Confusion.

Life progresses onward. School is finished and I have started a new job. I still feel very new even after three weeks. I am however optimistic about it as a good job where I will be able to learn a lot.

Downside to job is I am still pretty busy time wise. Commute is about 1 hour and I start at 7:30am. Need to be out of the house by 6:30am. I work till 5:30 so am not home till about 6:30pm. End result of this is I find my self needing to pick up some sort of exercise routine that fits into my life, which now includes someone else to work around as well.

I used to work out in the morning, and it worked out well for me. I am considering a home gym in order to do this again. Option 2 is a gym membership downtown, which means working out after work, which seems like a good idea, but I am often exhausted after work and I am not 100% convinced I will actually go regularly.

Besides the exercise I also need to get my nutrition in shape. I am having SO much trouble with this. I want to be healthy and have a decent body that I feel good about, but I have such a sweet tooth and desire to eat crap some days. I have been able to suppress it before and ate well for several years. I know how to eat well, but I always seem to think tomorrow is early enough to start.

Really I need to suck it up and get it done.

End of it.

Well tonight is my official last night on the help desk answering phones. I have approximately 50 minutes left. The job was good to me in some ways. Most people were good when they called, some however are just tools who need to learn to read. They ruin support for the rest of you.

Either way done and out in less than an hour.

Tomorrow is a new day, Tomorrow is my final exam of my program.

Currently I know one mark, it is an A+. I am anticipating 2 more in Linux and Reservoir Engineering and Developmental Geology. This leaves a few wild cards.

Foremost is Geology. I do not know how well I did on the lab exam. I did ok on the midterm, but only managed an 82 on the pretest. I do not feal great about the final. I knew what we were supposed to know, but purposely did not study some stuff as we were told it would not be there. Unfortunately 11 marks worth of it was there. I may be able to squeak out a 90 on the test, but I suspect mid 80s to high 80s is more realistic. So at the end, probably an A in the class, I do not know about the A+ though.

Next up Geop 395. Did well on the lab test I believe. No clue how well the labs were done, we never got them back. The Mid term and quiz were both strong at over 90 and I am pretty sure I crushed the final. Probable A+

The last is Geophysics 397. We had no midterm. The entire class was based on a project and a presentation. I believe I did both well, but do not know for sure as I have not seen the marks. The final for this class is tomorrow. I feel very prepared for it so I am optimistic I can achieve an A+ in this class.

My 4.0 probably hangs on Geology.

So tomorrow is it all done school 2 years later I have a substantially new life. No longer working in retail. My income has approximately doubled, plus better benefits and bonuses. I have a new girlfriend. I am optimistic about the relationship. Life is good.

The biggest change to my life? This institution will be gone. When I moved to Calgary I got my first job here, that was back in 2001. I worked here when the Towers came down and now just about 7 years later I am finally leaving it. It has been good to me for the most part. Good people, good friends, places to live, employment and flexibility for me when I went back to school.

Despite being happy to never have to answer the help desk phone again, the job ensured high marks and no student loan, and for that I am grateful.

That is all for now.

Abstract

In modern times the ability to find and exploit economically viable hydrocarbon reservoirs is of increasing importance. Being able to determine if a bright spot is a reservoir or just an anomaly is an important part of this challenge. If we can determine this we can drill fewer dry holes, which translate to a more successful company. One of the ways we can determine the fluid content in a potential reservoir is through AVO analysis both traditional AVO and through AVO inversion. AVO inversion techniques where applied to bright spots located off the coast of Trinidad where they have been able to distinguish between hydrocarbon accumulations and non hydrocarbon accumulations in all cases but one. AVO inversion can be a powerful tool which can be used to eliminate false positive bright spots from seismic sections allowing us to drill better and more productive wells.

Thoughts on AVO.

How do we find out about the subsurface? Seems like a simple problem. There is rocks down there. For some professions that might be good enough, but to find the precious hydrocarbons our planet has locked away it is not nearly enough.

Actually finding out what is 3km or more below the surface is a significant problem.

One method is to drill a hole. Simple, but fairly effective for a small area. We have developed many tools to find out what is down there. Measuring everything from background radiation in rocks to how resistive a rock is.

