Tag: 18. April 2013

Changing Weather

Hello everyone,

this will be short a pretty short entry (your thoughts: „As if your other entries would have been any longer!“), because  the last two days where more or less quiet.
Yesterday I worked at a little project to test a possible implementation of Gallery Project, a open source picture database. The whole project started because a user was complaining about how it’s hard to find  a suitable picture for whatever project he was working on.
For this a installed a Debian on a virtual machine and set up the web server, other necessary packages and Gallery Project, which is working just fine, and I’m currently toying around with it to asses it’s usability. Besides this small project I help my colleagues  where ever I can and I’m learning something new.

My Desk at Cultra

But besides work it’s the weather that gets me pretty worked up (pun intended? maybe ;)). It’s really hard to predict the weather here but in general you can be sure that at some point it’s going to rain. Yesterday morning it looked like it’s going to be a fine day, the sun was shining and as soon as I was about to leave the apartment it started to rain as if all gates have broken loose, but I’m sure I’m in for more :D. The result was that I arrived at worked drenched from head to toe, I’m glad that my jacket kept my shirt dry or else I would be lying in bed with a cold.
And today started gray and turned out pretty nice, the sun was shining most of the day and it only rained a few times in between.

A Storm approaching?

 

That’s it for today (I told you it would be short), tomorrow I will be working at the Ulster Museum again, I’m curios what quests await me there.

Yours sincerely

Tobias

A walk, a Pub and Nachos…

Hi folks, it’s me again.

 

Today Steve and I went out into a pub to have a beer and something to eat.
Steve ordered “Bangers & Mash” and I ordered some “Chilli Beef Nachos”.
It was awesome. I never ate such good Nachos.

 

Before...
... and after.

 

At work, we are trying to implement Drupal (a Content Management System) into our workflow. This should save us some time because we don’t need to create so much from scratch.

 

Our plans for the weekend are still the same. We still want to visit the Temple Bar District.

 

That’s all folks. I think I’ll pass my next entry at the weekend so that I have more time to see and experience something.

 

See you soon.

Markus

 

A normaly midweek

Hi guy’s

how’s it goin‘? Nothing! The last two days I have totaly screwed. The work is hard, but interessting.
Today I  created my first web service. It is a little bit complicated, therefore very cool. I don’t know, what I could report.

The trip to our work ist very long and the most time I sleep in the bus. We got used to the friendlyness of the busdriver already.
Even though I havn’t much time after the work, I often go jogging in the park. The park is small, but so beautiful.
At the right side is a little river and in the center of the park are many sportfields (football, hockey, rugby and so on) . A lot of people make sport in the park. I think this is good.
At the weekend we’ll visit the habour and go a little bit shopping.

See you later guys.

#5 – Way to work, way home and tasks at work

Hi there,

Today’s blog will provide you with a bit more details about my way to work, coming home, and my tasks.

So, as i mentioned before, it is quite the hard task to actually see where we have to hop off the bus. Most bus stations look quite same and most busses have no display. If there is a bus with a display it doesn’t help us at all as we don’t know the names of the stations. We look at the numbers of them, which has been easier so far. Well, for now, we do know when to get off in direction of work, as there is a green gas station on the right hand side and, as i explained earlier, a mix out of fields and garbage on the left hand side.

 

From here we have to walk only a few minutes to reach our respective workplaces.

 

 

On our way home, we just have to look out for the „gigantic needle“. This is rather close to our hostel and near the station we get on the bus (and it can be seen from very far away as this one is really high!). It is actually called „The Spire“

 

 

Concerning my tasks at work, this is what I am doing right now:

– Check failed backups, contact clients about it. (Mostly they just forget to put in tapes)

– Monitor my Co-workers. For this one they setup the phones in a way that I can enter their call from my phone and listen to them, while i can’t be heard.

James told me that I will get more tasks in near future. These will include managing the exchange services on server side (also creating and amending E-Mail-Accounts), user management in general for the SBS servers as well as some cloud-services which he still has to explain in detail to me.

 

That’s it for this Blog, this time a bit more colorful than the last time. Next time I will tell you a bit more about our weekends, so keep on reading!

 

— TO BE CONTINUED —

Bourgeois German’s!?

Dear Reader,

the first „working Monday“  was done a few days ago and it was really hard to stand up after that funny and short weekend. On Saturday we went to bed at 6am so we can’t sleep on Sunday. A devils circle 😀
But now the work starts to get interesting. I need to do the mail migration to Microsoft exchange in my company. A long and exciting process an i am really surprised because of the trust in me.

Nearly every day we need to go to the supermarket because we are very unorganized and sloppy but we will manage it in a few days, maybe weeks, hopefully not month. Of course that creates very funny situations like our daily conflict with the traffic light besides the street in front of our „hotel“. In general that’s complete different than in Germany. Sometimes we are standing besides a traffic light and feel like stupid bourgeois German tourists. Okay, we are bourgeois German tourist but we are not stupid, sometimes.

An other thing is the way you react on the sidewalk if someone is in front of you. He will step to his left side and you will step to your right side. Same problem as before :/ But hey, that was only one week. And like i know the Germans, at the end we are more irish than the Irish.

Our apartment still suck but we are all vaccinated so we will survive the 2 months. But when it comes true what Markus told me and another guy join us in the next few day’s, than we need to change again. Let’s hope that we don’t need to contact Magaret again 🙁

In the next Post I will tell you more about my work.

Best wishes from Ireland,

Alexander