Weekend plans

Hey everyone,

the last days were very nice. At Work there arrived three new students from Portugal. We all work together and I am trying to help them anytime. Their english is not so good and it is very difficult to explain them something. I hope I can help them to enhance their english and technique skills.

The last two days we had nice weather in Dublin and Paul and I made some plans for the weekend. On Sunday we will drive to the east coast next to Northern Ireland and take a walk at the seaside and some lunch. I also want to meet some friends at the weekend. Hopefully the weather will be as good as today.

Yours George

Step Up!

4th place so far…

643k steps and that only got us 4th place. The leading team, the Holy Walkamolies, has 161696 steps on us and all that after I walked my feet raw last week. I am determined to lead my team to victory, though. So up until now, I already walked 60000 steps and after work today I will go to the pharmacy to get cushions for my toes because I have blisters in the most annoying places of all. Once my toes stop bothering me, I will keep going and going and going like one of those freaking bunnies out of the Duracell commercials.

I want to go (as in walk) to the Dublin Zoo on Saturday and walk back home, as well. I’m hoping to score another 60k at least on the weekend if I go to Greystones on Sunday, maybe. Even with some of my team members hanging behind – and I still think they’re doing a good job – I believe we can gain on the Walkamolies and even let the other two teams eat dust because we’re not too far away from them with 674k and 690k respectively. I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

On Tuesday I sat in on a meeting with a guy from BT together with Eamonn and Emmet. System Dynamics wants to move their servers into a cloud environment. Well, sort of. The plan is actually to move the virtual machines onto new servers, connected with new switches, stored on new disks and stored in BT’s datacenter. I created a little draft with Visio to show what System Dynamics thinks how the setup will have to be and brought it to the meeting. My colleagues liked the way I did it and I listened in on them discussing different possibilities to set this thing up. Nothing is decided, yet and I believe I won’t be here by the time something “interesting” happens in that department but we’ll see how far this thing goes before I’m gone.

On the topic of being gone: It’s just over 2 weeks now until I have to go home. I’m happy I’ve seen as much as I have but there is still a lot left that I haven’t seen so there will be a vacation that has to be spent here within the next years. Something I’m already looking forward to.
The Problem with the flight home is the time it was booked for. It leaves at 7.10 in the morning and that is a terrible time to get to the airport in any convenient way, at least in Dublin and I don’t want to take a taxi, let alone have to get up at freaking 3 in the morning. So I’m actually planning on spending my night at the airport with the guys and a couple of beers. Probably not Guinness, though because it’s just too heavy and also not quite convenient to drink from the can It’s much more likely to be Budweiser or Heineken. Hell, if I get a good offer on Carlsberg, it’s going be that for sure. I’m not sure what we’ll do for dinner but there is supposed to be a McDonald’s that’s open 24/7 at the airport. I’m pretty sure that’ll do.

Tomorrow is the SD BBQ and the infamous Treasure Hunt. All I care about is steps, food and drinks and interesting conversations. Which is pretty much what it is. 😀

Cheers,
Angelo

from VBA to API

On Monday I finished my VBA Macros for excel to automatically create graphs from a .csv file.
I showed my solution to Lawrence and Steven they both liked it. I gave Steven a brief overview of what I did and what the code does he is the one that keeps my code maintained after I leave in a bit over two weeks.
Afterwards Lawrence gave me a new task as the title already states its about API Our Redwood engine got a API to pull out certain data (movement, temperature and a few more) my task is it to find a way to pull out the data when the last movement was registred from one of the sensors and if it was more than X minutes ago it should send a signal to a BMS (Building Managment System) to shut down the heating in that room/area. And of course to turn it back on if someones enters a room. The documentation was about 30 pages long and it took me a while do fully understand it. Today I finished my first perl programm that is able to send a HTTPS PUSH request to pull out certain data. The next Step is to scan the String for the data that I need. The last and I guess hardest part is to get it work with a BMS since our Building doesnt have one so hopefully I find a way to test it somewhere/somehow.