Homemade food

We realized that we eat just a few times at a fast food restaurant or that we bought convenience food. That fact brought us to mind that we eat most of the time together and that is an indicator for a good working community in our apartment. We are happy about that and about the fact that four guys at Ireland are able to cook for their self’s. So I will introduce to you one of our favorite dishes. At this Sunday we decided to cook a homemade lasagna. It is a bit elaborate, but it’s worth it.

Ready for the oven

It was very tasty and most of my housemates hat to do an afternoon nip after they had finished there potions.

Tasty!

First match

The UEFA Euro 2012 has started and I was going to see the first game of Germany in a Pub called “Stiff Kitten” together with my colleague René Skillen. The pub is just round the corner and we thought it would be okay if we go over a few minutes before the match has started, because we’re at Northern Ireland and we thought just a few people will watch the match. Don’t! The pub was completely full with fans and we were surprised. I was satisfied about the fact that Northern Ireland people are interested about the German team and how they play at this championship, but just for a moment because the fact is that we hadn’t got a chance to stay and see the match. So we had to went back to our apartment. It was annoying me but it was relaxed to see the game at the apartment.

Paperwork

On Thursday and Friday I had to do a lot of paperwork. Richard Ruddock and I filled out the forms for europass. It took much longer as we supposed but at the end of it all we found the right formulations and we were satisfied. Afterwards I began to write my report about the stay here in Belfast. Because Word isn’t the means of choice to write such a report I decided to use LaTeX. It is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TEX typesetting program. It is a much nerdy way to write a report and documents created with LaTeX looks a million times better than Word documents. So I wrote the report and while I wrote I could improve my LaTeX skills a bit. It was fun. The last thing I have to do Is create a presentation about the stay in Belfast. It is also possible to create presentations in LaTeX, but I don’t  know which program I will use to do that.

My Weekend

After two exciting days at Enniskillen, I tried to relax at the weekend. I spend a lot of time spleeping and just hanging around. Saturday,we had lunch at „The Morning Star“, which is a pub offering lunch. Oli, Tim and Tobias had the „Morning Star Burger“, I tried the „Chicken Burger“. It was a nice location, altough there were many people so it was quite loud. Afterwards I watched some football with Oli.

Sunday wasn’t more interesting. Oli cooked some lasagne for us and in the evening, we were at „The Belfast Empire“ again, to listen to Ken Haddock’s for the last time.

It’s also quite calm on work, I’m doing last paperwork so everything is ready for leaving.

The Weekend

The last whole weekend here in Belfast run out. Next weekend we will fly home. So, I decided to do anything special, as far as practicable in Belfast. A bird twittered me something about the Lagan Valley LeisurePlex. This is the „largest leisure pool of its kind in Northern Ireland“ located in Lisburn – approximately 30 minutes away from our train station. At noon we went to the train and drove directly to Lisburn. After a few minutes walk we reached the leisure park, which was full of families with her children. We had a lot of fun there and it was something else, what I can do in Northern Ireland. After this event I was tired and hungry. So we searched somewhere to eat something and found a Chinese restaurant, where we could eat from a buffet for a fixed price – Therefore a all-you-can-eat. I tried a lot of the Chinese food that was very delicous. Maybe a little bit to much. Afterwards I had stomachache.

I went saturated  home and had a small nap. But not so long, because I want to see the European championchip. So the 3 FIANs Benny, Chris and Timo and myself went together with the German flag to a pub. Unfortunately the match was not so exiting, but we had won and this is the main point.

The Sunday began with a typical British breakfast at Maggie May´s. Maybe I hadn’t choose the big „Bumper Fry“ with 2 eggs, 2 bacon, sausage, potato bread, soda bread, hash brown, mushrooms, beans and chips. After this huge meal I had to sleep again.

Lisburn Leisure Park

Water pools and waterslides...
Water pools and waterslides...

Yesterday was a relaxed day, too. Well, I have found a nice place where we can spend the time on sunday, but this I have already told you and it was nice. Maybe, we have slightly increased expectations, because the water leisure pool looks on the pictures bigger than the real look, but I think we are accustomed to bigger and more spectacular water parks from Germany. However, we have enjoyed this wet experience. Unfortunataly, there were to many kids on this day where we can’t really relaxed in the pool and have some fun waterslides, it was still too small for those many visitors. After all, we have a little hightlight in our favourite pub the morning star and enjoyed the football match between Spain and Italy. We have ordered some steaks which are looked very nice and they were very delicious, so we have ended this day with a great meal and now we watch the last football match at the evening.

Ireland vs. Croatia – 1:3

The game started really bad for Ireland. In the 3rd minute  Croatia already it’s first goal. What followed was a fishy game by the Croatien players but then in the 19th minute St. Ledger made a nice head goal. Befor the end of the first half Croatia made another goal. During the half time break I was thinking about some Irish people and what they said about they football players.

Every Irish person says that they have a bad football team.

Maybe that’s the reason why I like Irish Rugby more than football. In the end Ireland lost the game with a 1:3 against Croatia. Let’s see how they handle the next game on Thursday.

Enhancing Network Performance … Again

Last week I boosted network performance at Translink again.

The core switches used to be connected via single 1Gbit/s links, whereas all other ports are also 1Gbit/s. Unsurprisingly they had problems with several connections traversing the core. So I decided to increase the bandwidth (and by the way improve redundancy) by configuring an 8-port EtherChannel between each two core switches.

Of course the redundancy could also be improved by just patching more links between the switches, but in this case there would only be one usable link at a time, because the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) would block the remaining links to prevent a loop in the network. By configuring the EtherChannel the switches consider the eight ports of the EtherChannel as one logical port and load-balance the traffic over all links.

The torch in Belfast

Hi guys,

the Olympic Torch was on Wednesday in Belfast and I was there. Belfast has organized a big celebration, to welcome the torch. Martin and I have waiting for the torch, a little bit outside from the celebration, because it was at the main places to much scramble for us. Besides we had more place to make pictures.

As the torch finally came, we are run with the torchbearers through the complete city, to make good pictures and to see the torch.

It was very exhausting, but we have got many good pictures. On the end of the run, the torch came on stage in front of the city hall. There was lit, a big fire in a goblet.

A interesting information incidentally: each torchbearer has his own torch, so it exist 8000 pieces.
I had never thought, that really each his own torch has.

Best regards from Belfast
Benjamin

Belfast Burger Bash

Yesterday we checked out a bar/restaurant that was recommended to us by some colleagues: The Morning Star.

As starter we had a broccoli blue cheese soup, which was already very good, but the restaurant is famous for its identically named Morning Star Burger, so of course we tried it.

The burger is very delicious, to cut the matter short, it’s legendary! 😉