Today, I was going to write 100 words about public holidays, given that Queensland had one today. I was going to write about the philosophy of public holidays, and whether they should be mandated, and then wax eloquently about being self-employed and so public holidays don’t actually mean that much, etc.
Anyway, I was going to write all that, and it was going to be terrific, and then I wrote the date, and couldn’t get past the simplicity of writing:
May the fourth be with you.
And I’m not even a Star Wars fan.
But I do like Harrison Ford.

I like running long distances. Sunday is often a long run day. A lovely long 3hr meander along Brisbane’s riverside is a wonderful way to spend a Sunday morning.

In my running community, I’m nothing special. Most run further and/or faster.

Taking 3hrs to run 24km is fairly pedestrian (slow), but it makes me happy.

My brain free wheels, or I listen to podcasts or audiobooks, and it is terrific me-time.

For me, slower is better.

Sometimes we need to slow down to achieve things. Not everything needs to be done at a cracking pace. This applies to work, too.

I’m starting the preparation and pack-up for an upcoming office move.
It’s both enlightening and infuriating how much paper I have.

I’m thoroughly enjoying reviewing it all as I pack it up. I have articles on topics such as knowledge management, ethics, project engineering, principles and respect, and of course risk, quality and competencies. And course all of the client-related documents and records: it’s ten years of being self-employed.

I clearly can’t and won’t move away from paper. It’s ridiculously wasteful, in terms of both materials and space.  And yet, it’s not wasteful: it’s reminders of a self-employed life lived.

The other day, I went to write the word “goals” and instead wrote “goats”. Scribbled it out and funny enough, the remaining scribble somehow looked like the word "ghosts".
And I thought, well ok: if we strive for our goals we can become GOATs (greatest of all time). (Or maybe striving for a goal makes us feel like a goat).
Meanwhile we’re all surrounded by ghosts of past goals.
What does it all mean on this Friday, May 1st? I don’t know, but I promised myself I’d start up 100wordsaday again, so, here I am, goals, goats, ghosts and all.

Today I joined Felicity Furey’s book launch (‘Future of Engineering—Legacy by Design’). It’s a substantial, weighty book, and pleasure to hold and flip through.

The event was well attended, and it caused me to observe two things.

1. There will be books in the future: thin books, heavy books, philosophical ones, fiction, self-help, biographies, memoirs. Yes, books will continue to have a place for a long time.

2. Meeting in person will remain a ‘thing’. It’s easy to drift into a life online with little in-person interaction. I am convinced, though, that a fulfilling life must include meetups with other people.

Habits are fragile things: easily broken when just starting them up. I’ve been trying to build a few habits lately (fitness, nutrition, writing), but they aren’t settling in quite yet.

Two learnings so far:

Make time over finding time: I switched thinking ‘I can never find time!’ to “if it’s important, I’ll make time”. Yes, that does mean something else won’t get done. Recognise priorities and get on with it.

Wanting to do it vs forcing myself: having decided on a habit to embed, remember it was my choice to take it on. Lean into that agency and own it.

Technical Standards like AS2885 for high pressure pipelines, or button battery safety, or pool fences, or others like that, are a unique documentation situation.
While Standards “lead” because they set requirements to be met so that products are safe, efficient and consistent, I actually think Standards are laggards. Quite often, we can’t set a Standard without being able to refer to experience about what’s efficient and safe.

When novelty and innovation are underway, people are also looking for a Standard. But we’re finding that it can’t be written until there’s enough experience to know what the best requirements should be.

On Saturday I ran in my first ever Parkrun.  These are 5km ‘races’ occur around the world, at 7am every Saturday morning. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, getting people out for some exercise.
It highlights the human need/want to do things together.
Any of these people could’ve run 5km on their own, or gone out for a 5k with a few friends. And yet, 200 people at this event, didn’t do that, no, they came to Parkrun.
Because spending time with other people who want to do what you want to do, seems to just be something people want to do.

No, not personal failures; I’m not going to regale some story of my struggle to battle back after some epic failure (well, only if asked). Here I’m referring to the more mundane but sometimes spectacular failure of design, materials, or systems.
To be successful, every engineer should spend time considering failure. An outcome of good engineering is the prevention of failure. For infrastructure, process, and mechanical engineering, failure can mean fatalities.

Anticipating failure is as simple as asking the question ‘how might this fail?’. Too many projects are never seen through this lens, because of our natural fear of failure.

Any successful undertaking will have a definitive champion. And that champion will be a person. An individual person with a name, not some enigma or amorphous committee.
This is my conclusion after many years of wishing something would get done about things I thought needed fixing: in my industry, my community, or my home life.
Whether it is a company initiative, a community project, or family event: if it’s got momentum, then I guarantee there is a person, an actual person, behind it. Not the corporate name, not the committee, but an individual person.
And they are a real champion.

A writing prompt in a class I’m taking asked us to write about “the single most important lesson you’ve learned (in your industry)”. I was surprisingly stumped finding an answer, nothing came to mind. And anyway, what defines a ‘lesson’?

