Kategorie: Allgemein

After Saturday comes Sunday

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.

Bloodstains and The Last Unicorn

Friday came and went, much like today except that today is Sunday and there’s no work on Sunday. After work I went home, had dinner and got ready for a night at The Karma Stone. The Bar is owned by a cousin to George’s host family and Ryan, his host brother is the barkeeper there and he gave George, Jonas and I a ride home.

I had a few pints of Budweiser and a water to end the night but I still had a little headache the next morning. After breakfast the headache was gone, however and I went to get ready for my trip to Dún Laoghaire on this beautiful day. I took the train from Tara Station only a few minutes before 12 and I don’t actually know when I arrived at Sandycove, which is actually one stop past Dún Laoghaire DART Station.

I made my way down to Marine Parade/Marine Ave. and turned right, where I spotted a nice little place to set up the camera and take a few pictures. Unfortunately, I don’t understand the way my camera is processing the panorama pictures because towards the end, there’s always a small piece missing from the picture and this peace is just gray. There also doesn’t seem to be any kind of focusing involved so the pictures turned out quite crappy and I won’t bother uploading them. I took a few pictures with normal settings, though and I’m going to paste them at the bottom of this post. My Mobile seems to be much smarter and the panoramic pictures turn out quite good, so you will 2 of those down in the gallery as well.

10 minutes later, I put away the camera and tripod and made my way down to the water. I was pretty much alone down there so I took the opportunity to listen to the sea on one side and Passenger on the other. I sat down a couple of times, just enjoying the sun, the water splashing against the old steps of the quay and the music. I used the „silence“ to let my mind drift to a place it hadn’t been in a while. My thoughts stayed there as I made my way further towards the East Pier of Dún Laoghaire. I walked pretty slow, letting all kinds of people walk past me. Old people, enjoying the fresh air and just going for a walk around the place they might have known for years; young people, satisfying the desire to fill their minds with pictures, moments and experiences of any kind; and the people that were just looking for a spot to read their books, be by themselves, get rid of the things that put them down or just get tanned.

The walk towards and along the East Pier is brimming with memories, carved deep into the stone. Literally! People have carved their initials into the stone, made their confessions of love somewhat eternal or have erected monuments to honor the dead. It takes quite a while to reach the old battery right at the end of the pier but I didn’t walk fast and the pier is a mile long, after all. I had an apple on my way back and thought about walking home. it was only 2 o’clock and the walk would have taken not more than 4 hours. However, I didn’t make it past the third DART Station on my way home before deciding to break it off and just take the train and bus home. I was spent and so I also decided against going to the Docklands Festival as was my plan this morning.

I had chicken and rice for dinner, took a shower, put cream on my face and neck because the sun had left its mark on my skin and went to lie on my bed for quite a while, reflecting on the day. I have to admit that I was actually disappointed. I don’t really know what I had expected from this walk but whatever I had hoped to gain or lose, I obviously failed.

Today began like yesterday ended. I washed up after lying in bed for a couple of hours, unable to rest and caught up with The Big Bang Theory. Now I’m sitting/lying here because I can’t seem to find a comfortable position in this bed. I can’t sit up against the wall because my bed just slides over the floor when I put too much pressure against it. I’m going to see what Ann’s husband has prepared for dinner in an hour or so. I might watch a movie later tonight because I have finished reading The Notebook and I don’t really feel like playing anything. Tomorrow is a work day after all.

Enjoy the pictures,
Angelo

My work experience: Wednesday

Hi everybody!

At Wednesday we started our second task. We had to install desk holders for the PCs also one problem there we had just one drill. So Tim was the one who were constantly under the table with the drill and my job then was it to install the holders. Then Peter called us because he needed help with the first aid kits. So we splited into groups and went through the building to fill up missing parts in the first aid kit. It took us nearly the entire day because this building is so huge. Tim legs were hurting this day because he was training so hard the last days at the gym. So we decided to get us a taxi to go home.

Oh and I forgot to say that Tim and I found a restaurant where they sell Fish and Chips for lunch for just 3,50!

What we experienced at thursday you will see in my next post

first week at work

Hello everyone,now I’ve finished the first week of work and I’m still happy about my work placement.
The colleages are very friendly and had a lot of work for me to do.
Today we preprared a lot of PC’s for charity and built a test enviroment for some services.
At 10 o’clock I went with Graham to a typical breakfast in IrelandIMG_20140516_102204

I commute to work by train and today the conductor checked my ticket 4 times.
Befor I enter the train, when I’m in the train and at the way back, it’s not the same like in Germany, but it would be maybe a good model for the „Deutsche Bahn“.

The first four days went by

Hi there!

Right now is my fourth day at Steria Ltd. Meanwhile I’ve learned a good half of the names of my colleages, so it’s much easier to communicate with each other. 😀 The first day passed really fast, because the meeting lasts almost 3 hours. After that I was introduced to the daily check-up routines and the ticket system, which I couldn’t use, because I didn’t get web access with my laptop – more on that later. The next tasks were some warranty research for some hard drives for a NAS and the comparision of two config files. Afterwards we called IBM for the reference numbers of the hard drives, which we need for the warranty processing. Some minutes lates we’ve got a call from IBM again and it turned out, that IBM have made mistakes in 7 of our 8 warranty cases, so we need to correct the statements together. Yesterday I was on tour with Rick Browne for some field work. We went up to AMI (Asset Management Ireland Ltd), where we erased the hard drives with a strong electromagnet. Today we went down to Dungannon to restart a shut off NAS at the South Tyrone Hospital.

