Showing posts with label Senior Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Senior Design. Show all posts
Thursday, June 17, 2010 0 comments

The Prima Revolving Restaurant over Singapore's Harbor

Today, our professors took us to a revolving restaurant overlooking the shipyard and harbor of Singapore. The Port of Singapore is apparently the largest transhipment point in the world, connecting the east and the west by sea. It was really interesting to see real-life port operations, especially after simulating the ports along the coast of East Africa for my Senior Design project. Though I'm fairly certain that the Singapore port operates much more efficiently than Mombasa, Djibouti or Dar es Salaam :) And it definitely has more berths, just look at all those cranes down the side of the port!



The restaurant was only on the 9th floor, but it was definitely high enough to provide a great view of the Port and of some of downtown Singapore. Professor Chen Zhou warned us that it would look like a warehouse from the outside. In this picture, you can barely see the little round part on top of the building, thats where we were!



On the way in, some of our group posed with the cut-out of the famous chef in the lobby. One of the local NUS students remarked that Bill (in the yellow shirt) sort of resembled the chef.



Then, the guys tried to pack the elevator over its full capacity, or should I say FCL? Can you tell we're all Industrial Engineers?



It turned out to be a really fancy restaurant... they served all 30+ of us a 6 course meal with Peking duck! Here is the girls table(plus Chris and Adi): we're still at LTL because we were waiting on a lady from DHL to join us.



This is me, Doris and Michelle! Doris is our friend who actually attends NUS, she is from China and super sweet. She was our tour guide around campus the first day and just finished up her supply chain internship at Apple here in Singapore.



We started out the meal with shark fin soup. It was kind of strange, the shark fin was very stringy and the soup had a thick consistency like egg drop soup.



The place setting on the table was a bit interesting, your tea cup sits on the left instead of your right. So much for learning the "b and d" technique with your hands in Total Person.



After the soup, we had a dish with 2 tiliapias. Annie loved the fish heads.



Next was a shrimp dish (they were the biggest shrimp that Annie had ever seen).



Our next course was the Peking duck wraps. I think these are like the tacos of the Chinese culture, with duck skin, meat, and a green onion inside a rice flour wrap covered in real duck sauce. Duck sauce should not be that orangey sweet and sour sauce that people always ask for at Rusans.



We also had some vegetables with scallops and a noodle dish. I think the noodle dish had duck meat in it as well.



For dessert, we had fruit (of course)and some sort of fried pancake with red bean paste inside. We always have fruit after the meal at home, I suppose this is one aspect of the asian culture that I am already used to!



During the course of the meal, Joe came over to show off his newly acquired skills of pouring tea without touching the hot teapot.



Seeing the port from above was really cool, especially since you get a much better sense of how big their operations actually are. Just look at the size of these yellow cranes, and how the white offices on top of them look so small. Those offices probably have the standard 10 ft tall ceiling.



Each container vessel will dock at a berth and wait to be unloaded and reloaded by these cranes. The vessel will be loaded with cargo depending on its final destination or next transhipment point, so that it will carry a full container load. After being loaded with cargo, the vessel will u-turn (assisted by tugboats) and head back out of the port. There are not really any warehouses in the port, except these few warehouses that break-bulk the containers for more optimal loading. These are probably the most aesthetic warehouses that I've ever seen (the blue buildings with glass windows and roofs).



There are a ridiculous number of containers at the port. Talk about an absolutely ridiculous queue.



The contemporary white building on the right is the Vivo Mall, the crazy 4 floor shopping mall that we went to our 1st day in Singapore! It doesn't look that tall in this photo but I think there are some basement floors. And the island on the left is Sentosa Island, where we took our first field trip.

Monday, May 17, 2010 0 comments

Road Trip and a PC Status Update!

I successfully drove across the country in my little corolla! I crammed everything that I could into the backseat and the trunk of the car, and left my furniture behind. My car was riding ridiculously low from the weight of all my stuff and guzzled like over 15 quarts of engine oil (we refilled it twice and I got my oil changed the day before I left), but it chugged all the way from coast to coast! I'll post up some photo highlights of our trip when I get my new laptop up and running.

