Monat: Mai 2012

Sunny Work

As the other AFIB guys already wrote the weather here in Belfast is very good. This is untypical because we have about 20 °C and it feels like over 25 °C. The sun burns so hot that I have a sunburn – no joke. I’m very often outside to install the outdoor WLAN. But now I bought a sunblocker and hope that the red skin will change into suntanned skin 🙂 I never thought that would be so nice here in the rainy Belfast.
At work Jannik and myself tested the Intelesens Aingeal device which can monitor the vital signs. So I’m not afraid to test the device by myself. At first the website to access the data from the monitoring device doesn’t worked and we must waited until Friday. But then we established a connection between the WLAN access point and the Aingeal device. This worked not realy fine because the connection was interrupted at many times. But we had monitored some of my vital signs. I’m not a doctor but you can see a difference between the idle ECG and the burden. At this point I’ve done some press-ups.

The normal heart rate

 

After 40 press-ups

Active Directory Upgrade

This week I was introduced to another project at Translink: Plans are to upgrade the Active Directory infrastructure from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2. The project is realized in cooperation with the IT service provider Northgate.

One principal reason for running this project is that another project depends on this Active Directory upgrade: the migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010.

A project assistant from Northgate came to the office to talk with my colleagues and me about the hardware (physical and virtual) and software requirements as well as the necessary network (re)structuring.

Sunny Dublin

On Monday I meet Mrs. Neumann and Mr. Bavar in the Knighgtsbridge Bar at the Airlington Hotel. We talked a bit about the City and my job in Dublin and of cause about the weather which is not typical Irish. The days were full of sunshine and a bit too warm in my opinion. I didn’t know that you can put the weather from Germany into your pockets. That’s awesome. The cool thing I noticed is that there are less thunderstorms in Ireland than in Germany. Anyway, at Wednesday Mrs. Neumann and Mr. Bavar wanted to take a look in my apartment. Mrs. Neumann was kind of suprised how modern my apartment is. Wooden floor, huge living room and a modern kitchen that’s what I have here. Mr. Bavar also made a refrigerator check to see what we eat all day. Good that he didn’t saw the freezer. 😉

Good that we have a freezer so I can by some icecream for the next few days. I often visit Met Érieann to look how the weather will be in the next days. More sunshine, yeah! Time to go to a beach again.

Visit from Berlin

Hi guys,

on Tuesday came visitors from Berlin to Belfast. Who? Mr. Bavar (my supervisor) and Mrs. Neumann (supervisor from the MPIB).

They have visited the companies and accommodations from the AFIB members.

They were at 11 o’clock in my company, where we have talked about the work at Anaeko. Later came my responsible person from Anaeko to us and we spoke all together .

On the late afternoon, the complete AFIB went in the “Filthy MacNasty’s”-Pub, a small Pub in the Dublin Road, there we drunk, of course only coke. =D
It was nice to speak once again with people from Germany.

At 7:30 p.m. our visitors walked to the train station to drive back to Dublin.

Best regards from Belfast
Benjamin

Uplifting vocals

Every Wednesday is a great musician named Mark Graham playing at Filthy MacNasty’s. Rene, Tim and I were at his last to gigs and listened to him.  He is a singer/songwriter based in Lisburn and he is enchanting crowds with his heart-stopping, uplifting, easy going style of music. At night-time his job is being a musician playing at pubs and weddings, but his day job is writing songs.  His Music is inspired by McCartney, Lennon and Hendrix. It is a rally good feeling to listen to him and to see how enthusiastic he is about music. But the most impressive thing about him as an musician is that he don’t need a band behind him, just him and his guitar, that is all what he need to sound as great as he do.  I really like people like him, because they make our lives for a few hours easier and a bit stress less.

Mark Graham @ Filthy MacNasty's

So see you on Wednesday at Filthy MacNasty’s 10.00 pm, have a pint and enjoy.

Three days… Two films… One Project… But a lot of sunshine!!!

