Wesley's Tool-Box

The employees of KPX that came to the Philippines for the volunteering work visited St. Martha Elementary School located in Batia, Bocaue, Bulacan today. To start, various useful gifts were given to the school kids, then we got into giving some helping hands.


The volunteers arrived just before the lunch time, so the next task was to provide lunch to the hungry kids. Today's menu was steamed rice and chicken stew and the volunteers barely kept up with the flow of children lining up.

After everyone got their share, we got to play with the school kids. Balloons were blown and given out. Then some boys wanted to play basketball, so a nice 4-on-4 street basketball match was held as well. All in all, everyone was happy to take part in the experience.

Most public corporations in Korea were naturally situated in or near Seoul, the capital city. But to promote a more balanced growth in other regions, these companies are being spread out, relocating to newly-built "innovation cities". There is one in every province.

The one in South Jeolla Province (Jeollanam-do) is called Bitgaram City, and is located in the middle of the vast rice fields in Naju. This is where headquarters of many electricity-related companies, including KPX (where I work) and KEPCO are being moved to. All the companies will have completed the move by the end of 2014.


At the end of July, most of the buildings looked mostly complete, at least as far as the structural shape was concerned. KEPCO's new 31-story building is the tallest of them all, and is easily recognizable from far away because Naju is mostly "flat" throughout. But other buildings have certain futuristic looks to them and stand out of the landscape as well.

In the case of KPX, its new HQ building was basically complete a month ago. It is now waiting for the new Energy Management System and CBP-based Electricity Trading System to finish testing and the whole workforce to move in. This will happen at the end of September, less than two months from now. From then on, I will start living in Naju as well, ending 6 years of residence in Suwon. I await with hope and a bit of uncertainty.

I've been downloading and 3D printing a lot of interesting stuff so far. But eventually, I had to tackle the art of using a 3D modeling program to create custom designs. For my first attempt, I decided to make a coin with a logo on its face. Specifically, the logo was that of KPX, which is where I work. As far as I am aware, the company never issued a commemorative coin before, so it seemed to be a good choice.

A few weeks ago, I had installed Autodesk's 123D Design software to make 3D models. I was originally thinking of TinkerCAD, but that had been bought by Autodesk, so I thought I might as well just use Autodesk's original software. Apart from being slow to load on my Mac, it was thankfully not too difficult to make some shapes and move things around.


After a couple of practice, I started drawing the KPX logo. Sadly, there wasn't a way of importing an image file to trace over. As a workaround, I put a grid over an image of the logo and drew the lines as closely resembling as possible on the grid within 123D Design. It came out fairly well.