About Gefei Liu, PVI

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Language War, No More

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

I made a stop in Paris during my trip to Dubai. Although I don’t speak a word of French, I somehow managed to get around and order meals. I’ve heard from others that some French people deliberately speak French to English-speaking visitors, even though they’re able to speak English. Whether this is true or not, I’m not sure. I myself didn’t meet many people who do not speak English in Paris. If this statement is true, which I doubt it; it would be hard for us to understand one another. To communicate in our own native tongue is hard enough, why create an artificial barrier?

While visiting the Louvre museum, I noticed that all the labels are in French, which I found quite visitor-unfriendly, since most of the visitors in that museum are foreigners. This made my quick tour of the museum quicker than anticipated. I briefly looked through most of the art works except one painting that caught my attention: I even did not need to read the label to understand it. I was so fascinated by this painting that I even took a picture of it.

As you may already know, the painting depicts the Bible story of David and Goliath. According to the Bible, David heard that the Philistine giant Goliath challenged the Israelites to send their own champion to decide the outcome in single combat. David went out to face Goliath alone. David picked five smooth stones from a nearby brook and struck Goliath in the forehead with a stone from his sling. Goliath fell dead, and David took Goliath's sword and beheaded him. I read that story a couple of weeks ago and it was delightful to refresh my memory in front of the giant painting.

As they say, art does not have borders. Art does not rely on language to manifest its meaning, just like we can appreciate and understand the paintings and sculptures from France and Italy without speaking their languages.

I’ve been involved in the drilling engineering field for a long time and met many drilling engineers from different countries, mostly during our software training sessions. We all are able to communicate with each other easily despite our language differences. I figured out it must be due to the following reasons:

Most people in the drilling industry can understand and speak some English.
Tables and charts are easier to understand than articles.
Our software has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Portuguese.

It is our goal and effort to create some universal engineering tools for our drilling community.

This is Your Life

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

To make a long story short. When I was in Banff, Canada I went to this store and saw a big poster with the words: “This is Your Life”. I was quite touched by these words, so much that I bought a few inspirational posters once I was back in Houston.

Now, one of them is hanging on the wall in our break room in the office.

The story behind this poster hanging on our wall is that someone wrote these sentences as some kind of resolution to inspire himself. His friends found them so inspiring that they started to copy the writings, then, this guy started out a business by selling these kinds of posters. Why not? Making money while inspiring people seems like a good way of earning a living.

Even though it is difficult to follow them, I agree with every phrase in the poster. These phrases are the author’s personal words, but I believe it is a good idea to put the poster in our office area. After all, we’re all just normal people before we are software developers and salesmen and we all need inspiration in life.

We make drilling software. The quality of our software is the reflection of the dedication we put in our work. We spend 1/3 of our time working. Our work is part of our lives. If we can improve our lives, we improve our software.

This is our life and this is our software.

Location, Location and Location

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

There is an old joke in the real estate industry:

Question: “When establishing the value of a house, what are the 3 most important factors?”

Answer: “Location, location and location.”

In other words the area where the property is located is the one and only important matter and everything else you could say about it hardly matters.

This can be applied to a country as well. On my way back to Houston from a recent trip to Dubai I read an article about the upcoming world EXPO 2020, which will be hosted in Dubai. The article talks about the convenient location of Dubai. Two-thirds of the world’s population lives within an 8 hour flight from Dubai. No wonder Dubai’s international airport is as busy at night as it is during the day. My return flight from Dubai always leaves at around midnight, so that I can be either in Amsterdam or Paris in the morning to make my connection.

Dubai, UAE

Customers in the Dubai International Airport, 1:30 am

As the largest city in the UAE and the center point between Europe, Asia and Africa, Dubai has become a favorite city for the biggest headquarters of oil and gas, and service companies, including Russia’s Lukoil (oversea unit), and Halliburton among others.

By comparison, Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States, well recognized worldwide for the energy industry. We are fortunate to live and work in this dynamic city from which we supply drilling engineering software and support our users.

Houston is an ideal location to support users in North America. It is also a gateway to many South American countries. It is said that over 90 languages are spoken in the Houston area. Our drilling software also “speaks” various languages for instance, English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Portuguese.

In spite of the hot summers, mild winters and occasional hurricanes, I do not have much to complain. Houston is a pretty good location for a drilling software provider like us.

The Best is Yet to Come

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

The following is told by an American lady:

“My grandmother always used to tell us, “keep your forks.” when the main dishes were being cleared from the table. It was my favorite part of dinner, because I knew that something wonderful was coming… like a velvety chocolate cake or a deep-dish apple pie.”

A similar expression would be “You have not seen anything yet.” or as my 8-year old daughter told me, “I am not done yet!” when I gave her an applause after she sang the song from the movie “Frozen”.

