Tag: 15. Mai 2014

The first four days went by

Hi there!

Right now is my fourth day at Steria Ltd. Meanwhile I’ve learned a good half of the names of my colleages, so it’s much easier to communicate with each other. 😀 The first day passed really fast, because the meeting lasts almost 3 hours. After that I was introduced to the daily check-up routines and the ticket system, which I couldn’t use, because I didn’t get web access with my laptop – more on that later. The next tasks were some warranty research for some hard drives for a NAS and the comparision of two config files. Afterwards we called IBM for the reference numbers of the hard drives, which we need for the warranty processing. Some minutes lates we’ve got a call from IBM again and it turned out, that IBM have made mistakes in 7 of our 8 warranty cases, so we need to correct the statements together. Yesterday I was on tour with Rick Browne for some field work. We went up to AMI (Asset Management Ireland Ltd), where we erased the hard drives with a strong electromagnet. Today we went down to Dungannon to restart a shut off NAS at the South Tyrone Hospital.

Just like the Charité IT team in Germany, where I’ve done my last internship, Steria supports hardware for hospitals, with the small difference that we only support X-ray computers, servers and network storage here – thank God.

Next, I will get an introduction of all the contracts of Steria. And for next week it is planned to let me test some new apps.

And now back to my web access problem. I have figured out that Skype is functioning all the time and only the web access is blocked sometime, so the next days I will try to find out which ports are blocked and which not.

Networking

Welcome to another episode of The IT Crowd. That’s how I felt anyway when I was standing in the server room of System Dynamics. I was hoping for someone to make it simple and just hand me the Internet. The room itself is actually quite cool… on one side of it because that’s where the cooling system is. It’s an interesting setup because there is no real cold aisle but it’s all just one room and two air-conditioning systems facing each other on one side, blowing the freezing air onto you as you follow the cables from patch panels to the switch and vice versa. There are 5 racks in the room that are housing several switches, 3 of which are stacked Cisco C3750s that are supposed to be the core of the network because they – again – are supposed to have taken the place of older Cisco switches which are still in the setup for some reason. I guess I could make that my project to get rid of those and maybe tidy up the whole thing. I might need more than 7 weeks by the looks of it, though. Seeing as I don’t work on the weekends or do night shifts, it might be even impossible to achieve any of this at all without causing any downtime.

It pretty much goes without saying, that I have spent the last couple of days only documenting what is in that room because the last documentation is a few years old and there are quite a number of things that have changed or haven’t been documented in the first place. I am now trying to match the ports on the patch panels to the ports in the floor so I can add a few more details to the documentary like the desk numbers and people sitting there. It might be a waste of time, though, because as I have mentioned in an earlier post, there are only about 25-30 out of some 200 people in the office at any given time and I might never even get to see some of them.

I am hoping to see more of my colleagues in the following weeks though, as I have signed up for a few events like the Dublin Staff Relay as a supporter and a hiking tour in the Wicklow Mountains National Park where I hope to be able to enjoy the scenery while hiking some 7km. There is also going to be a BBQ next month that I am invited to and this is going to be on the ship that you can see in my last blog entry, the Jeanie Johnston.

Seeing as I wrote quite a lot the last time and people told me, that they haven’t even started reading this blog, I’m going to keep it rather short this time as to not let it stack up too high and give those stragglers a fighting chance to keep up.

Just a quick heads up on upcoming topics: George informed me that we will go to a bar on Friday where I will have a few drinks, maybe even Guinness 😉 and the weather is supposed to be awesome this weekend so I’m thinking about going to Dún Laoghaire and walk down the quay. There’s also the Docklands Summer Festival around the Grand Canal Dock area so I might check that out as well.

Cheers,
Angelo

Working at Speechstorm

I started working this Monday and arrived just in time to participate in a weekly meeting of the entire company where I was introduced to the staff followed by their regular topics. The company I am working for is called Speechstorm, which is developing their own stand alone programs providing a telephone based interactive communication system for customers all around the world. The idea behind this software is to allow big companies to handle a massive amount of calls whether they are just for the purpose of receiving informations such as account balance or directing them to an agent who will then help the customer based on their needs. To make those calls more time efficient and effective the agent is given a list of useful informations directly displayed on his monitor while talking to the customer on the phone. Those informations are collected by the software either by the inputs a caller made by pressing numbers on the keyboard (DMTF recognition) or by the voice recognition engine which is running in the background which is totally optional.

Although many similar programs are already in use, Speechstorm is setting new standards when it comes to flexibility combined with easy to configure software. Customers are able to set up Speechstorm dependend on their needs and can also decided whether they want to use text to speech as the output or upload their prompts on their own.

To really get into the programming itself I am currently reading through a lot of repositories to get a better understanding how the frameworks are working. The code itself is a combination of javascript with a SQL Database in the background.
I am really satisfied about my placement and couldn’t be happier in this type of environment with a small and young team in the background willing to help me wherever they can.

short summary of my work experience

I’ve worked for 3 and a half days now. I don’t have to much to do because our projects start the next weeks. So I had much time to talk to the employees. The company is really „colorful“, we got many people from different country’s here. And it is much fun to hear all the story’s and experiences. And I don’t feel that bad when i got words wrong or pronounce them wrong because nearly everybody does that too. I’m really looking forward the next weeks.