Then I got a bit meta and countered that it depends on the granularity of the question. Does ‘industry’ mean “engineering”, or “pipelines”, or, more specifically, “pipeline safety”?

If I was going to write about lessons, these might be them:
· communicate well,
· understand where your contribution fits into the pipeline system, and,
· effective controls are more important than risk assessments.

The photos from the ever-awesome APGA annual convention are now available to the attendees. I love seeing all the happy smiling colleagues.

I eagerly anticipated, and dreaded, going through the albums, looking, of course, for myself.

Huh: only 3/778 published photos have me in it.

I was there, at every event. Did I avoid the camera? Not really. Though, I also didn’t seek it out.

The weak side of me thinks ok, I’m not photogenic so mine were binned. The strong side of me says: doesn’t matter, I had a great time, great memories, and can’t wait for next year.

I recently introduced an American colleague to the children’s cartoon “Bluey”. Most out there with young children would know about Bluey. I was introduced to it via my extended family, which includes a 4- and 6-year-old.

Adults often remark on how good, as a parent, it is to be so “seen”. The writing reflects real life experiences, exasperations, and euphoria of raising children. It’s clever, thought-provoking, funny, and insightful.

Wouldn’t it be fun if we pipeliners, technical regulators, constructors, inspectors, and product suppliers could have our own cartoon, so that we are seen for what we face, like Bluey’s parents.

Some colleagues (friends?) in my industry (you know who you are) can’t help but when we catch up, clink glasses and yell “STANDARDS!...are we raising them or lowering them this time?”
It’s a funny insider joke, but there’s an underlying truth.
We all have standards, whether we talk about them or not. Standards are everywhere: how clean your kitchen is, how organised your finances are, how diligently you do the detailed work.
I’m known for the Australian technical pipeline standard, and perhaps, for holding myself to a fairly high standard. And I like that we can joke about it too.

For years I’ve been exploring the concept of credibility, along with respect, competence, principles, and self-awareness.

Credibility is subjective, and, it’s contextual.

I can say I’m an expert in pipeline safety, but someone who doesn’t know me might think, hmmm not really. Also, credibility has a wide range of context/interpretation: I can address pipeline safety from my context (civil engineer with 30 years of project experience), but not from the context of a process engineer with 10 years of intricate design experience.

The key factor with credibility? Experience. Action. Tangible evidence that you’ve actually done something related to that topic.

It’s a cliché because it’s true: ‘every life has its ups and downs’. There are highs and lows in everyone’s life.
It’s how we navigate them, though, that’s personal; and can’t be simplified into a cliche. Recognise when you’re up. And down.

Since my highpoint in June (endurance event followed by a caravan trip), I then experienced the lows of losing a family member, dementia in another, and responsibility for clearing out and selling their house, in a city five hours’ flight away.
It’s all part of life unfolding.
I’ve been in the valley; now, I’m looking to another summit.

In June, I achieved my high-water mark of 67km run in the backyard ultra (BYU) format. During the following 3 months, I only managed a few training sessions.  The October BYU was meant to improve on that 67km, but the lack of training meant I couldn’t expect much of myself.
I set out to run as far as I could, and stunned myself with a still-far 50km total.
All this humble-bragging is a reminder that muscle memory is a thing.  I’d never recommend the ‘no-training’ approach to goals, but, having long-embedded historic repetition of your skills or strengths has benefits.

I found a page in my files showing a hierarchical organisation chart for the topic of “pipeline engineering”. I don’t know what the origin of this document is, unfortunately.
It was in the file-folder titled ‘development of PECS (Pipeline Engineering Competency System)’, so someone in the development committee back in 2006ish must’ve created it.

I like the visuality of it. It gives us a picture of where to start with the topic, and how levels of knowledge can be ‘peers’ or can be ‘subordinate’ to other knowledge.
And any item listed could be the header of its own topic chart.

Very early in my career I learned about ‘time-blocking’: setting time to be focussed on one thing.  This is how to tackle hard work: regular blocks of intense focus to achieve one thing.  They happen because I ‘have meetings with myself’, to block off that time.

I’m on Cal Newport’s newsletter list. He’s a computer-science professor and prolific writer and thinker. Recently, he mused about work-life balance, cleverly differentiating between hard work (having grit, focus and determination over a long period of time, outcome focussed) versus hard-to-do work (14hr days, unfocused freneticism, and, ‘performative busyness’).

Hard-to-do work is not sustainable.

My early engineering experiences seem to have pushed me towards being a “doer” over a “manager”.  My evidence is simple: even now, when faced with a task that needs to be done, I’d rather do it myself over asking someone else to.
It’s an important distinction to be aware of while progressing through a career: not so much “are you doing or managing?”, but rather, which one do you enjoy more?
Even in my early days, I could sense that I was happier being responsible for the task itself (doer), over being responsible for the person doing the task (manager).