Winza

Today I was going through a bunch of new jobs (mostly new developments) to be inputted into GIS. As I was going through them, I found two sewer pump stations that were way too advanced, a couple of water main renewals that had already been done and some other random bits and pieces. And then there were three more that I had to put on hold because the prerequisite data are not on the system yet. Two hours later, I managed to find something that I could input. So I was happily importing files until I encountered an error in the GIS software, which I didn’t know how to solve. I sought help from the person who sat next to me and he inspected the raw data which was in ascii format. Thirty minutes later, we discovered some coding for the pipes were incorrect and we fixed it. Then we ran the importing process again and it worked. We opened up the development area in GIS and found the sewer features had been duplicated. And guess what? The job has already been put it but it hasn’t been marked as done in the job recording database.

This was stupid. But I did learn another lesson: It was to check the area before importing and adding new features into the system. As simple as that.

Today at work, I was drawn attention to this article and it made me realise that the amount of we consume is much greater than we’d thought. This excludes the water we drink, wash and flush our toilet with. It is not suprising that the more processed an item is, the more water it consumes because processed things undergo more stages in their life compared to less processed goods such as apples and eggs. (LCA - different thing, but can also be applied to water)

So.. should we only buy things that has the least water footprint? No way!

While this article reminds us of how much negative impact we can impose our environment and our (limited - because water is scarce in Australia) water resources, it is unneccessary to totally deprive ourselves of luxury items just because it would increase our ecological/water footprint, but rather be a little bit more conscious on what we buy and how to use our resources more wisely.

Productivity decreases dramatically when working with old, complex and tedious datasets. And on top of that, different people have bombarded me with different approaches for the data cleanup. Three days and I haven’t completed converting one single record.

This is bugging me!!!

• Queries are running too slowly in Access
• Having to deal with >12000 records of data
• Having to sought out conflicting data types
• Data that is corrupted
• Ambiguity in the data descriptions
• Hardly anybody knows how to approach the data cleanup.
• To many fields in the dataset (there’s almost 50 of them)
• Each category is represented by a numerical code and there are hundreds of them
• Dealing with old data from over a decade ago and were all categoried based on a different system.
• Computer freezing
• Duplicating data types
• Data assigned to different categories with different codes used at different times in the past and
• After spending hours of cleaning data, someone comes up to me and says. “I’ve made a mistake. I should have told you this.. In other words, this translates to: delete this and start again. Argh!!!

Despite all, I am still gaining experience with dealing lots of data. And I am happy that I can take part in this. It develops my analytical, communication, interpersonal, Access, Excel and AIMS skills. And I can learn, improve and earn money at the same time. If I can suppress my frustration, it will even be better!

I was invited to attend a meeting for the first time, where different teams made their own presentations on various on-going projects. I didn’t think I would be attending one, since I am just a short term contractor, but my team leader asked me if I wanted to go and I took the opportunity at that instant. The meeting wasn’t what I thought it would be - it was more like a discussion group kind of thing, like a seminar. I got to learn what other teams were doing and how different people from different teams come together and communicate issues and ideas. I was fascinated with the implementation of the third pipe system in the one of the new Estate communities and how different coloured pipes will represent different water supplies. I also learnt about the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition), a system for communicating information to and from various sites in the water system. I was pleased that I could attend because I learnt so much from the meeting. It’s funny how I have finished my studies and yet I am still learning new things. There are heaps of new acronyms at work that I need to get used to - especially when I need to deal with different assets of sewage and water systems.