My friend Stephanie and I started the trip by driving from Atlanta to Meridian, Mississippi last Thursday night. I really have no idea where Meridian is, but its just beyond the Alabama border. On Friday, we drove from Mississippi to Plano, Texas, which is just outside of Dallas. Saturday was our big day, we drove 15 hours from Plano to Tucson, Arizona. And yes, we did get stopped at checkpoints along the way and Border Patrol asked if we were US citizens. Thankfully we both are, I had my passport ready just in case. But I suppose they reverse-profiled us in California, because they just waved us through like 3 checkpoints when we drove from Tuscon to San Diego, California. We drove the last 8 hours of the trip up from San Diego to San Francisco on Monday and made it home safe and sound.

I woke up this morning and checked my blackberry, like I always do.. and was pleasantly surprised to see a Peace Corps Status Update! I jumped out of bed and immediately went to check my PC Toolkit online and saw that I have received Dental Clearance. Thank god, I had to get 3 cavities fixed and a whole new set of xrays for clearance. I now have Dental and Legal clearance, and I'm still waiting on Medical Clearance before I can be actually placed with a specific country of service and a program.

This is really nerdy of me but I wonder how the PC paperwork processing queue works. I sent in my medical and dental forms late March and they sent back my dental forms like 2 weeks later and asked me to get my cavities filled. I haven't heard anything back yet about my medical forms, even with regards to whether I filled out that stack of paperwork acceptably or not. I know that they prioritize medical/dental clearance by expected departure date, with highest priority given to those leaving within 3 months. So I suppose I should be hearing back soon, except I'll be studying abroad in Singapore in a week with very little access to healthcare and no access to any of my official documents. This is going to be interesting... back to the waiting game!

And by the way, I ended up getting an A in Senior Design! I guess all those late nights in the ISYE lab paid off in the end.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 0 comments

DONE DONE DONE

I'm done with finals... and almost done with Senior Design now! We just have the final cd of all of our files to turn in tomorrow morning. But its going to be one last late night in the ISYE undergrad computer lab.

Good news- my dad is buying me a new computer! He's getting me the Acer Aspire, and its being delivered home to San Francisco next Tuesday. I can't wait to have a working laptop. Too bad I won't be back in San Francisco until like May 18th. I'm leaving Atlanta on May 14th and driving across the country with my good friend Stephanie. Its going to be one epic road trip, hopefully my poor car will make it without any problems, *fingers crossed*.
Friday, April 23, 2010 0 comments

45 pages later

So after 14 hours of working on the senior design report on Wednesday, it ended up being 45 pages long. Plus another 18 page appendix for the User's Manual. I submitted it to our advisor for review on Thursday morning, then she returned it to us today at midnight. Not bad for a professor who has to review these final reports from 4 different senior design teams. Now I just have to make the 30+ changes that she suggested, and format the whole thing again. I hate when charts and graphs make the text chunks really awkward or leave large gaps on the page because Word formats them to overflow onto the next page.

But good news! Our spring T-day is tomorrow, where our football team has a scrimmage game and we fill the stadium with loyal GT Football fans. Our team won't be quite the same without our superstars Dwyer, Demaryius "Bebe" Thomas and Derrick Morgan though... at least 2 of them went in the 1st round NFL draft!

Tuesday, April 20, 2010 0 comments

Almost there!

My senior design group finished up our final presentation to the Georgia Tech faculty yesterday... what a relief. I pulled almost 3 all nighters in a row to try to run our optimization model successfully with different scenarios, and we had lots of problems getting our network to compile and run correctly.

Now 4 of my group members are headed off to Rome, Italy to present our final presentation to our client, the World Food Programme (WFP) and all we have left is writing our final report by Monday. Our final report will probably be 100+ pages after including all of the appendices. And by we, I mean me because I am doing all the top down editing and writing it so it sounds more cohesive and connected with one voice and writing style. Our last paper, the interim report, got graded down severely for repetitive content and lack of style. But that is just what happens when 8 different people try to write 1 long technical report together.

My stupid dinosaur laptop is being really frustrating, the lcd light bulb behind the screen keeps burning out like every 30 seconds so the screen just shuts off and goes black. So I have to open and close my laptop like every 30 seconds just to get the screen to stay lit up, and its really nonproductive and makes me want to throw the computer out of my window. The good news is that my dad has agreed to get me a new computer (finally!) since I've had this one since my senior year of high school. The bad news is that there are only 2 more weeks left of school so its not worth it to get a new computer before the end of the year. The goal is to get a new computer before I leave for Singapore and my summer studying abroad :)
 
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