Monat: Juni 2014

If I could… *whistle*

Have you guys ever had a song stuck in your head because you heard it somewhere, even though you didn’t hear the whole song but actually only caught a snippet over a conversation in a pub? For me it is this song that’s stuck in my head since yesterday evening. I heard it in the Glencormac Inn at the bottom of the Sugar Loaf Mountain in Wicklow. A group of 14 people from System Dynamics went up the mountain after work. It was a good hike and at the end of the day I had 17898 steps on my pedometer and a couple of sandwiches as well as 2 Guinness in my tummy.

Also, Mr. Bavar, Mrs. Teichmann and Mrs. Neumann came to System Dynamics yesterday to see how and what I’m doing here. It was nice to be able to show someone what I actually do here instead of just having to describe it as best I can. Nicola and Eamonn were talking to them as well over tea and coffee.

Because I didn’t want to go to the hike in my work clothes, I changed into jeans and a t-shirt. Unfortunately, I’m a man of habit and my habit is to keep my Leapcard in my pants pocket… my work pants pocket…
I didn’t have any change for the bus but Bridgitta, a colleague from SD, gave me 3€ so I could at least take the bus home. I decided to walk to work this morning to bring my step count up and also because I didn’t have enough money at home. It was a nice exercise, took me just over an hour and brought me 8k steps for today. I’m now up to ~9500 and I’m thinking about walking home, as well. That would easily be another 17k-18k steps for today but I’ll sleep in tomorrow because I have to get a rest at some point. Depending on the weather, I might walk up to Howth around noon tomorrow but I might also just do that on Sunday or even next weekend. We’ll see…

Cheers,
Angelo

And another Dell server

Hey yesterday we got another Dell Poweredge R620. So today is deploy time and that means: clicking install, wait 30 minutes, clicking install and so on and so on… It’s not the most exciting task but it have to be done. More interesting will be the deployment in the data center. We don’t know when yet, because we miss one server. We expected two to be delivered but only got one. We’ll see where it goes from there. And then I write about my data center visit again.

Familiar visitors

Hey everyone,

today me and Toni met our instructors Mr Bavar, Mrs Teichmann and Mrs Neumann in the Arlington Hotel. We had a very nice conversation about our time here in Dublin, the host families and about our currently workplaces. They invited us for a few drinks and gave us some useful tips for our work. The week is nearly over and we have only three weeks left. I will enjoy the next days and weeks and looking forward for new unpredictable impressions.

Yours George

Roadtrip around Northern Ireland

On Sunday Leo, a friend of him and me decided to rent a car and start a trip towards the north of Northern Ireland. There is a long road called A2 a.k.a. Antrim Coast Road which is a pretty fitting term for the views you get. We started our tour at around 12 am in the noon. After taking a nice breakfast at Clements which is a café chain only located in Belfast, we went to Sixt to get the car. It was a well equipped and fuel-efficient KIA. When we started driving down the M2 even as passenger it was a different feeling, because you automatically keep looking for the traffic and stay alerted too. When we arrived in Larne we finally got on the A2. Along the road are many way points where you can stop with your car and take pictures of the great countryside and the ocean. These stops are usually parking lots or third lanes and are well placed. The roads we were driving down are not for nothing so called scenic drives, you can capture great pictures of the awesome surrounding. Luckily the weather was great, it was cloudy but dry and there were many clear spells which underlayed a great lightning to the scenery. We made a few stops in the bigger cities and we were able to see anything from mountains right next to us to forests which we’re similiar to jungles to ports just for yachts. Unfortunately the Bushmills distillery in the far north of Northern Ireland was already closed when we arrived there. They produce a famous whiskey brand which is a symbol of the country (5 – 10 and 20 Pound notes are featuring a drawing of it). It would have been a great souvenir, but probably I will take a ride to there with the bus again and participate on the tour around the factory. The famous landmarks Giants Causeway and the Carrick-a-Rede are also located near Bushmills and as actual destinations of the trip we visited it right after leaving the town. It were unbelievable nice places to be and I think pictures can’t express the beauty of the nature and environment there but at least they can encourage you to visit it also if the chance exists. When we were able to tick those points for ourselves we again hit the road for driving to the last stop of the journey. It was a small town called Castlerock which offers a nice (baltic sea like) beach and a nice promenade. After a long day in the car and so much new impressions we became hungry and had a great dinner in the local „Temple Bar“ which offered a nice Northern Irish steak for a fair price. Saturated and happy to have had such a great experience we started driving back to Belfast (thru an inner-country route this time). – (pictures to follow)

Cisco all day

As the title already states I used the last few days to prepare for the NetRiders competition.
So nothing really eventful happens. I didn’t thought the difference between the CCENT NetRiders and CCNA NetRiders would be that big but yeah the CCNA one is definitely way harder than CCENT. Next Tuesday we will see how bad or good I scored finger crossed that its not the last place.
After I attended the NetRiders my Supervisors were supposed to come to visit me but as Martin told me they didn’t have enough time to do so they didn’t come over. So I spend the rest of the day with John he introduced me to the VOIP services KNI offeres. I was supposed to go with him tomorrow on site but I don’t have the Health and safety training I’m not allowed on a ‚construction‘ site.

