Kategorie: Allgemein

Monday and more

Hi guys,

my first topic today is Monday, the bank holiday, on this day was unfortunately very modest weather, on basis of this have we the complete day watched television (Bones). 🙂 Incidentally, Bones is our daily television program, because Roxi has ca. 4 seasons. The guys, which not like the TV-series, have bad luck. For all people who not know what or who Bones is: click here.

Yesterday, we had a funny evening, because Timo did made funny things with our pictures. For example he has replaced our heads with his own head. It looks very funny. 😆
What Timo can create with Photoshop, is very cool. My respect!

Best regards from Belfast
Benjamin

Getting the third week started

Thanks to the bank holiday, this week starts today, Tuesday. I’m still overwhelmed by all the impressions I got this weekend. I just can highly recommend to visit Tobi’s blog and read his post about our weekend. He describes our coast trip, which I described earlier, with much blood, sweat and tears and I think it’s worth reading it. I’m still working on building a Windows environment with an ESXi Hypervisor, which was delayed due to Installation problems. The versions 3.5 and 4.1 did not cooperate with the hardware I have to use, so I was told to install Citrix XenServer. I spend a lot of time working with ESXi Hypervisor in Berlin so I’m very familiar with this product and its advantages. I missed many of them when I tried to set up VMs with XenServer. So I decided to spend more time on getting ESXi installed and I succeeded! Version 5.1 seems to be compatible and finally I  can handle the basic work.

1/4 is done

Hi guys,

1/4 of our time is done, but fortunately we have even 3/4 of our time.

The Titanic-shield in the front of the Titanic museum.

Okay, to the weekend:

On Friday evening, we was in the Botanic Inn, a small pub near the Botanic Garden. There, we could see, how easy it is, with natives to come in a convention, but it was very difficult the drunken natives to understand. The Saturday was for us a shopping day and we was in the city centre of Belfast, incidentally we have witness the festival of fool. Sunday we was at the port of Belfast. We have seen the titanic museum (someday we will go inside), the titanic dok and many other nice things.

Best regards from Belfast
Benjamin

The Weather

Today, the 7 May, is a special day. It’s the Early May Bank Holiday. Northern Ireland has many Bank Holidays like the Spring Bank Holiday or the Summer Bank Holiday. At these days the banks, I think that is the reason for the name, and other businesses are closed. So today is day off and we have the opportunity to use this free day.
But there is a little problem: the weather. OK, Belfast and the whole isle of Ireland is famous for his rainy weather. But the last days we have been lucky because we had only light showers and the sun made sure that it felt not so cold. Here in Ireland you must be ready for changes in the weather. Sometimes it rained very hard and in the next minute the sun comes. And the next days get not be better. Finally we decided to stay at home, because not all businesses have open.

A summary of the last week…

The second week was ended… Last Wednesday, we was went to the cinema and we have watched the new film „The Avengers“, this was funny and a great film with a lot of jokes and gags. So, we have decided to go every Tuesday to the cinema, because it is very cheap to watch a film in 3D on this day of week. Well, here are some pictures, which i took while we went to the cinema…

As ending of the last week, we have decided to go to our favorite pub, because we are looked for a restaurant, but we didn’t find any one which haven’t to book. So, we went to the pub Morning Star and the most of my roommates ate a 24oz steak and i ate only a two 6oz cheesburger. On this week Monday, we want to go to the cinema, because we want to watch the film „Battleship“ and this film ending on this day, but the next day we will be going to the Pavillion Odyssey Centre and watch an other film, too. So, i thing, it will be a good week.

K.O. after cleaning

Hi there,

yesterday we sleept a bit longer because of the day tour the day befor. After I woke up I wanted to make some breakfast but my appetite was gone after I saw the kitchen. So we had to clean our kitchen because that french girl really dont know how to make something clean. I was a little shocked after I saw that she placed a pot with something burned in into the dishwasher. Also the hob was totally dirty so I had clean it. I didn’t watched into the microwave. After the kitchen was done we cleaned our bathroom as well. Normally there would be a cleaning service for our apartments but we never saw one here. We already talked to Margaret about that issue and she spoke to the reception about it on the same day. Yesterday I also wrote an email to Margaret about the missing cleaning service and about some other issues like broken beds and so on. During that chaos of cleaning and collecting issues about the apartment I totally forgot to write my blog entry. So I’m really sorry for letting you wait.

Have a nice bank holiday.

Greetings
Daniela

My first week at ECIT Institute

Working in this institute is quite awesome! My colleagues are polite, attentive and benevolent, my supervisor is such a funny guy; we guffaw every morning about his jokes. But if he needs to be the boss, you will respect him and you know that he is the boss. I am really grateful for having my placement at ECIT Institute, I had to choose on which areas I want to improve my knowledge and they do absolutely everything to realize my wishes and needs! It’s absolutely brilliant and I don’t tire of saying “thank you very much”. For example, they allocate me my own Cisco lab for two weeks and I am allowed to implement a site to site VPN in my own testing network. It’s just out of this world. Besides my chosen projects I am responsible for doing the daily service support and that really improves my English skills. It’s great, that’s what I am here for. So in my opinion I really found the pot of gold, my heartfelt thanks to Kevin Shine who arranged this placement for me.

Office
Titanic Dock

ECIT Institute

Something about ECIT Institute: As I told you in an elder entry the Institute is located on the Queens Island next to the Titanic dock and its pump house. So the view is great but from the technician view, the things they develop are equal the sights. I am not allowed to talk about details but they develop chips for European Space Agency (ESA), they develop battle dresses for army which are able to acquire the vital signs of the soldier in the battle, his position and all these data are encrypted broadcasted to the headquarter. Also they develop chips for virus behaviour detection and how to eliminate them before they infect the system. It was more than interesting to see these things. I am really happy to have the opportunity to see these things.

ECIT

Our coast trip

Hey!

During the last week, Tobi, Tim, Oli and me decided to hire a car for the weekend and see something of Northern Ireland’s beautiful landscape. Saturday, Tim and Oli got the car — which was advertised as a VW Passat on the website and turned out to be a Vauxhall Zafira — and picked up Tobi and me. We used the chance to go to a Lidl, which is some miles away from our apartment.

Today, our journey brought us to Giant’s Causeway, the Bushmill Distillery, and the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge. We took a lot of pictures, unfortunately I can’t upload all of them, but here are at least some of them. We used the selftimer to take one of the pictures..We put my camera and Tim’s on the roof of the car and after taking the photo, I took my cam back into the car..Tim did not..so his camera had some fresh air for about one mile..We looked very surprised when we got out of the car and spotted Tim’s camera..

The impressions were just amazing..So have a look…

Giant's Causeway
Standing on some stones
again Giant's Causeway
Bushmills Distillery
At Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge
In front of the coast

A little project

During this week  I spend some time on configuring workstations for the NIPACS project, which was introduced in 2009. NIPACS means Northern Ireland Picture Archiving Communications System and enables hospitals to view digital medical patient data like MRTs on the computer and save it centrally in two data centers within Belfast. The advantage which comes with this technology is that medical patient data can be accessed by every hospital in Northern Ireland. The diagnostic workstations use very powerful hardware, meaning two Quad Core processors and 12 GB of RAM. Furthermore two high-definition displays of EIZO are used to view the medical pictures.

On Friday I got a little project. I have to set up a ESXi Hypervisor and configure a small Windows domain, including a Windows domain controller, a Microsoft SQL Server and some Windows Vista / Windows 7 clients. ESXi is already installed and the virtual machines have to be installed next week.