Ampang-Phobia

Hi. I'm just sharing this to help jog my memory in the case it has to be included in my report/log book later. Okay, maybe not. I guess you people care about me and would want to know what I've been up to, right? Finished my last paper on Wednesday (for the n-th time, no comment) and started industrial training yesterday. And what an eventful day it was.

First, try getting this, a (not-so)simple concept of handphone coverage:

Take this beehive as the covered area. Each hexagon is a cell, each with a base station (those tall towers you see), and when you move from a cell to another your phone switches connection from a base station to another (handoff). A group of cells is called a cluster.

So after some briefing at the office, each trainee was assigned to one of their engineers. For the time being, we'll be the drivers, while the engineers will run the tests. Wah, not bad, get to learn, get to improve driving, get to improve Geografi lagi. OH YA KE_

We were told to do a cluster drive for the Ampang area. Basically this is the idea: Drive on every road in every taman in Ampang, the car is fitted with a modem on the roof connected to a computer, the engineer records the signal strength along the route and if/where handoff fails. Logs are kept in files about 50MB each. The routes given is basically a map without road names, without buildings, just a jumbled bunch of criss-crossing lines. Nothing like this:

(click to enlarge)

Ampang is defined as the whole area east of the MRR2 (the blue line) between Ukay Heights in the north and Taman Cheras in the south. (2.5cm=2km)

Shoot man, there's so many places I never new they existed! After about more than two hours of collecting data the engineer needed to have his Friday prayers so he said I could go find something to eat while he's inside. No sooner had I dropped him off, the worse storm (EVERR) happened. I could barely see the road in front. Drains were overflowing like boiling soup. Tree branches everywhere. So much for lunch, I thought. I better turn back and wait at the mosque before I got lost in the rain. At the mosque, I ran into a dead end and (foolishly) attempted a 3-point turn but got kinda stuck instead, no thanks to a gate that was blocking. So I had no choice but to run out and open the gate (there was an umbrella, couldn't get it to open though) and got totally wet. Phew. Lunch turned out to be 60-sen bread from the petrol station.

Not long after he got back in the car he suddenly exclaimed, "OHHH SHITTT!!!" and started jumping around in the seat. Guess what, he accidentally overwrote the file which had everything previously recorded! FUGG! FUGGG! Everything... GONE! What to do, start again la. This time I drove much faster and completed the previous areas in about 45 minutes. Supervisor asked to do until 6:30.

Covered areas (Geografi-haters, skip this part):

Kg Cheras Baru, Tmn Mawar, Tmn Bukit Permai, Tmn Seraya, Tmn Mega Jaya, Tmn Bukit Teratai, Tmn Saga, Tmn Melur, Tmn Muda, Tmn Kencana, Tmn Lembah Maju, Pandan Indah.

We may or may not (by then I was already zombie-like, so I'm not sure) have covered these areas too:

Tmn Pandan Mewah, Tmn Putra, Tmn Seri Raya, Tmn Seri Bayu, Kg Tasek Tambahan.

With these, we've pretty much covered only 1/3 of Ampang, continue on Monday.

At a traffic light on the way back, we noticed smoke coming from the front and hurriedly turned off the road to check. Bila check, ok pulak. The only problem was a busted air-cond so we continued and reached office at about 7:40pm. Ten hours of driving, people. My ass seriously needs a massage. Make that eleven: one on White Horse back to sweet home. Thank you Jesus for the safe journeys...

And hey, thank you again... You're so good to me lah =)

Let's see what next week has in store-