Humpday

Hello everyone,

on Monday Marco and I wanted to go to lunch, but Graham told us, that the contract between the NMNI(my Workplacement) and the catering company has changed. The contract are changing all 5 years. Now we can’t eat something in the cafeteria because all prizes increased and there are no chips, no custom sandwiches and the only remaining meal is a really expensive Daily Special and it tastes only sometimes. I’m really disappointed about that and now I have to bring my food to work.

After work Marco and I bought some burgers from the Chip Company and these burgers are awesome and very cheap, that’s why I can really recommend.them.

 

Thank you Angelo

Hey everyone,

actually I would like to write something about our „Roadtrip“, but I read Angelo’s blog entry and guess there is no information that he hasn’t mentioned. I totally agree that the trip was a moment in my life that I won’t forget. The countryside looks like it was edited with „Photoshop“. Unbelieveable and a little bit unreal if you don’t see it with your own eyes. The only negativ point was that I worn my new white shoes. During our climbing they were full of mud but to me it was worth it. The view from the top of the mountain was awesome. On the top we took a little brake, eaten some cookies, enjoyed the nice air and the beauty of the nature.

George

Angelo organized the roadtrip more than good and he and Paul drove perfectly in the Irish traffic.
I thank you guys for the nice days, lovely birthday presents, beautiful and funny moments! I wish we could repeat this some day.

Yours George

Makin‘ Plans

Now that the road trip is over and I completed the last calculations concerning payback to the guys, I can go ahead and make new plans. There’s not much I can do concerning tomorrow, when my supervisors will come and check out System Dynamics for themselves but I can make plans concerning my/our last hours here in Dublin.

I didn’t worry about the time the plane would depart when I saw the schedule a couple of weeks ago but now that I know about the public transport situation here in Dublin and also the rest of Ireland, I can’t really wrap my head around just what the people were thinking when they booked the flight for this ungodly hour. It might be absolutely ok and even possible to reach the Tegel or Schoenefeld airport in time at any hour of the day but here in Ireland that’s another story. The first bus arriving at the airport is number 16 at around 8am. My flight leaves at 7.10am… What’s wrong with this picture?

So, in collaboration with the guys from Derry, we’re planning to stay at the airport from Friday night to Saturday morning. It shouldn’t be a problem IF… we bring enough resources to keep us beertertained. Budweiser, Carlsberg, Heineken or any other liquid of the canned variety will take care of that but I guess I’ll come back to that when the date draws closer.

Tomorrow afternoon, there’s also the hike that is organized by the Sports&Social Committee here at System Dynamics. I’m taking part in that to see the Wicklow Mountains and raise my step count for the SD Summer Step Challenge 2014. I hope my team “The Caribous” will win or at least reach a good second place. 😉

We’ll see and I’ll keep you posted!

Angelo

All or nothing

Hi there!

The title refers to a common gambling in the british world of work. I’ve already heard about it somewhere, but I was still a little bit confused as my colleages asked me, if I want to play along.  It’s some kind of lottery where everyone adds 2 pounds into the pot and have the chance to win everything after a month, if he hits the jackpot. But unfortunately I will be back in Germany at the time of the next drawing, so I couldn’t participate. And of course we were in the cinema again. After all, yesterday was Crazy Tuesday. We’ve seen X-Men in 3D and it was epic. In the first half of the movie my mind was still pondering, whether I would want to be the super fast guy or Magneto. I really like the actors and the realization of the movie, so he get’s a 8 out of 10 from me.

visit from our supervisors

Today I had an appointment at 12 o clock to meet up with me supervisors from Germany. We met in our conference room and had a nice chat about what my work here is all about and how i am getting along with it. After introducing the AFIB to my Speechstorm supervisor we discussed what I learned and how I feel about my work here. All in all it was nice to show them that I am learning a lot here and not just wasting my time. Followed up by the discussion we took some photos and I had the opportunity to show them around my working place and explain a little more about it. They had some more visits on their strict time table where they are going to meet my other german colleagues and find out more about their work here in Belfast and Dublin.