Hey guys,

it’s always funny to how the weather can be changed in irland. Now, it’s a lot of sunshine like the first few days of summer in Germany. We have watched to additional films in our favourite cinema: „The dictator“ and „Safe“. „The dictator“ was very funny and I would recommend this one, but I didn’t like to recommend the other one, because I my opinion, the scenes was switched to fast sometimes and there are to much story scenes with very few action. I think that’s very unusual for an actor like Jason Statham. Well, I enjoy the first sunshine days of this week and my projects at Volunteer Now works very fine, but I had the first setback on tuesday, because I wanted to use MS Dynamics SDK, but the current version of this SDK wasn’t compatible with the MS Dynamics 4.0 CRM Server. Therefore, I was frustrated that Microsoft doesn’t keep his own standards and the migration was successed from the 4.0 version to the 2011 (5.0) version, but the import of the old organisation site was failed, because there was to many changes. So, I had to create all changes from the previous one, but I have finished this one and now, I can begin to develop some webresources with the new SDK and a new Framework. Well, it’s very interest, but it’s a little bit more difficult to work on project which used a more closed application than an opensource project. I think, it will be a nice challenge and I can get more experience by using Microsoft SDK’s. So, I look hopefully in the following days of this week and I wish everyone a nice week, too.

A half day on the Titanic

Hi guys,

no, I was not really on the Titanic, but close to it, because we (Martin and I) was on Saturday in the world famous Titanic-Museum. It is one of the landmarks of Belfast.

The Titanic-Museum

We started on Saturday noon to drive with a taxi to the Titanic-Museum. Arrived there we have picked up our tickets (on the website reserved) at a ticket office. After 30min waiting, we could start in the “Titanic World”. 🙂

The start began with the former living in Belfast and how the shipping industry arose. After them we could drive with an elevator up on the titanic scaffold (20m high).

After the crossing of the scaffolding, we could with a small, I would say space shuttle, fly around the working mens, which have worked on the titanic. We could they see on screens, camouflaged as windows.

On the end of the museum, we could marvel the titanic wreck under our foots, it was amazing.

Best regards from Belfast
Benjamin

Sunny Days

This week starts with some really nice days. The sun is shining all day long since Monday and it really feels good. Yesterday Mr. Bavar and Mrs. Neumann visited us at our placements and our appartement. Afterwards we had some nice hours talking about our experiences here in Belfast and our impressions about the city, the people and the atmosphere at work. Mrs. Neumann really attracted interest in the dress code and the casual friday.

More than half of the 8 weeks are over now and to be honest, I’m really looking foward to get back home. I really like Belfast and also it’s people but you know, there’s no place like home.

Vistors from Berlin

Yesterday, visitors from Berlin, Mr. Bavar and Mrs. Neumann, came to see Belfast. Kevin Shine, our local advisor from RSM Tennon, arranged for them to visit each of us in our work placements and afterwards to see our apartment, the MEWS house at Hardcastle Street. The apartment is first time part of this training program, so our visitors wanted to receive an impression how the conveniences are. They were impressed and Mr. Bavar said that he would choose this apartment if he had to go to Belfast for two month. They took a few photos and afterwards we went to a pub called “Filthy MacNasty’s”, Mrs. Neumann really liked this location. We had a few nice conversations and a lot of fun, it felt like they brought a piece of home with them.

Visitors at Filthy MacNasty's

But unfortunately we were short of time and the visitors had to drive back to Dublin. René, Tim and me brought them to rail station and there we bid good bye.

Outdoor WLAN

Our IT-Supervisor Damien suggested that we can set up the outdoor WLAN Access Point. So Jannik, Damien and me set up the device, fixed on a mast, for a small approximately 2500 square metre big area in the near of the NIBEC building. At first we tested the strength of the signal with the internal antenna. Which was very sober, because it had a high signal loss after 50 metres. Then we plugged in the antenna from our ZyXEL Repeater and voila the signal was still after 50 metres very good. Even behind a building we have connection to the access point. So we decided to go as far as we have a signal. Result: After 215 metres behind a tree we lost the signal. This suprised not only our IT-Supervisor, Jannik and myself was suprised too how far this small antenna worked.

Maybe this or next week we get the right cable for the outdoor antenna, which is 1,5 metre long. Then we can establish a connection for whole Jordanstown and maybe up to Belfast 😉 Anyhow it’s enough to cover a football pitch. That is the only reason for the huge outdoor antenna.

Also the education coordinator from Germany Mr. Bavar together with Ms. Neumann from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Kevin Shine visited me. They want to know what we’re did at work and if we’re pleased with the work and coworker.