Danish terms

undersoegelse = examination
samlet = summary
tykkelse = thickness
bilag = appendix/annex
mappen = portfolios
Bemærkninger = remark
sten = stone
grus = gravel
ler = clay
modellen = the model

MSDS-women

Self-explanatory

Disclaimer for scientific reports

Limitations

The conclusions presented in this report are professional opinions based solely upon visual observations of the subject property and vicinity, on our interpretation of the available historical information and other data provided by (your source), and on our evaluation of the sampling and analytical results described in this report. They are intended exclusively for the purpose outlined herein and at the site location indicated. This report is intended for the sole use by (your client). The scope of services performed in execution of this investigation may not be appropriate to satisfy the needs of other users, and any use or re-use of this document or the findings, conclusions, or recommendations presented herein is at sole risk of said user.

Opinions and recommendations presented herein apply to site conditions existing at the time of our investigation and those reasonably foreseeable. They cannot necessarily apply to site changes of which (your company) is not aware and has not had the opportunity to evaluate. Subsurface conditions, including groundwater level and contaminant concentration may change with time.

There is no investigation that is thorough enough to preclude the presence of materials on the site, which presently, or in the future, may be considered hazardous. Some variations in subsurface conditions across a site cannot be fully defined by investigation. Hence, although the sampling targeted suspected sources of contaminants, it is possible that the measurements and values obtained from sampling and testing during the investigation may not represent the extreme conditions that exist within the subject property.

The scope of services performed is that which (your client) agreed to in light of its needs and considerations.

MU Frenzy

If you are not a fan of MU, I would suggest you give this posting a skip, else the videos would be painful for you to watch!!

Kings of Europe 2007/08



Champions of England 2007/08


Man United 7 - AS Roma 1

Nice video compilation... enjoy!!

Greener pasture

Migraine... err... I mean migrating.

Yeah, I am contemplating on whether to embark on this... as it seemed that the country is going nowhere (stagnant) but perhaps backwards in the years to come, judging by the things are going in the country and national issues that are affecting us, the not-so-privilege citizens whom are born in the country that is blessed with abundant natural resources and stability (geologically, meterologically etc.). Being born in this country doesn't guarantee my basic rights as a citizen to have a level playing field in education, employment opportunity or materialistic gain (e.g. property, automobiles). Of course in here I can't disclose them as explicit as I have it clearly 'worded' in my mind, as I would not risk myself or my family to intimidation, harassment or even being thrown in jail for saying things that are considered 'sensitive'. If you are resident of this country long enough, you will know what actually I'm trying to say here.

Gloomy prospect in the future for the country if things are the same as now, as far I can see la. I'm worried for my offspring, and the future generations of the not-so-privilege citizen would suffer the most. Can't seem to see the light at the end of the tunnel at this moment.

If even in my own country I am still considered the descendants of migrants, might as well go to another country as migrant and feed on the bigger economic cake there? Two or three within my group of contacts has emigrated, and I'm contemplating on whether I should take the big decision to migrate like them.

Is there still hope for this country?

Mind games

If someone put you in the bad light and make you feel like you are the devil in the company by he himself acting as a 'victim' and 'seemed' to be victimised by you, how would you react to this play-acting? One more thing, this bugger is much more senior in the company and has lots of connection (upright, sideways and downright).

Should you just keep quiet and let him have his way? Or should you retort by reporting to the higher management and make a fool of yourself as you cannot explicitly prove it?

As the big boss in the company, how would you react if you find two key personnel in your company feuding on who shall take responsibility on certain tasks that were already clearly defined and documented in their scope of work?

As a responsible person, should you just close one eye and let bad things happen only to find out later that you could intervene/manage it from the beginning? What if the other person somehow knows that you'll intervene and hence let you do all the troubleshooting for him?

I say it is damn bloody unfair and its clearly a one-sided affair.

What say you?

It's complicated

I have a friend, and he's entangled in an office conflict.

He resigned from a reputable MNC firm and joined his former boss' company, which coincidentally his first company since graduating from university. He was reluctant to jump ship at first, knowing the fact that his former supervisor would feel displaced if my friend make a comeback to the office. But he was reassured that he'll be given a different role and poised to 'lead' a new division of the company to do consultancy jobs. So he leaped on, without any tangible backup.... and practically burned the 'bridge' behind him when he chose not to be interviewed by his management during his exit from the MNC firm.

In the 'new' office, there are two 'heads'. So when my friend hopped in, he's the third head. The 'old' head was my friend's former supervisor, when he was a fresh grad... junior staff. And the 2nd head, Snr Project Manager is super envious (based on body language, spoken words & actions) of my friend, and very kiasu.

