Monat: April 2013

End of the second week

Hi guys

the second week ist over. Thursday and friday were very nice workdays.
In my projekt I created my first web service. I programmed this in c#.
It’s very similar to java. The test failed, because I used the
false timestamp. So I did send me 334 mails in 3 minutes to my charite
account. That was very funny.

After the work we cooked and met some colleagues in a pub called
„Buskers“.
Some guys and I went to a club at midnight. At the beginning it wasn’t
so cool, but later we had a lot of fun.
Yesterday Stefan and I went to the harbour, but we choose the wrong
one. It was the industry harbour and we didn’t see the ocean.

walk to the harbour
walk to the harbour

After a sunny walk, all our colleagues visit us and we made a little home party.

Today is our cleaningday and the rest of it we’ll chill and enjoy the sunshine at our balcony.

 

See you later

#6 – Weekends

< “Hey everyone, it’s me again” – hell who is “me” supposed to be? I always have to scroll down and look for the name of the blogger, so let me introduce myself properly. >

“Hey everyone, this is Stefan.” – HA! Take that, Blog!

Well, I said before I will tell you a bit about my weekends. Still I believe this one will be a quickie in terms of blog-entry-length-whatever-input-stuff-here.

To the topic: we generally try to go outside and see places we have yet not visited. This of course depends on the weather. As a few colleagues already did point out, it is quite unpredictable. We went around a lot last Sunday and visited temple bar (and of course a pub.). This time we had splendid live-music. Sadly, as it was a Sunday, we weren’t able to stay long.

 

 

Even though James (my mentor) advised me not to go drinking in temple bar, as it is far more expensive than elsewhere, there are still a few Pubs I will definitely visit. Other than that, we plan to visit the port (or harbour) and we intend to visit places outside of Dublin; of course including a few castles. Below a few pictures of a quite impressive church we passed by. It’s the christ church.

 

 

Well, that’s it for now and I have yet no idea what my next entry will be about. I guess when I don’t know what to write about but i will find something of course. See you then.

 

— TO BE CONTINUED —

What? The second week is over?!

Here I am!

It is incredible. It felt like yesterday was Saturday the 6th and I am waiting for me flight, because the time is just running. My colleagues are still cool, my workplace nice and I like to stand up early in the morning just to go to work. All our Users are very friendly and helpful and if that´s not enough: The Big Bosses are also extreme friendly and helpful. If you ask me: This is a more familiar atmosphere than it could ever be in Germany. We are not laid back enough. This is a nice atmosphere we have here in Ireland.

After 2 very short weeks I am finally able to have no problems to find the way to work without my GPS and it becomes better, I am able to find the way back home walking. 😉

Why should I do this? Just because the Busses are so extremely expensive. So I burn some calories and save some money. That comes in handy!

I am still amazed from the friendliness of all the people here. If you walk against someone or stand in their way, they only say “Oh, Sorry!”. I walk against them and they say sorry! In Germany I would be beaten. 😀

Wednesday I took the Bus and sat next to an older woman. I was listening music when she suddenly began to talk to me. She asked me, where I am from. I said Germany. And then she started to ask me, where she should go, because next week she will go to Berlin. Funny coincidence. And then she told me about a turret clock, I every day pass by. I never realized it, but this clock is called the “Four-Face-Lier”. All of her 4 sides shows an other time. It´s on my list of fotos I want to upload. 🙂

Thursday I was in the St. Patricks Cathedral. A very phenomenal and impressive building! But I have to say, it´s more interesting from the outside than from the inside. However, it was worth the 4,50€ entrance. Here a picture from the cathedral:

 

St. Patricks Cathedral

I am not sure if we read us tomorrow. I will take a tour with a girl from my workplace. It is a tour about the old celtic culture. We will see some castles and other real cool stuff. It starts at 8am and ends at 5pm. Imagine, I would never think about to stand up on 6am on an Saturday in Germany. I hope (and I am sure :D) it is worth to stand up that early!

 

See you Guys!

Time is running

Dear Reader,

it feels like yesterday that I take my clothes, put it in my suitcase and start that adventure but now we are almost two weeks in Ireland. Everything is okay at the moment but I think in few weeks I will miss my family and friends.

The working place is still perfect for me and my english. I made first level support (where I need to talk with people :O), the exchange migration and other small things like reinstall computer’s, configure our new NAS or stuff like that. In our break’s we talk a lot about football and our team’s we support. Especially it’s a funny thing that there are a 2 German teams and 2 Spanish teams in the semifinals of the champions league. With all the Spanish guy’s here, hopefully Munich and Dortmund will win 😀

I'm working on the right hand side
I'm working on the right hand side

Before we start our journey, a lot of people told me that the Irish people are more relaxed and doesn’t work that much and stuff like that, but in my opinion they are working as hard as the German’s and they are more stressed. The only difference is this very courteous communication, no matter how stressed they are.

Not much happened in the last few day’s so we will read us later.

 

Yours sincerly,

Alexander

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

 

 

 

 

What the weather…

Hi folks, it’s me again.

 

Now we have about one and a half weeks behind us and there is one thing I recognized just today, the changes in the weather.

I don’t know how to explain it, because it is totally weird. When we were visiting the Guinness Storehouse on Monday last week, I figured out that the wind, despite the normal temperatures, could be terrible.
But since today afternoon I know for sure. It is like a hurricane just as I am writing these letters. For me as a smoker that is not allowed to smoke inside it is like a punishment.
It’s like the wind wants to annoy me. Besides that, it is not really possible to walk outside without some protective walls because the wind will play with you and push you around.
If you ignore the wind (if possible) the weather is pretty fine, it’s not too cold or too warm.

 

At work it is going to become more IT related. I am now responsible (together with a colleague) to write some PHP functions for our reporting software and later I may be able to finally use some of my networking skills when we are testing the system on the streets.

 

This time there are no pictures that I could come up with. We didn’t go out the last couple of days. Maybe at the weekend, when there is more time to go out. But when we do, we will try to take a look at the Temple Bar District. Maybe we find some interesting spots and/or people.

 

See you soon.

 

Markus