Hi everyone!
Tim managed it for us to get better working conditions. So next week we can finaly start to do some IT work. Our task will be to set up multiple training rooms for the new hired people and we also get to work with Macs and some network related stuff. All in all I am really looking forward to that. Also there is a thing that is constantly bothering me this week. I am so sleepy. Everytime I got home I go to bed. I don’t know why but even after getting up I am still tired. One time I slept like 17 hours. I hope that will change in the next time.
Kategorie: Belfast
Not a smooth start in the week
On Monday I continued to estimate the data outlets and cable length in ‚Castle Court‘, I needed half the Day to finish that task.
After my lunch Mark (another Mark!) gave me a new task, to estimate the data outlets and cable length in the Ulster University on 9 Floors. I also have to estimate the cable length for the CCTV and access control
in the university. On Tuesday I was halfway through the estimation for
the data outlets and the cable length for them.
Later that day we decided to make some burger and suprisingly it worked better than expected. We were a little bit concerned due to our awesome pans that got a nice little dent in the middle therefore are only getting hot in the centre. This morning Mark and I took a look at my measurements and the blueprints for ‚Castle Court‘. As we went through my measurements and the blueprints we realised that we have a little problem the cables are too long (over 90m). And without any additional information or a site visit we’re can’t solve that problem. But we can’t do a site visit so we had to do a lot of assumtions for the pricing of that job. We will see how that goes.
After having lunch and a little chat with my co-workers I continued to do the measurement for the Ulster University. I finished the measurement for the data outlets, tomorrow I’m going to finish the estimating for the CCTV and access control. And hopefully I won’t encounter any problems.
next week schedule
For the next week my schedule at Speechstorm is going to be to find out how the grammar structure which is already in place could be modified to fit into the other upcoming projects. I already wrote a detailed overview about the differences which are crucial to the development of the project. A good example is that if someone in Spain is telling you to take the bus in southern america this could be understood as humping the bus. Finding such differences is very important as many people could get upset by finding out that a similar but not equal language is used just for the purpose of not doing that extra bit of work. Obviously Speechstorm is taking this effort and I am more than happy to contribute to it.
My work experience: Firday
Hi everybody!
Now I am going to talk about last friday and what we experienced. The thing is that friday nearly half of the building is empty because there aren’t so much people working at friday. Thats means that we also have less to do at work. We had nearly a three hours break because there was nothing to do at that time and when we worked it was just finishing the other tasks from the days before. So yeah we also asked Peter if we could get more IT related tasks to do but he toled us that this is not his desicion and we have to wait another week or two to get better tasks. After work I went to the Victoria Centre tand took a nice view over Belfast even if the weather was not so good.
Two weeks over, six to go
This weekend was a pretty boring weekend we didn’t do that much. We went to the city centre even though everything is opened on saturday and sunday its only till 6pm which was bad for us because we decided to go at 7pm. So we arrived at the city centre everything was closed but before we headed back to our accomendation we decided to walk through the market that they put in front of the city hall. The theme of the market was food from around the world you could find everything from german food to food from africa, we bought some german sausages before we went back home.
Today we went to tesco and iceland to buy food and water for the next days/week.
I’m looking forward to the next 6 weeks.
Everyday life
My first week at Speechstorm is over and I am more than happy that my work there will not be a everyday task like changing keyboards or bringing a monitor from place a to place b and contribute to their product. Its amazing how everyone is so friendly and supportive and after just a few days I feel more than accepted, even more than that I feel like I am part of something big which will definitely change my view concerning small companies and their way of working.
I will try to define my work there in one of my next posts and show how a day at Speechstorm looks like.
We are in Belfast for quite some while now and I can certainly say that the daily tasks and troubles are more and more easy to handle. Being able to send groceries at home by ordering them online is still on the to-do list as we preferred taking a cab to one of the bigger Tesko stores.
Still I can´t believe how the people get a long when everything is so expensive in comparison to Germany but talking to random strangers on the street is helping a lot to understand their way of living.
My work experience: Thursday
Hi there guys!