We can use several holes drilled over a large distance to infer what is down there, but in terms of finding new places to drill that will have hydrocarbons, maybe not the most effective.

Seismic can give us a good idea of what is down there. Essentially we introduce a wave pattern into the earth and then record how it comes back to the surface at various locations and then sum the results to enhance the signal and remove the noise. Once we process these "stacked" waves we can get a good idea of what the subsurface looks like. Figure 1 below shows 2 sources being reflected at a common point and being recorded. Since they have a common reflection point the received wave contains information about the same point.

fig 1

It is important to remeber that it is not a photo, but a mathematical model based on our understanding of rock and wave physics. This means it is not perfect.



The model may exhbit a "bright" spot where the signal returned from the sub surface changes significantly on the displayed section. These can often be caused by a gas reservoir. The gas in the rocks strongly effects how the waves travel and how they return to surface. In figure 2 below we see the amplituides at 1.4 and 1.6 get stronger as we move right to left and then die off again. This may indicate a reservoir. Each second on the diagram correspods to 5000'.




fig 2

Unfortunately often might not even be 50% of the time and drilling every bright spot means a lot of dry holes being drilled. Obviously this is not what we want, drilling a hole 3km into the surface is an expensive prospect.

In figure 1 we would see a difference in amplitude between the two rays despite the fact they are reflecting from the same point, this is caused by the different angle the rays strike the reflector at. As mentioned earlier, summing these or stacking them removes this information but produces a good signal of that point. The formulas for this relationship are complex and have been simplified over time. A simplifictaion by Shuey is the most common way to express this relationship.

Analyzing how the relationship of how the amplitudes change with incidence angle can answer some important questions. Do we see the amplitudes getting weaker as we move further from the source? Or do we see them getting stronger?

In general the responses can be classified in 4 ways and will tell us what type of rock and what type of fluid we have in the pores.

This is the basic idea behind AVO and a formation charged with gas will exhbit a different AVO response than one charged with water. And more importantly it can be used to differeniate a gas charged bright spot from another anomaly.

This gives us a basic understanding of AVO and a place to move forward from.

Another Semester

Another semester has come and gone. This puts me 1 semester away from actually finishing some kind of post secondary education. Feels pretty good.

The marks this semseter break down as follows...
CMPP 230 Database Design & SQL Program A+
CMPS 320 Unix Systems for Geologist A+
COMM 288 Technical Communications II A+
GEOL 385 Case Studies in Petr. Geology A+
GEOL 390 Log Analysis for Geologists A+
GEOP 396 Advanced Geophysical Appl. A+

This maintains my GPA of 4.0 and continues my lowest mark being a A+, which is a grade higher than 90%.

Christmas is almost here and despite being alone for most of it, it should be relaxing and I am looking forward to it.

Lisa has gone to visit family in Texas, and I miss her already. I know she will not be gone long, but knowing she is not close, knowing I can't if I want to, just go and see her sucks. Depsite the short time together she has become very very dear to me. I love her very much.

Well despite not having written in here in forever I don't seem to have much to say, so to summarize....

Marks good.
I love Lisa.

Win or Die?

If you don't get in the water you can't drown.
If you don't get in the water you can't win,you can't start and you can't even finish.

Not starting because of fear of failure and pain is a mistake.

Infinite Rage

More like frustration and certainly not infinite, but discrete frustartion dosen't have quite the ring to it.

The last week has been interesting. I don't mean in one aspect of my life, across all aspects it has been this way.

Gym time has been pretty low over the last week. Once on the weights and once on the treadmill. Although judging from my weight last Monday I am not eating enough to support the amount of exercise I was doing. Typically on Monday I am the heaviest, which I attribute to retention of water from eating poorly over the weekend. Last Monday I was down 4lbs from the previous Friday. When I weighed on Tuesday I was at the same point.

School, well it was an interesting week. We wrote our first linux test this week, I totally forgot we had it till the night before. Such a scatter brain this year so far. Be a miracle if I maintain the A+s. Either way I set about reviewing and making flash cards. I specifically targeted my weak areas. Things like how to get the kernel version number from the system I ignored even though I figured it would be on the test.