Just like the Charité IT team in Germany, where I’ve done my last internship, Steria supports hardware for hospitals, with the small difference that we only support X-ray computers, servers and network storage here – thank God.

Next, I will get an introduction of all the contracts of Steria. And for next week it is planned to let me test some new apps.

And now back to my web access problem. I have figured out that Skype is functioning all the time and only the web access is blocked sometime, so the next days I will try to find out which ports are blocked and which not.

Networking

Welcome to another episode of The IT Crowd. That’s how I felt anyway when I was standing in the server room of System Dynamics. I was hoping for someone to make it simple and just hand me the Internet. The room itself is actually quite cool… on one side of it because that’s where the cooling system is. It’s an interesting setup because there is no real cold aisle but it’s all just one room and two air-conditioning systems facing each other on one side, blowing the freezing air onto you as you follow the cables from patch panels to the switch and vice versa. There are 5 racks in the room that are housing several switches, 3 of which are stacked Cisco C3750s that are supposed to be the core of the network because they – again – are supposed to have taken the place of older Cisco switches which are still in the setup for some reason. I guess I could make that my project to get rid of those and maybe tidy up the whole thing. I might need more than 7 weeks by the looks of it, though. Seeing as I don’t work on the weekends or do night shifts, it might be even impossible to achieve any of this at all without causing any downtime.

It pretty much goes without saying, that I have spent the last couple of days only documenting what is in that room because the last documentation is a few years old and there are quite a number of things that have changed or haven’t been documented in the first place. I am now trying to match the ports on the patch panels to the ports in the floor so I can add a few more details to the documentary like the desk numbers and people sitting there. It might be a waste of time, though, because as I have mentioned in an earlier post, there are only about 25-30 out of some 200 people in the office at any given time and I might never even get to see some of them.

I am hoping to see more of my colleagues in the following weeks though, as I have signed up for a few events like the Dublin Staff Relay as a supporter and a hiking tour in the Wicklow Mountains National Park where I hope to be able to enjoy the scenery while hiking some 7km. There is also going to be a BBQ next month that I am invited to and this is going to be on the ship that you can see in my last blog entry, the Jeanie Johnston.

Seeing as I wrote quite a lot the last time and people told me, that they haven’t even started reading this blog, I’m going to keep it rather short this time as to not let it stack up too high and give those stragglers a fighting chance to keep up.

Just a quick heads up on upcoming topics: George informed me that we will go to a bar on Friday where I will have a few drinks, maybe even Guinness 😉 and the weather is supposed to be awesome this weekend so I’m thinking about going to Dún Laoghaire and walk down the quay. There’s also the Docklands Summer Festival around the Grand Canal Dock area so I might check that out as well.

Cheers,
Angelo

My first work experience in Belfast

My first days at work were different to Germany but still okay.
On Monday we met with about 20 other people from all over Europe
which all had their first day at Concentrix and we were introduced all together to the company.
Except Max, Eric and me all would become real employees and had to receive an
introduction first. So we met at the Lesley Exchange building near the central station
of Belfast to meet Allan who’s something like the manager for different personal
matters. He’s usually around in the Electronic Arts section of Concentrix but on this day
he was the one that has shown the group the 3 different buildings in Belfast which
are spread over the city. On tuesday we met Peter at the reception of the branch on
Lanyon Place which is also pretty close to the Lesley Exchange one. He gave us
our first task to move PCs which weren’t in use to another room and take care
of the cables and network equipment. After accomplishing few another small jobs
inside the building our second day was over.
All in all I look forward for other tasks that are IT related because the most
of them are done by the Tech department itself and we are given more facility keeping
related ones but the colleagues are nice and I’m sure we can talk about
that with them soon.

System Dynamics Group Ltd

Sunday was spent in and on my bed. I did go out to buy a bag of Tesco’s finest Nuts & Raisins and a bottle of water for work but other than that I was in my room all day. I mostly read The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks because I have to give it back to Travelling Languages and I’d rather do that sooner than later.

Monday apparently was everybody’s first day of work. Interestingly enough, it was my first day at System Dynamics Group Ltd. Now, I had a general idea of the whereabouts of the company but decided to be there early to find out the exact location and be able to show off my German punctuality. I actually only planned on about a half hour window but when I went off the bus at Tara Station and boldly checked the time on my phone, it showed a very generous 75 minutes left until the appointment at 9:30 am. Not impressed by that much time but by this beautiful morning, I decided to go for a walk along the quay itself and to take pictures like a real tourist would do.

After walking around and taking pictures like a professional person of Asian ancestry, I used my phone to zero in on my target, the Whitaker Court. A last check up on my looks and I was ready to plunge into the adventure that was to be my first day.

