(no subject)
I'm in Kuala Lumpur on a training course in Petroleum Economics.
Unfortunately I came down with a nasty case of the flu just before I left and it was touch-and-go whether I'd even get on the plane, but I just managed to recover enough to take the flight. Still not very well, skipping dinner and getting fevers in the evening.
It's been a pretty good course so far. The only thing is the guy is making us do all the spreadsheets by hand, on proper spreadsheet accounting paper - tapping away at a calculator to solve each cell. It takes AGES. To do it with Excel would take seconds because you only have to do it once and then you fill the formulas. I have never been more grateful for the advent of computers! I get where he is coming from because he wants us to understand it, but it's really inefficient for learning when you spend 40 minutes tapping away at a calculator and writing long numbers in small columns. You're only spending 5 minutes actually learning, the rest is grunt-work that could be handled by a computer. At least we don't have to use slide rules, I guess...
They gave me a textbook, "Economics of Worldwide Petroleum Production" which I was pretty impressed by. I've never got one from Nautilus. They also gave us each a pretty good programmable calculator, which does all sorts of nifty maths tricks like differentiation, linear algebra etc, although it would have been a bit more useful in the pre-smartphone age as I'm sure you can get apps for that these days. At least the battery will last longer, I guess! The downside is that it came with a big book of instructions which are all in Dutch for some reason, so I'm learning to work it by trial and error.
My coursemates are a much tamer crowd than I'm used to on the Nautilus courses, which have been full of Brits and Aussies in their 20s and early 30s, who make for some good nights out at restaurants and bars. I suppose that might be because most of the Nautilus courses I've been on have been fairly junior level courses that the various oil companies send their young graduates on. Or maybe it's just luck of the draw, I don't know - this is a fairly basic level course too.
But it does mean I am feeling a bit lonely as they are not the sort of people I can catch up with for a beer in the hotel bar, even if I were well enough (I can hardly even understand some of them). I couldn't even face the thought of dinner so I've just sat in my room on the laptop all night. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow and can go have a beer or two, though it'll be a solo beer!
It's the first time I've ever faced a weeklong course in KL without anyone to even go out to have dinner with. I was looking forward to catching up with a Norwegian girl I met on last year's Nautilus course in Perth, who was based here in KL, but she got abruptly pulled by her company and sent back to Norway a few weeks back in response to the collapsed oil price.
Oh well, such is life! As I said, I'm sick anyway, so if it has to happen on any course that there's nobody for me to hang out with after class, it might as well be this one.
Unfortunately I came down with a nasty case of the flu just before I left and it was touch-and-go whether I'd even get on the plane, but I just managed to recover enough to take the flight. Still not very well, skipping dinner and getting fevers in the evening.
It's been a pretty good course so far. The only thing is the guy is making us do all the spreadsheets by hand, on proper spreadsheet accounting paper - tapping away at a calculator to solve each cell. It takes AGES. To do it with Excel would take seconds because you only have to do it once and then you fill the formulas. I have never been more grateful for the advent of computers! I get where he is coming from because he wants us to understand it, but it's really inefficient for learning when you spend 40 minutes tapping away at a calculator and writing long numbers in small columns. You're only spending 5 minutes actually learning, the rest is grunt-work that could be handled by a computer. At least we don't have to use slide rules, I guess...
They gave me a textbook, "Economics of Worldwide Petroleum Production" which I was pretty impressed by. I've never got one from Nautilus. They also gave us each a pretty good programmable calculator, which does all sorts of nifty maths tricks like differentiation, linear algebra etc, although it would have been a bit more useful in the pre-smartphone age as I'm sure you can get apps for that these days. At least the battery will last longer, I guess! The downside is that it came with a big book of instructions which are all in Dutch for some reason, so I'm learning to work it by trial and error.
My coursemates are a much tamer crowd than I'm used to on the Nautilus courses, which have been full of Brits and Aussies in their 20s and early 30s, who make for some good nights out at restaurants and bars. I suppose that might be because most of the Nautilus courses I've been on have been fairly junior level courses that the various oil companies send their young graduates on. Or maybe it's just luck of the draw, I don't know - this is a fairly basic level course too.
But it does mean I am feeling a bit lonely as they are not the sort of people I can catch up with for a beer in the hotel bar, even if I were well enough (I can hardly even understand some of them). I couldn't even face the thought of dinner so I've just sat in my room on the laptop all night. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow and can go have a beer or two, though it'll be a solo beer!
It's the first time I've ever faced a weeklong course in KL without anyone to even go out to have dinner with. I was looking forward to catching up with a Norwegian girl I met on last year's Nautilus course in Perth, who was based here in KL, but she got abruptly pulled by her company and sent back to Norway a few weeks back in response to the collapsed oil price.
Oh well, such is life! As I said, I'm sick anyway, so if it has to happen on any course that there's nobody for me to hang out with after class, it might as well be this one.