# 7 What is the version of the kernel you are running and what command did you use to find it.

No problem. Fire up a command prompt.
Linux:# root:/ $_
Keith: ver
Linux: Unrecognized command.
Linux: # root:/ $_
Keith: Fuck.

Yeah so apparently in DOS you use ver to get version and in Linux, you don't. Guess I didn't know how to do it afterall. On the positive side it was only 2 marks and I found the kernel number stamped on some system files.

The answer is "uname -r" btw.

Well I still think I did decently on it.

Geology and Geophysics were pretty standard this week. We did more accumap in geology lab and more survey layouts from seg-y headers in geophysics.

Oracle. Got our test back from last week. 48 out of 50. I'll take it. One wrong which I legitimately answered wrong and one wrong that I guessed at.

Well logging. The interesting course this week. As in ANCIENT CHINESE CURSE kind of interesting. Class starts as well as usual. Andreas has a new plan which I am happy to try. He has an assignment on his website. No trouble. He is going to go over it one at a time. This will force people to pay attention and follow what he is doing.

We do not have printouts, but we have two monitors. I open the assignment up on one and the log we are looking at on the other. I copy and past the log into paint so I can make notes. I also have facebook up. Initially I am having trouble keeping up with him, or that is how it feels at any rate. I feel he is all over in terms of speed. I can't guage how long I will have to write things down I start becoming frustrated right away.

We got through question #1, then we get to question #2. Brock puts up his hand and asks how to do #3. At my current frustartion levels this pushes me into an even deeped frustration. Can he not see that Andreas is about to show us that and we don't need to slow things down by asking him retarded questions.

#3 is a volume shale calculation. Basically we are figuring out a ratio between how much is at one point in the log compared to the difference between the sand line and the shale line.

The formula in the book reads....
Vclay = Vshale = (SPclean - SPlog)/(SPclean-SPshale)
where
SPclean = Max SP deflection from a nearby clean section
SPlog = log reading from the point of interest
SPshale = SP reading from the shale baseline.

On this log the scale is as follows
SAND SHALE
-90 -80 -70 -60 -50 -40 -30 -20 -10 0 10

No trouble, I have been reading a lot on this stuff I understand how the SP log works. I can't really read the board from where I am, but I go to town. I calculate 56% or something. He calculates around 44%. Hmm I think. I ask Natalie next to me what numbers he is using??

She tells me. I ask what he is using in each variable. And this is where the train loses it.
He is using Vshale = (4-(-40))/(4-(-82).
I am using Vshale = ((-82)-(-40))/((-82)-(4))

Ie I have used
SPclean = -82
SPshale = 4
he has gone the other way.

So now I am frustrated and I don't get why. I stand up and walk to the front to read the board myself. admitedly I am now in a POOR mood. I point at the board and ask where he got the 4 from???? He tells me it's the shale measurement. I ask why? Why not the clean? I don't get it. He starts explaining the concept of the formula. I don't want to hear this I want to know why the hell we are using 4 where it says SPclean. I turn and walk back to my desk muttering, he replys that maybe if I put up my hand like everyone else etc etc. Sure I can now agree with that, but in my poor mood it did not help things. I sit down and put up my hand. I repeat my question. He starts explaining how the formula works. I interupt and start to ask again why we are use the shale line value in the clean spot. he interupts me and tells me not to worry about the formula in the book.

That is the last straw in my brain. I have gone from frustarated to argumentitve and I know I am done, I know nothing is gonna help now. I leave. I get up and leave the class in a VERY pissed off state.

So unlike me. I can not believe how frustrated I got over the whole thing. So now I get to go back and apologize for my outburst and I still have no idea why he would put the values in the way he did. I also have no contact information for him so I can't even ask in private.

Summary: I handled it very poorly. He is smart. He is a lousy instructor in my books.

And that wraps up school and moves on to the love life.

Lisa and I are getting along well still. We are still enjoying each others company and she is making a lot of effort to see me when she can, which makes me feel pretty damned special. We have had a small conversation about where things might be going. Half of her wants to try and make something from this and the other half is scared. I can't say I blame her.

I think we will both be ok though. She makes me smile and makes me happy and obviously cares for me as much as I care for her.

What an emotional web we weave.