June 11, 2007
Dalian (CHINA)
A Job Opportunity and Meeting an Angel
At work I am beginning the
laborious process of learning engineering software.
Rather than delve into too much research blabber - I am
paid to do such things and even then I hardly
like it - I will summarize my immediate task with the
following: I am to input an harmonic force function
(flowing sea ice) into an existing off-shore oil
platform model using the high-powered software ANSYS.
This simulation will generate data (acceleration,
displacement, and stress concentrations) that I will
later use to locate pipeline failures atop the
platform's superstructure.
So it is slightly busy at work as I read through manuals and perform tutorials, but it is not so busy that I can't chat with friends throughout it all.
One of the graduate students (the same one who would later help get this webpage back online, shown to the right) put me in touch with the prettiest girl I have seen since coming to China. We chatted online for a while and I later exchanged phone numbers with Scarlett (shown below). She has rubbished all the places I have seen in Dalian and says she will show me a far better side of the city - which is no small task because I already love Dalian!
Besides,
who
wouldn't want to be spend time with a girl as pretty as
she is? Add on the fact that she speaks fluent English,
is a dancer, will soon move to Hong Kong for work, and
used to sing at one of Dalian's most famous bars called
Banana, and I cannot help thanking my good fortune.
After work, I walked back to my apartment and passed out from exhaustion. I didn't sleep long though because I joined the other REU students for dinner at a local restaurant we are now regulars at. The English name of the restaurant is "Smack of Ligi", but I have no idea what a ligi actually is! One of the other students, Tyler from Virginia Tech, spent most of dinner working out a Rubbix Cube. If he wasn't doing it to impress the giggling waitresses who watched on awestruck I would have given him a good bollocking.
Just because we are research engineers doesn't mean we need to act like it.