time around when I have more time.
TTFN!
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