Live every day to its fullest

Hey everyone,

only ten days left but I live every day to its fullest. Yesterday the Brady’s(Hostfamily) and I went to „Nando’s“. It is a South African dining restaurant and they are specializes in chicken dishes. I eat ten chicken wings, a bowl of chips and drink 3 glasses of water, because the chicken wings were very spicy. Also so chips were spicy but delicious. After that we all eat ice cream and had a nice conversation at home.

Today the weather was awesome. We had twenty-three degree and I enjoyed it much.
Ryan asked me if I like to play soccer in the afternoon with him and some older men.
I agreed and right now I take my clothes and get ready for the match.
That feels like a typical summer…

Yours George

Doing Nothing Never Works

“…things just never turn out the way you expect them to.”
…ect them to…
…ect them to…
…ect them to…

I tried staying in bed but I guess all this walking makes you kind of addicted and I couldn’t find any rest. So I thought about what to do and around noon headed into town. I took the bus into the city center because even though I was restless, I also didn’t want to overdo it and my legs still hurt from the activities of the past few days.

When I arrived in O’Connell Street, I went to the Savoy movie theater to check out their times and found out that A Million Days To Die In The West was playing in just over an hour. I remembered George saying he wanted to go to a store called ForbiddenPlanet so I thought I might just see where that was. It was easy enough to find and it was open as well so I figured I can have a quick peek inside and see if they sell any cool belt buckles. ForbiddenPlanet is a chain of comic book/pop-culture merchandize stores and I believe Eric actually already had a post featuring the Belfast store.

I didn’t find any buckles or anything else of interest, unfortunately. After about half an hour I left the store to head back to the movie theater and went into one of the many Carroll’s stores of Dublin. I needed a few more postcards and also something for myself to take as a souvenir since I didn’t get to buy a buckle. In the end I ended up buying a set of six coasters with different Irish idioms on them. They’ll be nice on the small sofa table I have back at home.

A Million Ways To Die In The West was hilarious. It has this strange kind of humor that comes with everything I’ve seen from Seth MacFarlane so far. People argue that the best scenes have already been seen in the teasers and this might be true but as far as real humor goes, this movie has a lot more of it than a few flashy scenes with someone’s head being squashed by a huge block of ice – a scene that really was very enjoyable. After the movie I thought I might just follow the way the 16 bus takes in case I want to get on it at any point but my legs felt fine so I ended up just walking all the way home.

Dinner was waiting for me when I made it home and soon after eating I went to bed, trying to find sleep in my room that was hot from the sun shining into it all day.

I walked to work on Monday morning and pretty much on every morning since. I also walked home every day except for Monday because as I was walking towards Connolly Station where I used to get on the bus, I felt my shins starting to hurt and I decided to give my muscles a little bit of time to relax. Besides, my team walked 732491 steps last week of which I contributed 160000 alone. Unfortunately, my team mates don’t seem to take this thing as seriously as I am and I’m lucky if we can take and keep 3rd place. The other team had just under 3000 steps more and I’m hoping that either my team finally starts walking or the other team gets tired and does less steps this week. We’re definitely not going to win this because the guys in team one are either cheating or are more people or whatever but I doubt that all of them do 18k steps a day every day of the freaking week. I mean I do more than that and I know how much this sucks and I just can’t believe that they are all doing that. So I suspect cheating or just carelessness when it comes to calibrating the pedometer and it just counts more steps than are actually done. Nonetheless, we have a shot to even get to 2nd place but that would require my team to really “go the extra mile”.

The weather was also really nice these last couple of days with over 22°C and double rainbow sunshine all the way, oh my gaaawwd! No, it was really, really beautiful and not at all what you would expect from Ireland.

Work wise, I played around with my virtual machines again and I’m having some kind of problem with my DHCP because the machine that is supposed to get an IP doesn’t get anything. I still don’t know what the problem is and to be honest, it also doesn’t really interest me anymore. I might still finish it, just to have done it once but it’s not exactly my idea of a fun project.

I’m invited to Eamonn’s house for dinner tomorrow and he and his wife seem really worried about what to prepare for dinner. We had a very funny conversation over it today. He asked me if I was okay with rice and I said yes, asking what it came with. He said it’s an Indian kind of dish with chicken, curry paste and stuff. He looked nervous when I told him that I’m looking forward to it and for some odd reason I told him that I don’t really like to have Indian food at a restaurant just because of what it reminds me of. I had to spend 5 minutes promising him that I would eat it and that I don’t want steak instead.

We’ll see what they decide on feeding me, I’m just looking forward to the evening.

Btw: Here is my featured song of the week ;-).

Working in the Linux Shell

Because there is not that much to do here I work on my Linux Vserver most of the time. I connect to it over ssh and use only the shell for it. Mostly I play a bit and install software and server solutions for fun and experience. At the moment I try to get my Linux VPS as secure as possible. I started to install fail2ban a linux software that creates logs and bans IPs that fail to connect via ssh to often. Its fairly powerful and in combination with sendmail its even capable to send me mails with information’s about logins and failed connection attempts. Now I try to get a program that captures network traffic to write a log file and send it me per mail in a time interval. To see if suspicious IPs connect to the server or anything eats my bandwidth. Maybe I write a entry when I have that done and with which tools.