A long weekend and a lot of blueprints

As the title already states we had a long(er) weekend. Monday was a bank
holiday here in Belfast, so most of us had off. My workday on Tuesday
started with processing the time sheets for our workers so they can get
their paycheck.
Later on I continued to estimate the cable length and data outlets for the
Ulster University building BC. I finished 4 of 15 floors on Tuesday. I
continued the estimating today and finished three more floors. After that
I talked to Lawrence about the rest of the Week. He is sending me on a
site survey tomorrow about a (maybe) future Intelligent Lighting
installation. Afterwards I’m going to take look (remotely) at the pilot
project in the Derry city council to check if there are any lights that go
on at a time were they shouldn’t e.g. midnight. So we can replace or
re-calibrate them.
I’m looking forward to doing that. With a bit of luck he might take me
with him to Dublin on Friday. But it’s not written in stone so that could
change.

3 weeks already?

Hello everyone!

You know there is one thing I can’t imagine and that is that we are here for 3 weeks already. I mean it feels like we arrived last weekend and we still have so much to see and so much to do. We did a lot of stuff but we decided that we make another little sightseeing tour next week. There is one thing that I still have to manage and that is that tricky street system. I mean everytime I cross the street I have to look like 10 times to the right and 10 times to the left and when I start to walk there is a car tight next to me and I don’t know where it was coming from.

Third weekend in Belfast

Hello everyone!

This is now our third weekend in Belfast and it is already an awesome weekend because tomorrow at monday is bank holiday so we don’t have to go to work. Also this weekend was our movie weekend. Martin and I are watching a lot of „Burn Notice“ it is a about a spy who got fired by the government and he wants to find out why he was fired who he can get his old Job back and we watched a lot of Kong Fu films like Ip Man and Fearless. All in all it was a nice weekend!

 

three weeks over, five to go

Three weeks out of eight are over, it’s nearly half time.
This weekend was not very eventful due to the awesome weather here.
We stayed in our apartments most of the time.
We’re planing to go to the cinema on tuesday to see Godzilla in 3D again for only 3 Pounds since Tuesday is the cinema day here.
Nearly everyone got off tomorrow since its a Bank Holiday here only a few of us have to go to work tomorrow. Which means we got a long weekend and only a short week

internet conncection in our flat

My weekend was pretty relaxed and I had time to set up my livestream which worked better than intended. I will stream from now and then in a kind of internet radio which definitley will keep me busy for a while. Although our internet connection is kind of unstable it was a reason to set up my own private wifi. This worked for some while but the setup here is more than outdated. It seems like the one router operating at the bottom of this building is repeating the signal to floor one which will then again be repeated to floor two and so on… As we are living on the fourth floor it is definitley part of the problem and I am trying to reach out to our landlord next week to offer him my help setting up a more stable enviroment. Also I made a little trip to the city centre with the help of my bike to explore some parts of Belfast I didn’t see yet which really was interesting as I discovered a huge shopping mall which I didn’t hear about yet.

Market

Hello everyone!

Last Friday Tim and I went together with Max from the FSZ 22 class to the weekend market next to the building we are currently working at. It is a big hall with lots and lots of people selling and buying their stuff there. They have everything. From clothes and plants to food and erverything you can imagine. We went there around for like an hour just looking at all that cool stuff and then we got hungry. We looked around for what food we would like to eat and then we found that little stand that said „Probably the best Burger in Belfast“. So we had no longer to choose. Tim took „The cheesy one“ and Max and I took the „Bacon Burger“. The guy that made the burgers asked me what kind of sauce I would like to have on my burger so I asked him if he could recommend me something and he said „For me blue cheese sauce is always the choice!“ so I said „bring it on man“. I have to say that that burger was really amazing. I dont often eat burger with that quality and that freshness. Also the burger were done directly in front of you so you can suffer until you get your burger because you are so damn hungry. Have a picture!

Sunday

Hello everyone,

today Tim, Nick and I visited the hardware store Maplin, we only want to see what they are selling and how much it is.
We took a cab because it is a a very long way and it costs a lot of time if we would have walked to Maplin.
They had not really interesting things and everything they had was very expensive, so all of this was not very interessting for us.
Yesterday Tim cooked for all of us maybe cooking is the wrong verb he made burgers and those tasted very good. Thanks for this Tim.
I forgot to make a picture from the burgers but they looked really nice.
Yesterday I went by bike to Tesco Metro but it was terrible to ride by bike because the walker doesn`t make you any place so that I couldn’t drive there and everybody looked at me if I were an alien.

Induction in product architecture

On Friday I was introduced to the real coding work that is going to be a big part of my work at Speechstorm. It took some while to understand the concept behind it as it is a massive project and is a huge amount of documentation behind it.

One of our product architects was so kind to give ma deep look inside the coding work and also gave me a better understanding overall. Its incredible how much work and details there are but I am really getting into it now which also makes my work more focused and I can read about nearly everything in our document repository. Next week there will be some more informations about our next big customer which will also benefit to my working progress there a lot.

Cables and data outlets everywhere

Yesterday I finished the estimation for the Ulster University Block BD.
After I finished that Mark gave me the blueprints for the next Building (Block BC) which got even more floors to measure but I will get through it.
After a little confusion how to split the data outlets between the three comm rooms on floor 01 I started to get an average for each area so that Mark can do the pricing for this part.
This morning I did a little bit of research for Lawrence about a company called Surface Power that offers a product called HONE that uses Nano technology to turn daylight (not sunlight) into energy.
Afterwards i continued to do my measurement for floor 01 of building BC. Shortly before I ended the day Steven showed me how to process the timesheets for our worker so they get their paycheck, since he is on holiday I have to do that for him on Tuesday.

 

welcome lunch

Yesterday at lunch time me and almost everyone in the office met at an Indian restaurant to welcome the new arrivals at Speechstorm which led to some nice chats about life in Belfast combined with delicous food.
Certainly this was a really nice way of a company meeting and I am still happy to be part of it. My work is still focused on the localization including research on grammar and programming around call flows to get more familiar with the environment and java script in general.

Also I had my first impression about how beautiful Belfast can be with a little bit of sunshine which is definitely a nice diversion compared to our daily rain. Still just for the quote it did rain afterwards!