Letter from Manila - Santol - of course!

You need to allow for flavour and abv

Hope all goes to plan Paul. Good luck.

So, what's been happening?

Well someone kindly bought me some highly expensive (think several thousand US$) train operation simulation software. Well, no, they bought it for themselves and got it loaded onto my laptop as the only person with operational experience on the project.

Unfortunately, they didn't really want to buy the training that goes with it.

It works like this. You buy the licence and get two days free training, a third comes at cost. There's no limit (within reason) to the amount of trainees, but only one chews up the same time. Obviously, with COVID, everyone's working from home and I have a good internet connection. The client wants to hold back free training.

So, the people that were paying said, "How's about you do one day, on-line?"

I pointed out that on-line was no substitute for face-to-face and I wasn't sure one day would see me competent on a pretty complex piece of software. Two would be better.

"Okay, we'll get you one day"

As you can see, the client listens.

So I did my day. Guess what? Nowhere near enough.

Now fortunately, the local supplier/trainer happens to be a, "best friend," of mine ever since I financed him a full pi55 up here one night, so I screwed two more half-days out of him, gratis.

Still only half-trained and with some reluctant software, I attempted to build a model of 142.886 kms of line, to the level of detail about (not yet designed) signal locations and track circuit lengths, then run four separate, yet concurrent, services across it.

A week last Friday it had the Mother of all Crashes so, pretty disgruntled, as it had eaten a weeks work, I fired it off back.

Apparently, "It shouldn't do that," and it was sent to a mysterious entity called, "The Developer" for something computery.

Got it back on the Saturday. "Everything fine now." Well, it was after another seven days of entering the stuff I did the week before. Last Sunday, It's working!

Spent another week trying to get incompatible services sorted. 

So, tonight, Friday, the train plan I wanted to run, finally ran, and it works.

This cheers me greatly as my Japanese colleagues, and I use the term pretty loosely, reckoned it couldn't be done without their own, highly specialised software (seems nobody can do lots of up front on Excel) about which they could not possibly describe, or tell us which railways used it, but which apparently only Japanese people can operate and even further limited to 2 people with the combination to the safe in which this rare gem is held. In a mountain.

Interesting, but my Excel speed/time programme, which I've used on jobs all over the world, is within 1 minute of a several thousand dollar simulation.

Anyway, basically May disappeared, but Victory is sweet!

Having the first weekend off for a while.

May be having a "Mystery Guest" tomorrow. Do hope so.

Watch this space.

Take care everyone!

Have fun with Tania the mystery guest

I love excel - I've built quite a few very complex spreadsheets for work and home it really is a versatile tool

Years ago I was working in a company making cancer treatments and we produced for 6 different comtries and 4 different strengths

We used to get annual forecasts for volume all countries marketing teams (all strengths) and placed blanket orders for all the code specific packaging (sourced from another company) based on those volumes

Constantly running out of the right packaging and having to increase orders for some packaging made me frustrated so I built a model that I used to input what we had produced based on customer actual orders - in 6 mths I had all the data I needed to go back to marketing and they were very surprised to hear their forecast accuracy was less than 20%.

I proposed a yearly forecast based on what the data said and we used that - over the next 6mths it was just over 80% accurate

Turned out their idea of a forecast was to take the middle strength and put 80% of the volume against it and spread the 20% over the other strengths

I think if I'd been doing that job as a base I'd have said how much of each strength did we sell last year but I'm not in marketing!!!!

Very pleased for you all!

Because we're British; my friend Allan, curry aficionado extraordinaire, states that leftover curry is best served re-heated on toast the next morning. He sometimes does not eat the stuff ordered the night before so he can break his (curry) fast Mr. Creosote stylee

I, too, was hoping for a visit from the short angry man in charge.
Would have made for an interesting story!

And George, you can't fool me by holding the camera lower! None of them are that tall!

You makes I larf

The old “don’t mention that thing I haven’t told you about” trick..

Yep, I’d be answering the call of the beer as well.