When I went into the building, I spoke to the nice lady that kindly buzzed me through the door and told her who I was. She didn’t really care and sent me up to the first floor where I was greeted by yet another door that was locked. I huffed and puffed but I couldn’t blow down that wooden door. Turns out, I’m not such a big bad wolf after all. Anyways, another nice lady let me through that door and I told her my story. She seemed genuinely interested and called Eamonn McGinley after having me sit down in one of the two chairs opposite her desk. Eamonn came to the front desk only a few seconds later and introduced himself as Eamonn McGinley. I would have done the same but I quickly realized that he probably wouldn’t believe that my name was Eamonn McGinle, too. I settled on telling him the truth about me and together we went into the office which is basically almost the whole 1st floor of the building. We first went to his desk, where I put down my stuff and after a few words he realized, we might be better off utilizing one of the smaller conference rooms. We sat down and he showed me a printed version of a PowerPoint presentation that was supposed to introduce the company.

I have read most of the information from that presentation online and didn’t understand a lot of it because I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t more to this company than the website suggested. What I gathered is: System Dynamics Group Ltd develops and sells programs as well as selling licenses and providing experts for hire. It’s an interesting scheme because System Dynamics consists of about 200 people of which only a maximum of 25 – 30 people are present in the office at any given time.

Eamonn told me about how he came to this company and what he did before working as an IT Administrator at System Dynamics and in turn I told him about myself, the way the apprenticeship works in Germany and what I hoped to achieve in the internship. That last part was actually only addressed because he asked me about it and I told him honestly that I didn’t know an answer to his question and that I only hope to gain experience in any kind of work he could provide me with. He wasn’t sure what to give me at first so he showed me around the office a bit, introduced me to a couple of my new colleagues and let me set up my desk and computer.

The setup of the office is quite nice because the desks are big enough to comfortably sit at and the rows are facing each other so you could have up to eight people in a kind of a group together. The only problem about that is the division into these… mini-departments which means that even though you could talk about different projects and kind of work on them in an open discussion, it just doesn’t make sense because none of the people I, for example, am facing has anything to do with the IT in this company. They’re still nice people, though and have welcomed me very kindly.

Around 1ish, Eamonn took me for a walk around the neighborhood and showed me all the places where I could buy food in case I ever got filthy rich overnight. He then treated me to a nice sandwich and a cup of tea while we talked some more about how this whole internship program works. After our lunch break we went back to the office where I used the next 3 hours to try to figure out how I’m going to document the mess that is supposed to be System Dynamics’ network infrastructure.

Later that day, the Ladies Schulte-Clarke and Langnickel from the OSZ IMT wanted to meet to hear about our experience so far. We met right after work and went to the Stag’s Head, a pub near the Trinity College. While having a couple of Budweisers, they interviewed us about what we’re doing at work, how we’re accommodated and if we had any suggestions on what to improve. One thing you have to keep in mind in Ireland is to never lose track of time. We did exactly that and while most of the guys went earlier, Toni, George, Jonas and I stayed till well after 11pm. We ended up having to take a taxi and I walked another half hour after that because I had no money left to get a ride home.

After having not more than 5 hours of sleep and a morning with one of the best hangovers, I quickly got ready for work, took some Ibuprofen and left. I spent pretty much all Tuesday with configuring a Laptop for one of my colleagues. There was a lot of crappy HP and Microsoft software on it that I had to get rid of and after I’d done that, I had to install the software that he would really need.

System Dynamics is an IBM partner so they use a lot of IBM software as well as hardware although they’re trying to get rid of some of that. This is also a problem that you have to face when you try to understand SD’s network but that is a story for another day… 😉

Wednesday the 14th

Hello everyone,

we just finished our third day of work and I still can´t understand any context yet but I slowly get used to it.
The National Museum of Northern Ireland (shortterm: NMNI) is a very good place for work.
It is fully surrounded by a forest and the environment looks nice.
The colleagues are very nice and its fun to work with them.
I have to take a train because the NMNI is located in the north of Belfast,so it takes about 40 minutes arrive at work but it’s ok since it’s equivalent to commute in Germany.
The train always arrives on schedule which is better then at home so I always arrive punctual which really ease the morning routine.

Our trip to the Giant’s Causeway and the first working-experiences

Hi there!

Yesterday was our „little“ trip to the Giant’s Causeway, with some more stops at other famous places, so actually the trip took the whole day. The first half of the day was quite rainy, thats why I hadn’t so much confidence in the racy driving style of the bus driver. He even loses ground twice, but then the weather cleared up and stayed steady. Even so you should have a rain jacket with you, because you definitively catch a cold if you sit in the bus with wet closes. Thanks to the nice weather at the second half of the day we were able to make some REALLY awesome pictures. The next stop after the Giant’s Causeway was the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge which has a pretty interesting history itself. And it is possible to cross the bridge free-handed, but I guess that depends on the wind force. And today I had my first day at work here in Ireland. The day all in all was pretty calm and started with a little introduction to the colleages and an overview of the rooms. After that I even could take part in the weekly meeting, or rather a common breakfast.