Mai 2014 – Seite 4 – afib@irland

Friday

Hello everyone,

now it started, a long weekend because Monday is a bank holiday but not all companyies have closed on that day. Some people of us have to go to work for example Leo.
Marco and I wanted to travel to home by train yesterday but the train doesnt stop on our train station, so we had to go one trainstation from Cultra to Marino and we arrived very late at home.
On Friday I did a big step to finish my project, I installed a DPM, SQL-Server and Reporting-Server and configured them correctly(I hope) so on Tuesday I´m going to finish the project.
Yesterday Eric and I watched a lot of the serie Burn Notice it´s like McGyver but 20 years later.
Today we want to go to LIDL and I want to buy some german food if they have this.
In a multinational store they had german bread and I´m really happy.

Cables and data outlets everywhere

Yesterday I finished the estimation for the Ulster University Block BD.
After I finished that Mark gave me the blueprints for the next Building (Block BC) which got even more floors to measure but I will get through it.
After a little confusion how to split the data outlets between the three comm rooms on floor 01 I started to get an average for each area so that Mark can do the pricing for this part.
This morning I did a little bit of research for Lawrence about a company called Surface Power that offers a product called HONE that uses Nano technology to turn daylight (not sunlight) into energy.
Afterwards i continued to do my measurement for floor 01 of building BC. Shortly before I ended the day Steven showed me how to process the timesheets for our worker so they get their paycheck, since he is on holiday I have to do that for him on Tuesday.

Dublin Staff Relay and Where To Find Me

Thursday was a very nice day. I’ve started playing around with one of the servers here that is not in the productive environment of SD and set up a couple of virtual machines. It’s nice to see, that I haven’t forgotten everything that I’ve learned in the Windows seminar in my first year. I was able to set up an active directory, DHCP and DNS and was fumbling around with users, groups and respective policies.

At around half past four in the afternoon I set out with Linda and Genevieve towards Phoenix Park and the Dublin Staff Relay. The drive there was crazy because the traffic was unbelievably bad and there was one particular funny/exciting moment, when Linda drove up the bus lane all the way to the next intersection and when we were waiting there to cross the road, sirens came out of nowhere. We both thought that we were busted but when an ambulance came around the corner, we laughed delightedly at the daring maneuver and that we got away with it. However, we were still pretty short on time so Genevieve jumped out of the car and ran for our tent with the runner’s numbers and we tried to find a parking spot somewhere. After a couple back-and-forths, Linda found a spot on an adjacent field that was accessible from the road. We carried drinks and food towards the tents, looked for ours for about 10 minutes and set everything up, when we finally arrived. We were surprised to see, that we were actually sharing a tent with quite a lot of other companies like Mitsubishi and Europcar.

I didn’t really see a lot of the running but that was fine as I got to talk to the people instead. We had a couple of beers in the tent and most of us went to the pub afterwards. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones to have that idea and the pub was crowded, so we had to stand around with drinks in hands. It was a very nice evening and I talked to pretty much everybody that came to the run. I have to remember to buy the next round when we go out again because I was freeloading 3 drinks and I don’t want that to pop into people’s minds when they think about me. 😉

I was given a ride home by another colleague and went to bed at around 12 o’clock. Needless to say, this morning was far from being a good morning. I stayed in bed as long as I could and actually even longer than I should have, had breakfast, filled my water bottle and left after already having missed the first bus. Fortunately, I was still quite early and the office stayed quiet till well after 9am.

I’m also going to go home early today because I have to wash my clothes for next week as I will leave Dublin tomorrow morning for Connemara. I’m very excited about that as you must know! J

Seeing as I will get a visit next month, I will follow end this post with a short description of where to find System Dynamics.

The River Liffey cuts Dublin into 2 parts. Close to the harbor mouth, the „recently“ built Samuel Beckett Bridge spans from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay over to the North Wall Quay. The first thing you notice about the bridge is the shape it has. The Beckett Bridge looks like a harp and is easily distinguishable from any other bridge in Dublin.

When you get closer to it, no matter on which side of the Liffey, you will see that O2 has an office building right next to the bridge. On the bottom right of that building, there is a passage that leads you to Whitacker Court and if you turn left the door into the building will be on your left hand side. It’s of no use to describe the rest because you won’t get past that door unless the woman down there buzzes you in. I found out that she is not really the door opener for the building but belongs to another company in the building and she also seems to leave that front desk fairly often.

Cheers,
Angelo

welcome lunch

Yesterday at lunch time me and almost everyone in the office met at an Indian restaurant to welcome the new arrivals at Speechstorm which led to some nice chats about life in Belfast combined with delicous food.
Certainly this was a really nice way of a company meeting and I am still happy to be part of it. My work is still focused on the localization including research on grammar and programming around call flows to get more familiar with the environment and java script in general.

Also I had my first impression about how beautiful Belfast can be with a little bit of sunshine which is definitely a nice diversion compared to our daily rain. Still just for the quote it did rain afterwards!

One is not enough

Hey everyone,

the third week is nearly over and it doesn’t get boring. In the last two days I organized a lot of stuff for the stockholder, the PXE-Server and WSUS.

I cleaned the whole office and built a nice bench for our WSUS and PXE project.
A workmate and I installed all cable in the office so that it is easier to test the incoming hardware and to operate on the desks. We also repaired an old printer. The printer is now working on both workplaces and the Cisco switch is also connected to our servers and works fine.
We are looking forward to create a domain and test a very nice tool for the pxe installation.
I examined our network „rack“ and was horrified. It does not look as bad as the racks in Angelo’s company but now i understand a little how he felt while he tried to took apart the mesh.
Beastly job..