Hmm... for ease of reference, I would now refer my friend as 'dragon', 2nd head as 'dog' and the old head as 'pig'.

Dragon, dog and pig are all reporting to the CEO. Being an old staff and as an act of face saving, the pig managed to convinced the CEO to promote him as an 'adviser', having served his capacity as a general manager in the past few years with directorship status in hand. But pig poured all out to the dragon last year, saying that he had lost his dignity if he decided to take up the contract agreement (strip his directorship status, but all benefits remained) with a validity period of one year. Meaning, the pig now is on yearly contract, and he kept bragging about how the CEO pleaded with him to stay and sign 5 years contract, to which the pig said he refused (sure or not I do not know lar... ar but then why the CEO only offered him one year contract instead of 2 or 3 or 5 years before he said no?). Anyway, the pig seemed to forget about his talk to dragon (when dragon came to talk to the CEO about his offer) about saving his dignity when he chose to accept the one year contract with the company last year. Talking about going on freelance and team up with the company's competitor in Johor konon... but in the end he would rather eat his words rather than leaving the company with dignity (as he said earlier about not signing the contract which strips off his directorship status) and work his butt off outside. The pig asked the dragon whether he should stay, and the dragon said 'why not' because pig has still school going kids to feed... and he's way over the retirement age already (married late). The dragon still has respect for the pig, because after all, the pig was his first mentor in his working life after graduation from university. But the pig took the dragon on a ride during a task which the dragon was involved. In one assignment, the dragon was looking for some suitable pictures for the company's powerpoint presentation and he pointed out some photos to match a theme of the presentation, to which the pig said those photos are not related to the theme. So the dragon left out the said theme, only to be queried by the CEO. And when the dragon said there were no photos to show, the CEO said the pig can point out some photos to the dragon, and the pig nodded. What??!! Earlier the pig said none to the dragon, but now it's the other way around. Obviously the dragon has been made to look like a liar or fool in front of the CEO because of the pig and now the dragon would never believe what the pig says anymore! So now the pig is on the 'watch out' list of the dragon.

The 2nd head @ the dog took over pig's status as director, as well as his shares in the company. Knowing the company has not been performing under the pig, the CEO had recalled the dog back into the company, promising him 'carrots' in order to train him to take over pig's tasks and responsibilities. The dog is shallow minded and always assess things from a short-term perspective. The dog has said to the dragon before, that he would do ANYTHING for money. So after listening to the dog, the dragon knows he cannot afford to belittle the dog; hence the dog now is the 2nd person on dragon's watch out list. Well, I guess when the dog decided to rejoin the company, little that the dog knows that it is hard to overturn a company and make it a profitable one if the management doesn't change. For change to happen, the management must first change first right?!!

The plot begins when the dog came to know that the dragon, a new comer into the fold, was offered directorship... not only one...but two, including a newly formed company. And although the dragon has half working experience under his belt compared to the dog, his knowledge on the technical and know-hows are much greater. That include report writing, utilising softwares, costing, management and using techie gadgets etc.

To be continued........

Historic milestone for geologists in Malaysia

It has been confirmed!

16/7/08, Wednesday at 11.43am.

That the much and long awaited bill has been passed in the Parliament... Geologist Bill 2008. Indeed this is a significant event for fellow geologists in the country, particularly those who are involved in jobs 'on-land', e.g. engineering geologist, site geologist etc.

Without the bill, geologists play second fiddle to engineers in the country, particularly those in the engineering field. Eh... who knows the ground better ar... engineer or geologist? Of course geologist la! Duh! How can someone (non-geologist) sign or certify a report that is prepared by geologist? And why geological input are put aside as far as anything on the ground is concerned? Imagine this: Moderately to highly weathered argillite ROCK (undergoing physical and chemical weathering, degrade and decompose over time), but when drilled into and sampled, it is described as sandy SILT (can't say clayey SILT according to BS 5930 konon). Hoho... that's a huge mistake... 'rock mass' now being classified as 'hard soil' (N=50). Another example: Drilled 3m into rock and borehole terminated, because one would think the rock is actually 'bedrock' ('continuous' laterally), but in actual fact, the rock is actually a huge boulder sitting on residual soil and the actual bedrock is 10m deeper. But because geological input is 'missing', piling was executed and terminated at the boulder level, but strangely, pile lengths are too short at some points.... why? Wrong interpreted 'bedrock' depth lar! So, the project cost will balloon up and based on the current price of steel bars, the profit margin of the project may be lost even before its completion!

