Wesley's Tool-Box

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.

As the summer and winter peak demands for electricity in Korea get precariously close to the available supply capability in the recent years, KPX has been operating a contingency plan situation room for power shortage. To sharpen the skills of the people who man the stations, routine emergency drills are carried out, like this one today.

Since I'm one of those people, I participated, practicing all the things that I need to do in each alert level. The fast pace of the exercise reminded me that being calm, prompt, and accurate was crucial. Winter will soon be upon us, but we're ready to deal with what it'll throw at us.

Power supply/demand situation is getting a bit tight in Korea this year - there's this unusually hot weather coming up, and several large nuclear plants got shut down due to faulty parts being put into due to corruption.

As a result, power grid situation room is up and running early, and I'm taking part in the operation. This means I'll be showing up in the news broadcasts a few times throughout this summer. Yesterday saw some significant coverage from the media, and here are the results.

TV:
KBS News 9, May 30, 2013 (#1)
KBS News 9, May 30, 2013 (#2)
SBS 8 News, May 30, 2013
YTN News, 4PM, May 30, 2013

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