Will’s View

So, finally made it to Hong Kong! Leaving Melbourne we managed to get our flight delayed by 2 hours because some fellow in Adelaide brought sand onto the plane, but someone identified it as a ‘mysterious powder’ so it had to be closely examined. Nice one. Then once we were on the plane, an incoming pilot had apparently heard or seen an ‘explosion’ on the runway, so there goes another 20 minutes! Where do they find these people?

But once actually in Hong Kong we had a great time. We went on a day tour around Hong Kong Island and went to a market there. I took heaps of photos, but I’m still trying to put them up, work in progress! It seems like they have a huge amount of faith in bamboo here. I knew they used it instead of scaffolding sometimes, but it turns out they will cover a whole building in the stuff, with the characteristic green cloth. Can that stuff really be that sturdy? After the tour we went for a stroll down Nathan Road, called the Golden Mile. It’s an amazing street full of people and neon Sony lights, and a random food court where we had dinner, and no-one could speak english - very authentic!

I saw a couple of random things in Hong Kong:

1. A guy arc welding on a floating restaurant
2. A guy with a non battery-powered angle grinder in the middle of a floating fishing village
3. About 4 policemen texting thier mates
4. Double-Decker buses.
5. Double-Decker trams!!!

Now it’s on to London! Apologies if there are spelling/grammar mistakes, sleep on longhaul flights is hard to come by!

--> So, finally made it to Hong Kong! Leaving Melbourne we managed to get our flight delayed by 2 hours because some fellow in Adelaide brought sand onto the plane, but someone identified it as a ‘mysterious powder’ so it had to be closely examined. Nice one. Then once we were on the plane, an incoming pilot had apparently heard or seen an ‘explosion’ on the runway, so there goes another 20 minutes! Where do they find these people? (More...)

While celebrating the end of exams recently, a visitor to my humble abode brought along an apple pie or three to help kick things along. This is all well and good, but what about the means of eating it? Because of the hot nature of apple pie, it’s not the sort of thing one can just cut up and put on a plate for people to pick off, and god knows that there aren’t enough bowls in my house for more than about three people to eat at once. So what do you do? Well one of my particularly adept friends managed to figure out that we could use the handy tin-foil tray it comes in to serve it around, once it had cooled a little – this second part was discovered by trial and error. It seemed like a good idea at the time. This morning while cleaning up (lucky it’s recycling day on Monday!) I found globules of apple pie innards all over the floor, and most surfaces in the kitchen. So now I say renounce apple pie in favour of Doritos and other such easy-to-vacuum snacks!

--> While celebrating the end of exams recently, a visitor to my humble abode brought along an apple pie or three to help kick things along. This is all well and good, but what about the means of eating it? Because of the hot nature of apple pie, it’s not the sort of thing one can just cut up and put on a plate for people to pick off, and god knows that there aren’t enough bowls in my (More...)

Lift manufacture is a curious thing. One would think it’s relatively straight-forward to design a lift: it goes up; then goes down again. Sure there’s a little more to it than that, but it’s the bells and whistles they add that cause me grief.

Example: That ping that lifts make when they reach your floor. Well if the hallway leading to the lifts is made out of something that reflects sound (i.e. faux-marble) then it needs to be a little more offensive in order to construe its meaning. If I’m waiting in the hallway for an elevator, and the ping echoes around the hall, I have to waste energy looking around to see which one it is….isn’t the sound meant to prevent the unnecessary expenditure of effort?

Then we have the lovely voice that announces whether we’re going up or down, and what floor we’re on. The only problem is that the floors all sound the same. Because of the crappy speakers in the lifts (someone probably cut some corners somewhere) it just sounds like that ethereal feminine voice is saying “mmberf floor”, which doesn’t make any kind of sense. I swear, if they didn’t mean i could avoid stairs altogether, I might not even use them.

--> Lift manufacture is a curious thing. One would think it’s relatively straight-forward to design a lift: it goes up; then goes down again. Sure there’s a little more to it than that, but it’s the bells and whistles they add that cause me grief. Example: That ping that lifts make when they reach your floor. Well if the hallway leading to the lifts is made out of something that reflects sound (i.e. faux-marble) then it needs to be (More...)

God bless Subway stamps. I know they’re just a sneaky scheme to keep you coming back, but it works! I admit that I eat there a little more often than I should, but it’s just because it tastes so good! And I don’t really consider it ‘fast food’ per say. It’s more ‘reasonably-paced food’, and being able to watch them while they combine ingredients makes it slightly more interactive and entertaining. But, and here’s the clincher, you expect more. As I have been oft-quoted as saying “A Subway not made with love is just not cool”. And it’s true: there’s too much sauce; not enough meat; they’ve toaseted it for too long; and it falls apart when you try and eat it. These are all signs of an inferiorly-made (try saying that ten times fast) Subway sandwhich.

It must be said that some Subway ‘Sandwich-Artists’ should leave the Great Art, and switch to something a little less demanding, like Donut King, or ordinary retail work. For they do not meet the strict requirements demanded by other members of The Guild, and it makes me sad. A properly-made sandwich is a thing of beauty: not too dry lest you require an additional beverage; not too moist so that the bread goes soggy and you drip sauce everywhere; and a perfect balance of ingredients that are just healthy enough to justify the name ’sandwich’. This my friends is the Sandwich Gospel According to Will. Thank you.

--> God bless Subway stamps. I know they’re just a sneaky scheme to keep you coming back, but it works! I admit that I eat there a little more often than I should, but it’s just because it tastes so good! And I don’t really consider it ‘fast food’ per say. It’s more ‘reasonably-paced food’, and being able to watch them while they combine ingredients makes it slightly more interactive and entertaining. But, and here’s the clincher, you expect (More...)

For the first time in my university career I filled a whole exam booklet with text.

Now some of you - those involved in arts and the like - may think that this isn’t a strange thing at all. However let’s reflect for a moment: I do engineering, and I am well acquainted with filling exam answer booklet(s) with enough numerical symbols and formulae to, well, fill an exam booklet. But the art of prose is one not often practiced by us engineers; we can write a 20 page report with references and pretty diagrams, but when it comes to writing extraneous text in an exam, well that’s just plain rude.

I agree that for this particular subject (Manufacturing Processes - yes it is as interesting as its name sounds) there were very few formulae and maths-type concepts, but what ever happened to the “short answer” section? When I look through an exam and see words like “Discuss” and “Comment on” it tends to throw me off my game a tad. That’s why they have a special section in lab reports called “Discussion”, so we don’t have to do it anywhere else! Not only that, but they expected diagrams as well… what is the world coming to?

--> For the first time in my university career I filled a whole exam booklet with text. Now some of you - those involved in arts and the like - may think that this isn’t a strange thing at all. However let’s reflect for a moment: I do engineering, and I am well acquainted with filling exam answer booklet(s) with enough numerical symbols and formulae to, well, fill an exam booklet. But the art of prose is one not (More...)