Life is a simple and normal routine. Everyone has the same number of hours in a day and the same number of days in a year. It is up to us to make our daily routines more interesting, to fill our time doing things that will make us grow in every aspect of our lives, to make the most of our time. We cherish the hope that our present situation is not our final destination. The best is yet to come.

For us software developers, we are continuously enhancing the drilling software that is being developed. We certainly can’t add more hours to our day, but we can make our development more efficient. We will probably spend the same amount of time as we did last year, but we will have better products in 2014.

The latest release of our cementing software CEMPRO+ is a milestone. Why? Because this is the first time we address the displacement efficiency during the multi-fluid displacement operations such as cementing or wellbore cleanup. Before CEMPRO+ we used to assume that the drilling mud was completely displaced by the cement slurry with the use of a piston. This convenient assumption makes the hydraulics relatively easy, but it fails to predict the mud channeling which occurs due to many factors such as, differences in the cement properties and mud flow rates, and the casing centralization. A typical illustration of mud channeling is shown here:

Mud channel left on the narrow side of the annulus (Macondo incident-Chief Counsel’s report, 2011)

CEMPRO+ can help predict the mud fractions in the annulus during a cementing job. The following picture is a snap shot from the program. It looks neat. Graphics are more significant, because they show what really happens in the wide and narrow sides of the annulus.

Displacement Efficiency Illustration in CEMPRO+

If our CEMPRO has been on your software menu, keep your forks, because the best is yet to come.

The Drilling Engineers’ Version of the Johari’s Window

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

Probably most of us have had the experience of dealing with difficult people or difficult situations at some point in our lives. I have been in situations where a person has been widely considered “difficult”. One time, I was so frustrated that I went to a bookstore trying to find a solution and I certainly found a few books that addressed the topic.

The first thing I learned from these books, which is something I should have known, is that I very likely have been a difficult person in many situations. While writing this, I am thinking of many of my friends, co-workers and clients. Their faces flash in front of my eyes as I realize that I probably have been the cause of some of their difficult situations. I am also certain that they are interested in knowing what is it that makes us tick.

Information sharing is one of the many advices that are found in these books. Sharing information is one way to strengthen relationships when dealing with perceived difficult people. The Johari’s Window is a communication tool that is used to improve understanding between individuals. This technique was created by American Psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955.

Johari Window

The four squares (windows) represent:

Shared: known to both you and others.

Hidden: Hidden information, known only to you.

Blind: Known to others, but not known to you.

Unknown: Not known to you or others.

The idea is to increase the size of the shared information window by sharing information that you previously keep to yourself and encouraging others to reciprocate. A team or group of friends that understands each other (that is, each person having a strong mutual understanding with the team) is far more effective than a team that does not understand each other (that is, a team whose members have large hidden, blind, and/or unknown areas).

Sharing information does not mean that we have to wash our dirty laundry in public. It means sharing ideas with one another about what’s important to you and them. I applied this idea to our drilling engineers and obtained this picture of a revised Johari’s Window for drilling engineering.

The Drilling Engineers' Version of Johari's Window

Through feedback, disclosure and other tools, we can develop more productive relationships and bridge the gap between the members of a drilling team. By sharing information, we get to deal with less difficult people and uncover more of our potential, which is unknown to us and others. For this reason a drilling software such as, TADPRO (Our torque and drag model) serves as a tool to enlarge the 1^st window.

The Most Ancient Computer and the Latest Drilling Software

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

On December 5, 2013, the Chinese traditional method of calculations using the Abacus was listed as a UNESCO World Intangible Cultural Heritage. The Abacus, called Suanpan in Chinese, is considered as the world’s most ancient computer. It has more than 1,800 years of history. It is worth mentioning that others, such as Japanese cuisine, including sushi and the traditional food preparation methods and their culture have also been listed in the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The following picture shows the Suanpan I bought a while ago at China town in Houston. It is so cool to have the ancestor of the modern computer in our office, especially since we are an engineering software company.

A typical Suanpan is about 20 cm (8 in) tall and it comes in various widths. It usually has more than seven rods. There are two beads on each rod in the upper deck and five beads on each rod in the bottom deck. This configuration is used for both decimal and hexadecimal computation. The beads are usually rounded and made of a hardwood. The beads are counted by moving them up or down towards the beam. The Suanpan can be reset to the starting position instantly by a quick jerk around the horizontal axis to spin all the beads away from the horizontal beam at the center.

Suanpans can be used for functions other than counting, for instance, very efficient Suanpan techniques have been developed to do multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, square root and cube root operations at high speed. Operating a Suanpan does not require electricity or batteries; only fingers are needed.

In the semiconductor industry there is Moore’s Law, which is an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel. Moore’s law has proven that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore’s law to hold for at least another two decades.

