spontaneous data center visit

Last week Amit and I had to spontaneously visit the data center because one of our racks wasn’t accessible anymore and some services went down. We feared that the switch we completely filled with LAN connections last week went down due to overload. But as we went there we saw that the switch was ok and fully functional. We searched in the switch log for the problem and found out that the uplink port disconnects sometimes. The problem is we don’t know where the uplink is actually going. Then we got help from a employee of the data center and found out that the uplink goes in the switch from our other rack and after making a new cable connection to the other rack everything worked fine. The employee renewed the plugs because the cable goes 10 meters over many racks so we can’t just get a new one and we went back. But we still don’t trust the cable with malfunctions and we let it unused from now.

Damn cupboards

Hello everyone!

You know those days where you have some tasks to do which you really don’t want to do? Yeah I had one of those days. Tim, Max and I had to move some cupboards from the Lanyon building to the Lesley Exchange building and it was just a terrible pain in the arse. because the where so many problems. It sounded easy at first but some kind of god was mad at us and throw us some major horses in our way to hen block our path. Because of safety issues we first had to empty the cupboards and their were all full and there were like 4 of them, but before that the keys were missing to open them. Then the transport which was hard to navigate and there were always that one woman constantly asking if we are already done with our task. It took us two days to move them and at the second day we had to wait like two hours for the van before we could get even started.

Stupid cupboards!

WM start

Hello everybody!

The world championchip for soccer started a few day back and we watch as much games as possible. Normally I am not that kind of a soccer fan but I am always looking the world championchip on TV. Yesterday Leo, Martin, Tim, Nick, Marco from the FSZ 22 and I went into a pub for the public viewing. The pub is just down the road and has a really nice atmosphere. At the pub we watched the match italy against england. When I remember right italy won with a 2:1. It was a nice evening and we wanted to stay longer but the wanted to close the pub after 2 am.

drydock of the titanic

Hello everyone,

if you had read it in one of my last articles you had read that I will visit the dry dock from the titanic. So now i want to write about it.
It was the biggest and most modern dock at this time and it was very exciting to see and stand in it.
When I was inside it they played the sound from the people which worked there. You can see that a lot of time went by, more and more water intrudes the dock. It’s still okay but it will be interesting to see what it will be like in 50 years.
I recommend it for other people and it is not that expensive.

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Titanic dry dock

Yesterday Nick, Martin and I went to the Titanic Quarter to take a look at the pump house and the titanic dry dock where the titanic was build.
We wanted to take a guided tour at 2 PM but we were a bit lost and late so we wandered around on our own.
We started our tour at the pump house, which was responsible to open the gate to the dock as well as pumping the water out of the dock itself. We moved on around the top of the dock where they put up signs with a lot of interesting facts
e.g. you can fit 26 London busses into the dock.
Afterwards Nick wanted to go to the Titanic Museum but Martin and I didn’t want to so we went back to our apartment.

Sunbathing and Soccer

Hello everyone,

the weekend passed very quick. I and my hostfamily watched the „Soccer World Cup 2014“ games and we speculated which team will be the winner. We decided the best team should be the winner..except England. Unfortunately there is no Irish team in the groups.
I also realized that a lot of Irish people go to the betting office and challenge their luck.

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Actually we planned to go to the Irish east coast, but we deferred out trip to next Sunday because Ryan and Dillon worked the whole weekend. For that resaon we stayed at home and enjoyed the wonderful weather with drinks, snacks, music and more soccer games.

Along these lines..Cheers!

The Titanic Quarter

Hi there!

Yesterday we visited the harbour of Belfast, where we actually wanted to take a guided tour through the Titanic dry dock and the Pump-House at 2 o’clock, but we were a little bit too late and didn’t really know where the tour starts, so we walked around on our own. The Pump-House and the dry dock were very impressive ─ it must have been a very back-breaking job for the dock workers, back then. After the docks I wanted to visit the Titanic Belfast, but Martin and René didn’t want to, so I went in on my own and took my time without any feeling of urgency, since I am a fan of the seafaring and especially of the Titanic’s story. The first part of the exhibition was a general view of the maritime history of Belfast and the construction of the Thompson Graving Dock, which was the largest dry dock in 1911. The next floor refered to the launch of the Titanic. There was a very impressive illustration, where you had an overview over Titanic’s and Olympic’s slipway through a window, with the tracing of the the enormous bow of the Titanic. The next part was about the 3 different passenger classes onboard the Titanic and their interior in the cabins. The last parts were related to the disaster itself, the aftermath and the exploration of Titanic’s wreck, where you could see exclusive footage of the wreck. After that I visited the Lego Brick City exhibition, which is a temporary exhibition in the top floor of the Titanic Belfast museum.

England vs. Italy

Since I was a kid I always cheered for Italy when its World Cup time (good memories to 2006 still come to my mind especially now!) so when England encountered my second nationality I was for than happy to enjoy it in Northern Ire… ENGLAND. We went to a local pub where we also had some fun playing table soccer before the game started and I was so happy that this time everyone from our AFIB group was there not excluding anyone. The game itself was intense and thrilling but even more after England did manage to score their first goal. After seeing Italy winning I have to say I wasn’t sure to make my way back home unharmed but luckily I had my bodyguards surrounding me which was definitely helpfull 🙂

working on cpr scripts

My work at SpeechStorm was really interesting this week as I had to implement things I learned from our call last week into the program core. A coworker wrote some tests for it so I could directly see if the output would equal my scripting input. I had some fun with it as CPR also includes text-to-speech in several languages and I could not only see my mistakes but also hear them. It was still tough to work through the grammar and coding it into the program but I had a lot of support while doing that.

The exploration of Ireland

We started our trip by driving along the coast and enjoying the beauty of the north coast and after seeing the tip of Scotland we headed south always trying to stay as close to the coast as possible.Foto We passed London Derry but did change our road after hearing about Ballycroy National Park which only added around 100 miles more and was really worth it. When we reached Galway we booked a hotel for the night and called it a day as our next day was going to be even more exhausting. We payed little more than 30 Euros for a decent room which was close to the coast and granted us a incredible view the next morning. Dublin was obviously a big headliner on our road but still we spent most of our time seeing incredible places and landscapes. Compared to our last road trip including a friend of mine of Berlin and Tim I can tell you that driving around in peace without the „boys stuff“ is incredibly relaxing and I was reborn when we arrived at Dublin sitting down in a nice pub having just one beer for the sake of driving. I didn’t see that much of Dublin itself when we arrived at the Airport more than one month ago but after driving around in it and doing some sightseeing I kind of got the feeling that I wasn’t unlucky spending my time in Belfast – still Dublin is beautiful doe! As my girlfriend didn’t feel like driving in Ireland I just needed a coffee when arriving in Belfast to get my energy back including a dinner at TGI Fridays to get ready for the „gipsy lounge“. The club itself was ridiculous in comparison to german standards but we still had a great time as we also met our spanish friends from upstairs.