Some people never learned. Even tragedies like landslides that caused the lost of lives and properties can't seem to change the mindset of policy makers or some engineers that some geological input would have stopped these tragedies from happening. A good example I can think of right now is the rockfall at Bukit Lanjan. Although I don't recall someone being killed in the rockfall event, I did remember the hardships (super traffic jams) that the road (or rather highway) closure that had caused.... affecting thousand of motorists on daily basis for more than half a year. A simple rock slope stability after the blasting of the rock slopes could have stopped this rockfall from occurring. A daylighting joint that provides the sliding plane for the blocky rocks could have identified and mitigating measures such as removing the 'loose' blocks of rocks could have been carried out.... and surely the rockfall incident could have been avoided. But I wonder whose money was spent on cleaning up on the mess there? I hope it is not the tax payers' monies. An act of God konon... very irresponsible statement by the minister when asked about the likely cause(s) of the rockfall.

Sinkholes. Settlement. Subsidence. Is your area affected by these? If the answer is yes, your place could have been:
i) a mining area in the past (mining going below ground surface)
ii) a soft ground being backfilled and insufficiently compacted or lack of foundation works
iii) an area that is underlain by karstic limestone (meaning some cavities or voids within the limestone)

Frankly speaking, I'm not a super expert. But if you see significant signs that like any of the above, best is to contact the geological survey department to find out the 'history' of the land. So before you buy a land, why not ask the advice of geologist first before committing yourself to sign the sales and purchase agreement? He/She could have save you lots of money repairing the possible defects on your property... but how to monetize the run-around and time lost in the getting the repair being carried out or identifying the real problem? And peace of mind? That's priceless....

So why not learn more about the profession and let us contribute something to the society in return? But please, we are just humans and we can't see 'through' the ground or hills okay... if we can do that, we would have been super rich, being able to locate primary tin, gold or economical ores/deposits in the subsurface!!!

And being a young chap like me that holds two professional affiliations at one time is not very common eh.... so must salute me when you see me... hehehehe.... just joking here ok.

Anyway... boss, if you are reading this, I need a pay rise. I'm not greedy lar... 50% increase pun jadi lar ... this is to keep myself from being caught up in the high cost of living due the ballooning inflation rate that is predicted to go over 8% this year...


Remediated cut slope (with retaining wall) somewhere along the 'new' east-west highway... between Karak and Kuantan. Judging by the shape of the failure, it looks like a circular landslip. But who cares? Cut the slope and repair later wat... toll payers' are paying for the repair, the contractor and engineers will be laughing all the way to the bank...

Bug reporter for hire!

If you are a software developer and you would like to collate feedbacks about potential bugs (bug reporting) or gather constructive comments on how to improve certain aspects of your new applications, do drop me an email at tkurus@gmail.com.

I've always like to explore new software/applications.... and some of the ones that I'm familiar with are, but not limited to:
RESIX Plus, AGI EarthImager 2D, RES2DINV, FIRSTPIX, REFRACTION, Aarhus Workbench, Visual MODFLOW, Surfer & Rockworks.

There are more applications in addition to the above, but these are the ones that I am most familiar with. I would say most of them are related to 'geoscience' and 'modelling'.

Why me?

I have strong analytical skills, with some background in programming. It is usual the case where I've always try to 'push' new applications to its limits.... forcing it to produce bugs/errors such as these:

More bugs discovery meaning less complaints from potential clients/users. So why not try me out today?

Geophysical training programme

Participated in a geophysical training programme since last Monday, courtesy of Danida. We had a visiting professor from Aarhus Universitet of Denmark to share Denmark's technology and knowledge in multi-electrode profilling (resistivity survey). We managed to carry out 4 resistivity profiles, with an accumulated distance of 1.7km over 2 locations. The first location is within a prominent golf course in Kuala Lumpur territory, and the second, on a vacant land somewhere in Lembah Beringin (exact location is not disclosed, don't want to get sued).

This week's training module is a follow-up training that we first had in Denmark, back in March this year. Being exposed to 2D resistivity in the past, this training module is more like an affirmation for me, because I've already have had some basics back in uni days and extensive experience using this technique for groundwater exploration in Perak . But this training module is an added knowledge to me because a relatively new array, i.e. gradient array is being adopted for the acquisition of field resisitivity data. Apparently this array is a rojak between dipole-dipole, Wenner, Schlumberger etc. arrays, and widely used in Denmark for subsurface imaging. But I've always pondered if this widely used array in Denmark can be successfully applied here, on our terrain. The reason being is, in Denmark, the land is generally flat and underlain predominantly by sediments. And here on our terrain the geology is a complex one, we have all sorts of rock and formations - igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, you name it. And there is also limited papers describing the usage of the gradient array on tropical land like Malaysia, where we experience more vigorous weathering.