No matter how fast technology evolves, some devices such as the Suanpan, still have the same design as when they were first invented. I don’t know if that’s good news for Suanpan manufacturers. As a software vendor, we have to continuously upgrade our drilling software, not for the sake of upgrading, but to include any new operation methods or new drilling tools that are being used in the field. Our latest Dr.DE (drilling engineering toolbox software) has migrated to the internet and has become a web-based application.

I really do not like to change computers, but I love to upgrade software! Maybe this is probably because I am in the software business, but one thing is for sure, having at my reach the most ancient computer and the latest drilling software makes me feel that I have the best of both worlds.

Antique Store and OTC

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

My brother, who is a civil engineer in Kentucky, came to visit us during OTC in 2013. During his stay here in Houston, we did many things together, including visiting the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) and a local antique store.

OTC is an annual event that takes place in the month of May in Houston. As the largest oil and gas conference and exhibition in the United States, OTC attracts typically 30,000 – 50,000 visitors from around the world. The exhibition area is huge. My brother and I got tired after a couple of hours walking in one of the exhibition halls. OTC covers numerous technical areas which are totally new to us. We got lost in the aisles of booths, instruments and equipment. We felt so behind in many of the new technologies. However, we also felt that we were lucky to be part of the engineering world (drilling software for me) and that we are contributing to the big wave of technology advancement. We felt the vibe of the next generation. OTC is like a stage, where people dance with their dreams and where dreams come true.

After OTC, we visited a local antique market which had many small, individually owned shops selling items that have history. We were delighted to see many items that had quite a storied past, as the shop owners explained their history. We found an old kerosene lamp which captured a moment in our technology development.

These items are like fragments of time. Touching them allows us to travel back in time. When we are young, we spend more time dreaming, looking into the future. As we grow older, we are more occupied by things we are busy with at the present time; less time to dream, more time for memory review, perhaps.

When we are looking back at the past and forward into the future it gives pleasure to us both ways. A couple of years ago, I gave a presentation on TADPRO, our torque and drag model, to SPE Gulf Coast Section in Houston. I used two slides to summarize the history of drilling. The first one was a schematic of the drilling scene 2,000 years ago in China. The second one was a picture of an offshore platform, representing modern drilling technology. Both pictures represented the very advanced drilling technologies being used at the time. Centuries and millenniums elapsed. Our knowledge accumulation from history enables us to stand where we are.

Similarly, our drilling software development is the result of continuous engineering research and development over the past few decades. I have been fortunate to work with people with engineering and information technology backgrounds; some new and some seasoned. We, as developers are getting older, but our software stays young and robust.

The Longest Distance Between Drilling Engineers

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

In "Nine Million Bicycles", sung by the singer Katie Melua, there are some interesting statics:

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing,
that's a fact.
It's a thing we can't deny
like the fact that I will love you till I die.
We are twelve billion light years from the edge,
that's a guess.
No one can ever say it's true,
but I know that I will always be with you.

The distance between us and the edge of our universe was mentioned. Then, I asked myself the question of the farthest distance between any 2 people and found the answer on Google shortly. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles. This makes the farthest distance between any 2 people on the earth 12,451miles.

I also found this statement on the internet, which I am not sure about its accuracy: The longest distance between two points in the state of Texas is 867 miles.

As these numbers are getting smaller, I start to make sense out of them. We are talking about the measurable distances. Nowadays, our lives are affected and shaped by many tech gadgets. Mobile phones, ironically, while connecting people in distance, create huge distance between people nearby and these invisible distances created by the internet or mobile phones cannot be measured by miles.

People spend more time on smart phones, not only talking, but also texting, chatting or simply reading news. This could happen, before or during the meetings, lunches, etc. However, we could use more time getting to know our surroundings, or neighbors. We text more, but meet less; we have become more skilled in typing, but less skilled in socializing. I do agree that mobile phones are becoming the distance or gap between people. The magazine cover of “The New Yorker” November issue of 2009 depicts our situation rather well.

In my mind, the greatest distance between people is not the physical distance, nor the tech gadgets. It is the lack of communication. If we cannot efficiently communicate, we are not in the same page. For drilling professionals, besides regular communication skills, we need to pass technical information to our peers or managements. This requires both engineering and communication skills. Drilling engineering software is one of the solutions to bridge this gap.

Drilling software frees drilling engineers from doing the repeated calculations on torque and drag, hydraulics, casing wear, so that engineers can spend more time in making sound and informed technical decisions. If engineers are using the same software, such as TADPRO (PVI’s torque and drag model), then, they can see tables and charts for the same case, even if they are in different locations. When holding a web meeting, they can easily understand each other’s points of view and reach agreements.

