Category: My studies

The bridge between mechanical and civil engineers

Last night I was reminded of the fascinating world of moveable bridges. From the glorious transporter bridges of ports and river estuaries to hulking swing bridges of the…

Archive photos/early attempts at developing/les arcs

Probably the best module I studied during my year at ENPC was not engineering-themed – but photography. The module was run as an English language course: the subject…

Happy Birthday Livic – Seven Years Old!

Back in 2004, I and fellow civil engineering student Andy Kosinski got together to create a new student newspaper for the civil engineering department at Imperial College. It…

The Return of Scientific Curiosity and Creativity/Ideas for an Outdoor Classroom

This post is about rediscovering a childhood fascination for how things work, and the thoughts it has provoked about creating learning environments that harness that fascination for the…

Joint Best Loser

Apparently it was too close to call. The judges deliberated for three hours as to which of the six shortlisted finalists should be given the prestigious title of…

Finishing my course – travelling to Iran by train

Since my last post, I have been rather busy!  The lack of posts on this blog since then can be attributed in part to the large amount of…

Berlin Wall lost in translation – can anyone help?

I am correcting a document that has been translated from French into English and I have hit upon a term that keeps cropping up, and I simply don’t…

Project update – meeting the architect and virtual handshakes + one for those who moan about London Underground

At the beginning of the week, the architects for the project that I am working on flew into town for an intensive week of meetings. Most of yesterday…

Tube Challenge – Project update: wobbly floors

Tube Challenge I always dreamed of doing this when I was a lonely and boring teenager. All the tube stations in one day. Thanks to Mary for sending…

Pounds per square inch?? (project update)

Today I started getting into the nitty gritty of how to stop a floor from vibrating. When dimensioning the floor slab of a building, one of the considerations…

Progress…at last

After much rudderlessness, it seems I now have something fairly conretely (haha!) defined subject for my Projet de Fin d’Etudes. Up until yesterday, I had been increasingly frustrated…

Zen and the art of building maintenance

  I am in the throws of reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. In my view it is a philosophical book that challenges…

“The late worm avoids the bird” and other stories…

I have my cousin Ralph (of Stringfever fame – see link to the left, under music) to thank for that piece of advice, which makes me laugh each…

Bending beams and counting the cost

During these first few weeks of my placement I have been carrying out some fairly entry-level calculations on a forty-five storey tower. These follow on nicely from courses…

Final Year Project

Last Friday I handed in my last piece of course work at ENPC.  Despite having started my placement two weeks ago, last week I was still finishing off…

The end of bridges and the beginning of projects

After seven and a half years, I had my final exam as an undergraduate last Friday.  As final exams go, it counted for a minute part of my…

Le vide grenier de l’onzième

We were recently asked in one of our French classes to write an article about a business in the style of short piece for a newspaper. The brief…

The end of architecture school

Today I sat the final exam for what has probably been the most enjoyable course that I have studied during the last four years, the ambitiously titled “History…

Earthquakes exam leaves students shakey

We have just had the first of two earthquake engineering exams, and this one was hard!  Revision for the exam was doubly frustrating: firstly because the key topics that…

Photography Course

dsc02040b.jpg Last week I got wind of a course at ENPC in photography. After a little research I found out that it is actually an advanced course for…

How to be dam safe

Glen Canyon Dam, as featured in the popular film «Superman» When designing, building and operating a dam, there are a few steps that ought to be followed in…

Economic croissants and maps of cheese

Time is flying by. I am already into my second week of college. These first three weeks are preparatory classes for all the Erasamus students at les Ponts,…

False starts – Grave affair – Breaking & Entering

Sunday evening I started to pack my bag for my first day of school on Monday, or so I thought… A double-check of a letter from ENPC reconfirmed…

Blog blues

Thanks to all of you (well one of you) for your requests for photos. I have now been trying to get photos to work on my last entry…

Why blog?

This first entry is not a treatise on why one should blog.  I am not even certain why I should blog.  But I am certain that I like…