Monat: Mai 2013

Hey,

So as the weather was incredible on Sunday we decided to spend the rest of the day at St. Stephens Green Park. On our way there we took our time to listen to the street musicians this time. We resisted the urge to afford one of their CDs even though they played great music. At the park we found a nice sunny place and hung around there. Nothing much to tell about that, other than it was utmost relaxing and a very nice spent day.

On our way home we again listened to the musicians so we took quite long to get there. After Dinner we watched breaking bad, and that’s about all we did on the weekend.

No idea what my next post will be,

just read on and find out!

— TO BE CONTINUED —

Greetings everyone,

my last week of work has started and I’m having mixed feelings about my leave. On one hand I will be glad to be back in Germany seeing family and friends again and  grateful to sleep in my own bed again. On the other hand I’m a little sad to leave my work placement especially since I started to look into different projects I won’t be able to see completion.

The last two days, that’s Monday and Tuesday, I spent at our Warehouse at Heron Road where we had to supervise the installation of the new hardware from the ISP because Heron Road recently got an upgrade in the line speeds which made other hardware a necessity. Furthermore Graham and I were asked to exchange the existing small cabinet for a bigger one, which meant to move all hardware, active and passive, from one cabinet to the other.
The first problem we encountered were the two Ethernet patch panels because the cables were wired in a way which made it impossible to take out without cutting the attached network cables and that meant we had to rewire the panels again. And of course we managed to, accidentally, destroy half of the fiber connections while taking out the fiber patch panel, which meant we had to get a contractor to splice the connections anew.
After we had everything out of the cabinet we wanted to switch the small cabinet with the bigger one, which was about 3x times the size of the old one. I should mention that the cabinet is standing under a stair and we had maybe 2.10m of max. height while the new cabinet is 2m high and on the edge of the stairs was a small bar, which supported the stairs, under which the cabinet had to go through with maybe 1cm of air.
Well we got the cabinet in without any problems after the fits attempt  facing the same direction the old cabinet did and realized, as it is deeper, we couldn’t open the door properly, so we decided to turn the cabinet by 90°. As we were turning the cabinet the cabinet got stuck on the bars and refused to move even one inch and it took us around 30 minutes and a lot of physical violence, which was my part, to get free again and into the correct situation, we even had to involve the poor fellow from the ISPs subcontractor.
Once the Cabinet was in place the ISP subcontractor installed the new hardware, tested the internet connection and left. Graham and I still had to rewire the Ethernet patch panels and to install the hardware again.

After we were done the day was over.

On Tuesday had to go back to back to Heron Road to supervise the contractors tasked with repairing the fiber connections and we had to find out why the IP telephones didn’t get an IP address over DHCP, which turned out to be a small misconfiguration on the ISP router. This again took most of our day and we only got up to Cultra to report on the situation.

It was a produktoive start into the last week and I will report on the rest of this week later. Have a nice week!

Yours sincerely,

Tobias

P.S
Kinda scary/exciting scientific „news“ of the day:

Two Rats Communicate Brain to Brain

the scientific paper on the topic:
https://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130228/srep01319/full/srep01319.html

Yes, I am not sure what to write down here, because the topic says everything.

This is my last full week here and now it´s really time to go home. I have enough. I´ve seen more than the most irish people, I „enjoyed“ the drinking-culture here but with every day my money says more and more „Byebye!“. I am tired, I am exhausted, and I want to go home. 8 Weeks… 6 Would have been more than enough.

I am not sure if everyone thinks like me, but I know from a few people that they do. If it would be longer than these two remaining weeks, I would say „Cheers“, go to the airport, book a last minute flight and wouldn´t look back.

I want my own bed, „my“ bathroom, „my“ kitchen. Mom, I promise you. As soon as I come back, I will cook something. I don´t know what, but I will. Really…

Naaa, maybe not on saturday. Mrs. Holstein, I invite you to go to the indian restaurant in… I don´t know. You know where it is. I forgot it. So… I pay! 😀 Markus (my Brother, not my colleague), you are also invited, if you want to join and if you have nothing better to do than to drive the whole way to Berlin…^^

Why do I write this here? I have to say: I have no idea. I am tired and bored. Whatever. 😀

Oh my gosh, I really look forward the flight next week!

Hi,

This will be just a short entry as I am running out of topics and I still need a few.

So The weekend was mostly quiet, I saved Eriks ass on Saturday morning, as he almost overslept and resulting that almost missed his tour. Luckily I made the night through (for some reason I did not really get tired) and woke him up at 0530 am. The Saturday itself was quite silent for me. I slept until 1400 pm and went shopping for food afterwards. Just a few ingredients required for dinner. Other than that I was lazy.

For Sunday Erik and I were shopping again for clothes. As Erik got A TON of T-Shirts I almost completed my business outfit equipment with additional trousers, shirts, ties and a jacket. I will probably afford decent shoes in Germany.

Will tell you about the second part of Sunday in the next Blog!

— TO BE CONTINUED —

Hello everyone,

this week is almost and over and my last week at work is about to begin. I know officially our last day at work is the 30th of May but my colleagues said it’s alright  if I take the week of to do stuff I haven’t been able to, e.g go on a photo tour through Belfast.
But for now let me tell you about my weekend, OK there isn’t much to tell but still not much is better than nothing 😀
On Saturday I went shopping which was a big mistake because it was pouring the whole day and I was literally soaked from head to toe but nothing a nice hot shower can’t cure. I got myself a pair of nice beef steak and they were delicious, the meat on this island is really on of its plus points.
In the evening our Spanish neighbors held a farewell party for themselves because most of them will be leaving for Spain at the end of this week. I stayed till 2am, seeing as it was pretty boring I didn’t stay long, but a few stayed awake like 7am.
Today the weather was better and with better I mean it wasn’t raining. My flatmates took the opportunity to went shopping for themselves and to get our lunch. Furthermore for the first time since we are here we had to top off our gas card, which is kinda like a prepaid card, since we arrived in Belfast, in comparison our neighbors had to top off their gas like 3 or 4 times already and they started with the same amount.
We just finished eating diner, delicious self prepared burritos with more cheese than a doctor would call healthy.

Well that’s it for the moment, I hope you had a nice weekend and happy holiday.

Yours sincerely,

Tobias
Useless information of the day:
Titin is the larges known protein (C169723H270464N45688O52243S912). It has the longest IUPAC name at 189.891 letters.
It takes approximately 3,5 hours to read it in its entirety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titin