We also finished the „6-monitor-build“ for the stockholder and gave him a little
presentation how it looks like.
The PC works nearly noiseless and don’t need too much space.

The next project will be a little PCs which support between 10 and 12 monitors.
I am glad that I have the opportunity to pursue my interests.

Yours George

3rd week

This week Eric, Max and me finally managed to get more IT-related worktasks. We were introduced into the 1st and 2nd level support helpdesk in the firm. The Tech Department consists of many people which are given tasks between programming and supporting of the employees. There’s plenty of work to do since the different branches in NI keep over 1000 employed and there are more PC’s then persons in the buildings. There are Linux, Windows and Mac Operating systems which will make the work for us even more interesting. The last few days we had to move PCs from one place to another and keep the workplaces in an operating state. We also had to tidy up a storage-room which had caused some trouble because some people were not okay with it, but Peter managed it to reconcile the problems. All in all we’re looking forward to a few exciting weeks but until now I really enjoyed my stay in Belfast.

Thursday the 22th

Hello everyone,

the halfway is nearly taken and I got a project on my own from my workplacement. need to configure a test environment with Windows Server 2012 R2 and install the Data Protection Manager in conjuntion with a SQL Database Server. After finishing the initial setup I have to create a Backup scheme and I have to migrate Windows XP PCs to Windows 7 and also there’s a lot of other work to do.
My supervisor showed me a program which I never heard of before. It’s called HBCD and it’s very useful. It boots into a live Windows XP or Windows 7system and enables you to create an image of a HDD and play it back. It also includes loads of other useful tools and features.
The project is quite difficult, but I’m sure I can manage it.
The other people in my workplacement currently install a PXE-Server for the PCs which will be migrated soon.

Hyper-V „Server“

Doe to the fact that we use Hyper-V as virtualization solution, I build a Hyper-V „server“ myself today. And i say server in quotes because we only had a Dell Core 2 Duo PC left for testing. I was lucky that it got 4 GB RAM and it ran surprisingly well. But i had some problems that the system center that is used to manage the VMs only works in a domain with a domain admin and I can’t add the V-server to the company domain. So i build my own. And like I said it ran astonishing good.

Crazy Tuesday

Hi there!

Yeah, actually this week was kinda boring until now, because the colleage who should introduce me into my project is still not here. But it seems that the project will keep me occupied for some weeks, so I’m looking forward for some interesting stuff. The last few days I’ve tried to improve my English skills with some Duolingo tasks which had been recommended by a befriended developer from Germany. Today I will be on tour again for some field work. And for those of you who are surprised at my title: The most cinemas here have a cinema day on Tuesday and at the Movie House on Dublin Road these days are called „Crazy Tuesdays“. Every movie costs only 3 £ for everyone, so of course we used this day to watch a movie. We’ve watched „Bad Neighbours“ which was really funny. Only the end could have been better. And next week we want to watch the new Godzilla movie but this time in 3D.

Workout

I returned The Notebook to Travelling Languages yesterday after work and used the opportunity to ask about our trip to Connemara this weekend. I’m really looking forward to it but I guess everyone knows that by now. I have also made plans for the weekends in June. Nothing’s written in stone but I want to go to Howth and Greystones/Bray because the views are supposed to be great and I can hop on to the DART for both so it’s not going to be too expensive.

So I was telling you about buying my hiking boots. Naturally, you have to break them in before they get comfortable. Well, I am trying to do that since yesterday and seeing as I only have today and tomorrow to kind of soften the leather a bit, I actually don’t believe I will achieve much until I need them this weekend. However, I had a nice long walk yesterday because the bus that was supposed to be at the station in “2 minutes” finally arrived after about 30 minutes of waiting for “2 minutes”.
Of course, it didn’t stop to let anybody on because it was full. Now, the good thing about the real time information of the Dublin Bus is that… ummm… it is that… phew… umm… okay, there is actually zero, zip, nada, zilch… *taking a breath* …bupkis, diddily squat, nothing good about this crappy display. Those things are lying through their LEDs and they are devoid of any emotion so they can’t even feel bad or good about it. They are lying and they just don’t care!

So after waiting roughly another 10 minutes only to have the second bus pass me by without stopping either, I decided to eff this ess and walk home.
This is the route I took: https://goo.gl/maps/g2sqR

It turned out to be a nice “walkout”, my heart racing not only from the exertion but also from the rage boiling inside me. That rage ebbed off while the exhaustion grew and after another hour, I arrived home to three Spanish girls trying to cook what I assumed was to be an omelet. Ann was watching them as they were following the recipe of one of the girls’ grandmother. Now, it was actually only potatoes and eggs in the pan but I was told that it’s “not easy”. I settled with expressing my agreement and underlining that with the widely known fact that the fewer ingredients a dish has, the harder it is to prepare… just think of preparing tea – that’s a science in itself. 😉

This morning it dawned on me that I had left my hoodies at work and since I didn’t want to wear my coat, I came to work wearing my leather jacket. I ♥ my leather jacket! It will come in handy today because the Dublin Staff Relay is happening after work and it is supposed to rain in the afternoon and while I hope that our tent will be enough to protect us from the downpour, it sure is nice to have an extra layer of protection. But let’s just hope for the best!