I was wrong eh... the signal over noise ratio for gradient array was so impressive that a profile conducted profile over electrical cables doesn't seemed to be affected that much and there weren't many negative readings as compared to other array that I've used before, e.g. pole-dipole (forward or reverse) and dipole-dipole. And looking at the pseudosection derived from the gradient arrangement, I think this array is the best to apply when you're carrying out a resistivity survey. But the downside is, over a profile of 400m long, the depth of penetration that you can expect is between 40-60m below ground surface, which is kind of shallow for 'our' standard. A quick look at the pseudosection that I've generated using the data acquired in Perak last year indicate that penetration depths were generally greater, whereby for pole-dipole and dipole-dipole arrays, the penetration depths are generally 90-100m and 50-70m, respectively.
But anyway, it's an eye opener for everybody because this is one rare opportunity where we actually have had a visiting professor from Denmark to teach us and share his knowledge on resistivity survey.

Working in Brunei

8 - 11/8/06

Site 1


This was the first ever site that I've worked on in Brunei Darussalam. Pretty interesting site where soil, sediment, groundwater and surface water are required to be sampled. And this was my first site that I had actually used a Van Dorn sampler for surface water sampling, and improvised a method for sampling soft sediments at the bottom of a pond. Completed all soil/sediment/gw/sw samplings with the help of colleagues in the record time... of three working days!! But it was pretty scary on the boat when we were carrying out the sw sampling and sediment sampling since we can't see the bottom and the overgrown underwater weeds keep 'grabbing' our equipments that were lowered down into the pond for probing/measurements.

Well, for the samplings within the pond area, the initial idea was to build platforms to 'reach' out to the sampling points.... but then again it will be very expensive (materials priced in BND) and building 4 or 5 platforms will be too time consuming. And we are a bunch of environmental sampling experts and not foundation engineers, where we need to calculate the proper strength of the materials and structure (platform) before we could actually put our weight on it. And then there was also an idea to build a pontoon... but then again, it won't be as stable as a boat. So since I am the de facto project manager of this site (and my colleague chose to be in charge over the 2nd site), we decided to go on a boat with peddlers, to carry out the sediment and sw sampling. For the sediment sampling, we tried using Ekman grab/dredge/bucket, but the soft sediments 'disappears' before we could lift the sampler out from the surface of the pond, and that warrants for plan B. But what's the plan B? No such plan.... heck... so in the first day of sediment sampling, we failed to retrieve sufficient sample... not even in decent volumes to fit into a single soil jar!

Pondered hard overnight over the predicament (sediment sampling), and suddenly the sampling mechanism of 'geotube' and obtaining undisturbed sample via Mazier sampling (from experience working at KL Pavillion site for 6 over months) came into the picture and voila... I took my chances and ordered 4-5 nos of 3m lengths of 1.5" dia uPVC pipe the following day, got on the boat, used a handheld GPS to get to the sampling points, whacked the short uPVC into the sediment 'beds', cap them (liken to close the tip of a straw to retain the liquid inside), pull them up, cap and seal the bottom. The next step is to drain out the water column inside the uPVC, else the water will mix the sediment up and it will be an impossible task to differentiate the sediment at the top surface and the required sample at 0.5m below it. So I took a small drill (that was mean for riveting) and drill some holes within the water column in the uPVC pipe, but very near to the top surface of the sediments, for draining the water out from the pipe. Mind you, this wasn't an easy task because the pipes aren't transparent, so I had to rely solely on my sound judgment. So after the draining task, the next step is to remove the sediment samples from the pipe... easy except for one... the rest is just like laying logs in the toilet bowl, if you know what I mean ;-p

GW sampling - easy lar, same as soil sampling. Surface water sampling is a bit tricky, because we're in the boat somewhere in the pond area... windy at times and it would be an arduous task to attempt rinsing or decontaminate the sampler after each sampling (at three different depths, if my memory didn't fail me lar). And some more challenging because there were so many bottles to fill up i.e. preserved and unpreserved plastic bottles (for testing of metals and inorganics, I think), glass 500ml and amber 1L bottle (more bottles for duplicate).

Drilling and installing monitoring well is somewhat challenging, since the site is predominantly underlain by silty fine SAND with high water table. And mind you, we did not engage a drilling contractor for this job (PM quoted less to build bridge with the client). But with Makkal Sakti of few Filipinos, we managed to pull this through and wrap up all the work by the third day.