The Glorious English Summer

This is the current rainfall radar for Great Britain and Ireland.

Tom's Tips for Travellers #1

Do not buy food in English railway stations. Ever.

I have just paid £2.70 for what must a real-world realisation of the worst ham & cheese croissant theoretically possible.

Work Culture

One of the great questions about the world, along with Why does Jeremy Clarkson exist? and How do six billion people manage to produce so little television worth watching? is, What are secretarial staff for, exactly?

In Australia, true secretarial staff are becoming increasingly rare. Even where you can identify them, they tend to have titles like Office Manager or Security and Safety Officer, by which they prefer to be known. Here are a few things that such staff will not do for you in an Australian company:

• Type that letter to a client for you;
• Deal with your mail;
• Make coffee for you;
• Make your lunch;
• Wash your dishes after lunch;

and so on. In fact, a cynic might allege that Australian secretaries are only interested in doing jobs that increase their own power base within the company. Australian secretarial staff are generally very adverse to the above list of jobs, but very happy to, for instance, book travel (and approve or reject travel plans), prepare bids in response to tenders (and determine relative client-funded pay-scales for individuals) and so on.

I am a bit bemused to find that this is not the case in Britain, at least, certainly not at GH. All mail is opened by the secretaries, and dealt with as best they can; you only see it if they're not sure what to do with it. GH provides drip-filter coffee and lunch for their staff; the secretarial staff can be seen each morning, setting up the coffee machine (if no early-birds get desperate and beat them to it, which might actually be most of the time, often me), taking the delivery of sandwiches from Sainsbury's, laying out the pickles, mustard, beetroot, fruit, mayonnaise etc, slicing tomato and so on. And it seems to be just normal to dump your dishes on the bench afterwards, and let them load the dishwasher and pack the dishes away afterwards. Most people (including me) will load their own dishes if the dishwasher is not full for the day yet, but with two domestic dishwashers serving more than a hundred people, this inevitably runs out fairly early. So the secretarial staff deal with it.

Those familiar with an Australian office environment will likely notice some differences here. I suspect that, when I get used to it, I will rather enjoy it; for the moment it is quite uncomfortable, and I keep wanting to offer to help. At least once I have been told not to, because my time is too expensive for that (or at least better off billed to a customer).

And to elaborate on an earlier question, we have 43 free-to-air (so long as you pay your TV license fee) channels here; several of them are, admittedly devoted to to sort of infomercial only seen on late-night TV in Australia, or to constant music videos and the like, but there must still be at least 25 channels showing general television which then allege you would like to watch. Why is it that, at any one time, three of them will be showing Top Gear? which, if you do the math, tells you there are a very large number of Top Gear repeats here, and that Top Gear is sensationally popular here. There is also a channel called UKTV History, which sounds really interesting to me, being quite interested in the more popular bits of history; a quick look through to next week's programming shows that it only broadcasts for about eight hours a day (fair enough I guess) and repeats shows about every two days (what?). It perhaps goes to show that the Australian model of four channels with few repeats might be about right.

And let me take this opportunity to plug MythTV; a free software digital video recorder for your TV. With this and a £50 TV receiver card, I can control our TV from the computer. A week ago I told it to record any Top Gear episodes that came on; I now have sixty one and a half episodes recorded, which rather demonstrates the validity of my complaint, I think. Handy bit of software, though.

OK, Jack has asked me to say a bit about my new job. He assures me that lots of people are interested. Well, you are, aren't you?

I work for a company called Garrad Hassan and Partners. We are wind turbine design consultants. We have been in the business since 1984, well before wind turbines were fashionable and, so I am told, we are the very best there is in design consultancy when it comes to wind turbines.

We cover every aspect of wind turbine design; from site selection, wind modelling and power output prediction for a given site, right through mechanical design of the turbines and the towers, electrical design and component selection, to controller design and integration, factory test support, prototype tower commisioning, Human Machine Interface (HMI) design and so on.

So what's it like to be a raving greeny? Actually, the people who work for GH are an interesting mix. Some are in the business because they believe they are making the world a better place and want to see the end of fossil fuels and nuclear power; some are there because wind turbines present some very interesting problems in engineering; some are there because it's a job that pays the bills. Most, I suspect, are a mixture of all three, including me.

We work in a fantastic old building called St Vincent's Works. It is pretty much what you'd get if you crossed a factory with a fairy castle. The wikipedia page has quite a good photo. It was originally built in the 1800s some time, and was mostly concerned with the manufacture of corrugated iron for export to Australia; apparently quite a lot of the corrugated iron used in early Australian buildings came from this factory. The factory portion (which you can't see in the photo) is now derelict and held up with scaffolding; the office portion has been well-maintained and refurbished over the years. The entry foyer is an octagonal chamber with eight arched entry-ways, murals on walls and floor constructed from ceramic tiles, concealed up-lighting to highlight the nice bits, slate stairs up to the first floor and so on. Every visitor just stops and looks at it for a minute or so, and so did I when I first came in.

My particular job is in the controllers group of the software department; we are responsible for implementing control algorithms produced by our turbine design people and also developing HMIs to go with them. This presents some interesing, although hardly unique, challenges.

For starters, we never impose hardware choices on our customers. We do advise when we are asked to do so, but most customers have already decided whose hardware they want to use and we just promise to support it. Our controller needs to be very portable, then; to different hardware, differnt operating systems, different communications protocols and so on. We are constantly porting our software to new platforms, and trying to make sure we keep as much as possible in common between the platforms. Some customers even change their minds half way through the project, and we still promise to support it; it is part of the service.

It turns out that wind turbines are complex beasts, with plenty of potential to go badly wrong, and it is our responsibility to make sure we never get into those situations and that everything goes right. How bad can it be? Have a look at this; this is what happens when a turbine goes wrong. This condition is known as overspeed, and is about the worst thing that can happen to a turbine. It is both expensive and extremely dangerous. The description on that page is not quite accurate; I think the story is that a maintenance crew had disabled the controller's overspeed protection for maintenance purposes when the wind came up unexpectedly, and a couple of other overspeed protection systems failed. Don't quote me on that, though. Thankfully, the crew had time to get out.

My particular responsibilities are basically the messy bits of controller implementation; I don't know a lot about how controllers work, but I am responsible for making them (and their HMIs) work on every platform any customer asks us for. So far my work has been mostly behind-the-scenes, preparing some abstractions to make this a lot easier in future.

So there you are; that's what I do all day. It is interesting and entertaining. I am also walking four miles each day to get to the train, from the train to work and back again. At first this was a bit of a drag, but now I am finding I quite enjoy it. I feel a lot fitter than I have in a long time. Occasionally I take the bus from the end of our street instead; when I get to work, I feel like I have missed out and it leaves me feeling edgy and disquieted. Besides, with the dreadful traffic we have here, it is quicker to walk one and a quarter miles to the train and take the train than to walk a hundred yards to the bus and take the bus. Sigh. We will see how I go in winter, when the sun comes up after I get to work and goes down before I leave.