Chevron job

I've been reading about Chevron over the last week. Which might be due to my starting a part-time job with them soon.

For those familiar with the Tauranga/Mount area, I'll be located on Totara St (off Hewletts Rd) where all those huge tanks are. Shell, BP and Mobil are also thereabouts. Fulton Hogan, Downers and others who use lots of smelly Bitumen have their own tanks right next to the road.

Anyway, Chevron is the parent company of Caltex and Challenge! (which they bought in 2001). It is a global company that can trace its roots to Standard Oil and the California oil rush of the late 1800's.

Caltex, as we know it in New Zealand, started as a joint venture between Socal (Standard Oil Co of CALifornia) and Texaco (which was still a seperate company) in 1936. This created California Texas Oil Co (Caltex)

About the same time as Challenge! was purchased/merged in 2001, Chevron and Texaco merged as well, resulting in the Caltex joint venture becoming more formalised as a company brand.

Other mergers happening with Gulf and Unocal (76), but these weren't that significant in New Zealand.



Dates etc pulled from :-
http://www.chevron.com/about/leadership/history/

IMG_0766

IMG_0766, originally uploaded by freetzer.

Founding members of the Waikato VHF Group (Inc.) from back in 1973 at the first VHF Convention. True visionaries who understood that Amateur Radio extended far beyond 30 MHz.

The next VHF Convention will be held in Hamilton organised by the Hamilton Amateur Radio Club (Inc.) and the Waikato VHF Group (Inc.).

IMG_1075

IMG_1075, originally uploaded by freetzer.

A nice quiet day out in the country. Then, suddenly, explosions, gravel on metal, and a car comes into view hard on the brakes to slow down for the corner. Such is life at the World Rally Championship/Rally of New Zealand when helping with safety communications with the Hamilton Amateur Radio Club (Inc.).

Cellphones

I had decided that I needed to buy a cellphone. My requirements were simple, clam-shell design, no camera. With two cellphone companies in NZ, I thought this should be easy. However, as far as I can tell, Vodafone don't have any phones without a camera. So I ended up with one from Telecom, and it was a bottom-of-the-line unit. I'm lucky I didn't want GSM or GPRS as that is what Vodafone uses, or wasn't too fussed about using CDMA 2000 1X.

This really should have been easier, but apparantly I just don't understand what people want their cellphone to do....

Originally posted 7 August 2006

Setiathome/BOINC

I've been running Setiathome for several years now. After all, my free and unused CPU cycles may as well be doing something.

The Seti project is currently moving to use BOINC and their new home page gives more information on this. They are experiencing some problems at the moment as the BOINC conversion has proved to be more popular than they expected.

Originally posted 19 June 2006

Information Systems and Competition

Well, as I'm not much of a Capitalist (although I'm really into Democracy), I don't really like companies quashing competition in the computer industry.

As a result, I really like Linux (don't care much about which distro, or which UI), I love Mozilla (along with Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc...). I use cygwin and MinGW to get a unix type interface to Windows XP.

Originally posted 16 June 2006