Some drilling software like TADPRO also have been translated into several languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. The localization further shortens the distances between engineers in different geographical areas. We also emphasize the visualization of downhole conditions. Drilling engineers cannot see 20,000 ft subsurface, but that does not mean that we cannot predict the downhole pressure or pipe deformation, like the buckling status of drilling string in the 3D wellbore as shown below.

These software packages are PVI's efforts to bridge the gaps between drilling engineers.

As Smooth As A Cruise

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

“For the next four days and nights, you do not need to worry about making meals, washing dishes, finding restaurants or driving around. You are on vacation!” The host of the first night show in the Disney Wonder Cruise ship disclaimed, while everyone in the audience including me bursted into cheers.

With the exception of those of us who are obsessed with cooking and do not want to take breaks from our daily routines, most people love cruise vacations because they free us from those tedious work and bring us to remote places.

Smooth cruises are as fascinating as exotic destinations. Vacationers are looking for fun, excitement, stimulation and pleasant surprises. The expectations of 2,680 passengers are met by 1,000 crew members. On Average, every 3 guests are served by more than 1 crew member. No wonder I felt the impeccable quality of services.

British writer Arthur C. Clarke made Clarke’s Three Laws. The last one of them is: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” My experience aboard the Disney Wonder Cruise reminded me of our drilling software and consulting services we provide to the drilling community.

On the service side, we do drilling engineering consulting to companies or individuals. It is normally one-to-one. Our drilling software, on the other hand, is often one-to-many. We develop a particular solution, such as MUDPRO (drilling mud reporting software), and provide it to mud engineers all over the world.

We also realize that many drilling fluid engineers actually make some mud reporting software using Excel spreadsheets to replace paper forms. These spreadsheets might serve the purpose of reporting to some degree. However, keeping track of numerous daily reports in terms of spreadsheets and creating end-of-well recaps are challenging, to say the least.

As a drilling software company, we always want to streamline the daily calculations such as mud reporting. MUDPRO is the solution to remove some of the burdens that mud engineers have to carry every morning and at the completion of drilling.

Like a cruise ship, MUDPRO is created by a team of petroleum engineers, graphical interface designers, programmers and software testers (quality controllers). Quite a few companies think that we have only a couple of genius developing MUDPRO. Far from that, we not only have a group of people involved, but also have spent a few years to arrive at our current level of comprehensiveness of mud reporting.

As software developers, we know that many engineers can program. It is our feeling that unless you love to code, you should leave that dirty and tedious job to some dedicated professionals like the folks at PVI, because we have an experienced team whose mission and passion are software creation.

Cooking meals, or washing dishes in a cruise ship? I don’t think so. Developing drilling software while drilling a well? That is the reason I recommend PVI drilling software for your next drilling project. This way you can be on cruise control; as smooth as the cruise journey I am taking. Safe travels.

Saving Time Using Drilling Software

Posted on December 24, 2013 by Gefei Liu, PVI

Who doesn’t like savings, deals, bargains and even some free stuff every now and then? Further, who does not want to save time in our work? Generally speaking, software save us tremendous amount of time in our daily lives. We heavily rely on Outlook^® for our email communication, Microsoft Word^® for word processing. These software free us from repeated and often tedious tasks. And they are so common in our work places that we often take them for granted.

While we use these software as tools for our work, they are the missions of many software developers, whose full time jobs are to created them. In this society, everyone serves someone else.

Specifically, drilling engineering software has become an indispensable tool for well planning, especially for horizontal and extend reach well drilling. Being a software developer, I feel very lucky to be involved in this highly creative work, which requires both engineering background and graphic design senses.

Our goal is to create drilling software not only to solve technical problems, but also improve drilling efficiency by solving problems quickly. This means carefully designed user-interfaces so that the users will be able to save trouble and time to perform a certain task.

Time belongs to everyone. Wasting other people’s time is a crime. On the other side, saving people’s time brings benefit to them.

Our way of saving people’s time is to make software extremely easy to use.

We as software developers do not meet with our users often, but our users frequently use our software and some even do on a daily basis. For example, there are more than 500 MUDPRO (drilling mud reporting) users in US. Every morning, these mud engineers open up MUDPRO, input wellbore configuration, mud properties, inventory and type remarks. Then they will generate daily report from MUDPRO Output window. If we can add features to save one user 5 minutes in the process, we will be able to save 5(min) x 500(user) x 365(day)= 912500(min) = 15208(hr) = 634(day) of time of those 500 MUDPRO users in a period of one year. This is as powerful as the butterfly effect. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas. If we make an improvements in our software, hundreds and thousands of software users will benefit, even it means that sometimes we need to spend months for certain feature. But it is worth the efforts. Spending time in software development translate into tremendous time saving for all software users. The benefit is amplified much greatly as more users join the pool.

Happy running software and saving time!

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