Autor: Nick Rauter

Hi there!

The fourth workweek is already over and now I’ve finally my „own“ little project. After we were at the hospitals (Royal Victoria Hospital & Belfast City Hospital) again, to replace a BIOS battery of the SAN volume controller and a hard drive, I’ve switched over to the apps team. Since Wednesday I try to work myself in a charity project. The task is the development of a website for the charity organization Hope and a Future. So I’am trying to get used to the ASP.NET MVC which is quite similar to the Bootstrap framework, that Tim and me used in our HTML course last year. Today nearly the whole office went to a Mexican restaurant for lunch, to eat burritos and stuff. For me it was finally the first really spicy meal here in Belfast, that’s why that was definitely not my last visit there.

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.

Hi there!

4 weeks have passed already and only 4 more weeks still to go. Actually I don’t really know about what I should write, because thanks to the weather we didn’t really do something. On Friday evening we celebrate the Father’s Day, because that’s not a holiday here. We wanted to go to a pub, but it was already to late, so we couldn’t get into. Our spanish upper tenants celebrated a bit too frisky, so they triggered the fire alarm of our house, luckily Leo and I could fix it somehow. Yesterday we watched some movies again and played games till 4 am in the moring, or so. So all in all a relaxed weekend.

Hi there!

Yap, yesterday was again a day of field work. Rick and I went to Antrim yesterday, to replace a smart array controller of an HP MSA array system. Antrim is one side of our storage cluster, so the absolute functionality is very important. The controller itselfs is just the size of a big book, but nonetheless the price is very high, so take care! Today I’ve studied some IPv6 configurations for our next Cisco exam and activated a few Windows OS’s of PACS computers. They are called NIPACS here, by the way. („NI“ stands for Northern Ireland) As far as I am informed our dear colleage Toni pays us a visit this weekend and that’s fitting well, because we cleaned our flat yesterday, or at least the floor, so we can show now, how tidy we are. 😎 No, seriously, actually we wanted to clean the floor, because Martin dropped… hmm, I don’t know, it’s been so long that I’ve forgotten what. Well, at least he finally cleaned it up.

So, let’s see what happens this weekend.

Hi there!

Actually I wanted to post some more of my impressions of the new Godzilla  movie and hide them with the spoiler tag, so that anyone who hasn’t seen the movie yet can still enjoy it. But unfortunately JavaScript is blocked and it seems that some WordPress templates are missing, so I can’t even use the more tags.

So, yeah, yesterday we watched the new Godzilla movie, this time in 3D and this time with a group of 8 people, so nearly everyone of us was there. As a Japan fan I really liked the new version of Godzilla, because it’s more like the original one. But what’s really bothered me all the time were the not plausible physics. Sometimes I even had the feeling that nobody of the film crew ever was thinking about that. Let me give you one example. When Godzilla appears he nearly causes a tsunami, but when he plunges into the water again he causes only a smooth wave…

But if we ignore that Godzilla was a really cool movie. 😀

Hi there!

Today is the day after yesterday, and nothing new happened so far. Thanks to the weather all of us were not very adventuresome and so we spent the day watching movies or in my case playing Anno 1404. We stayed up until 4 or 5 am, or at least Eric, Martin and me. 😀 We slept till noon, had breakfast and then took a taxi to Maplin. Maplin is an electronics shop, like an irish version of Conrad. Even the corporate colour is light blue. Actually we wanted to get a new laptop fan there, Tim even called the shop whether or not they have the fan, but in the end we were unsuccessful. I guess my nexy article will be about the new Godzilla movie, because we want to use the next cinema day to go to the cinema again.

Hi there!

In fact it was more the supervision of an IBM engineer doing his work. We have a contract with IBM, so they have to replace broken hardware, but because even the controllers contain very sensitive data, we have to monitor every intervention in the system. A BSO technician was also there, to grant us access to the server rooms. At 3 o’clock I and Rick went to the Royal Victoria Hospital again, to change some SAN hard drives. Yesterday we had a little meeting about the abolition of some downtimes of syslog services. The downtimes were implemented several month ago, because the syslogs were alerting regulary at midnight through backup processes. But that is a thing of the past now, so the downtimes are no longer necessary and should be abolished. Next Monday we have a day off, thanks to another bank holiday, so we ease into this weekend.

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.

Hi there!

Yep, this weekend was truly a little bit of nothing, so let’s resume the last few days. At Thursday some of our German teachers visited us at our companies. They wanted to get an idea of our work placement and our tasks there, but the question, what I already have learned was quite funny. I was happy to know the names of all my new colleages. In the evening we met again at the Maddison pub/hotel/restaurant. The Maddison was known to my Irish colleages as pub for all the divorced mid-thirties womens, but actually it was quite nice (and without grannies). We had planned to go to the gym after our meeting, but we didn’t go. So we had planned to go at Friday after work, but my dear couch potatoes err roommates had found a new game for their smartphones and because of that, the Friday evening was another lazy evening. But finally at Saturday we went to the gym and afterwards to the city center for some shopping and browsing at the local market. And today was our BIG shopping day, we bought so much, that we even had to take a taxi for our way home. And now I’m looking forward to Tuesday, because we want to go to the cinema then.