Our third day was kinda like the second they you just have to switch the plaster part with cleaning out the hall on on the third floor. It was a mess! I have to say I never so so many I Mac cases at one place. We made a fun out of it and stacked them as high as we could. The task took a awfull lot of time.First we had to get everything out and then we have to put it back but better so that there is more place and then to put there even more stuff from the other floors. It took us the whole day to manage it but I am really proud of our final product. This day Tim and I decided to go to that mexican restaurant next to that Fish and Chips place. I got a Chilli Beef Burrito and it was really good!
That was my work experience for thursday! What happend at friday will you see in my next post!
My work experience: Tuesday
Hello everyone!
Tuesday was my real first day at work because now we started to work. I am working together with Tim and Max from the FSZ 22 class. We met us at 8:50 at the main building from concentrix to get our security passes and you really need them there because you can’t open one door without using it. It took some time until we got our passes because they had much trouble at the moment but last but not least we got them. Then we went to the Lesley Exchange building, the place where we are going to work the most. There we met Peter, he is some sort of janitor but with much more tasks and responsebilties. Peter gave us our first job which was to set up a trainings room with PC, IP telephones and stuff like that. We thought that would be an easy task but we proofed wrong there. It was kind of a difficult job because so many parts where missing a lot of cables and some monitors. We had to scavange to whole building to find everything and it took us the whole week to find everything and that was the only thing we did that day.
What happened the next day can you see in my next post!
Guests from Germany, a trip to Derry and a lot of measuring
Yesterday Lawrence introduced me to one of the tasks at KNI, which is essential for structured Cabling.
He showed me the blueprints of three floors in the ‚Castle Court‘ that need to be rewired, but before we can do that we have to estimate the data outlets that are needed and the rough cable length.
Lawrenced showed me how they usually run the cables within a building, which is in the middle of a floor and within a room along the wall. So I started to count the needed data outlets I came up with about 1.600 data outlets for all three floors. Afterwards i did a rough measuring of the cable length but during the measuring I discovered a problem there is no Communication Room on Floor 5, so no place to run the cables to. So we have to go to the Site to see if its possible to run the cables to a comm room a floor below. Later that day two teacher from our OSZ came to visit us and talk to me and Lawrence to see how things are going. In evening we met again in a little bar called ‚The Madison‘ to talk a little bit more about our stay here in Belfast. Today we did a trip to Londonderry/Derry. KNI is currently involved in a pilot project within the Derry city council, they refurbished a test floor where they changed the lighting, to a intelligent lighting thats able to react to certain events (movement, daylight) to either dim the lights or turn them completly off depending on the policies that are applied.
After a little tour through the floor and rooms, they had a little meeting to discuss if the project is still on track and if not why. The meeting went well and the project is still within the schedule and on track. But there is no perfect day so of course something had to happen and one of the redwood engines that powers LED had a failure, at this point the energy manager at the city council told us that the CCTV went out as well so we assume that there was power peak and the engine simply didn’t survived it.
Luckily we had a spare engine in our store in Belfast so one of my co-worker made his way up to Derry to replace the engine so the council employees got light when they come back to work on Monday.
Working at Speechstorm
I started working this Monday and arrived just in time to participate in a weekly meeting of the entire company where I was introduced to the staff followed by their regular topics. The company I am working for is called Speechstorm, which is developing their own stand alone programs providing a telephone based interactive communication system for customers all around the world. The idea behind this software is to allow big companies to handle a massive amount of calls whether they are just for the purpose of receiving informations such as account balance or directing them to an agent who will then help the customer based on their needs. To make those calls more time efficient and effective the agent is given a list of useful informations directly displayed on his monitor while talking to the customer on the phone. Those informations are collected by the software either by the inputs a caller made by pressing numbers on the keyboard (DMTF recognition) or by the voice recognition engine which is running in the background which is totally optional.
Although many similar programs are already in use, Speechstorm is setting new standards when it comes to flexibility combined with easy to configure software. Customers are able to set up Speechstorm dependend on their needs and can also decided whether they want to use text to speech as the output or upload their prompts on their own.
To really get into the programming itself I am currently reading through a lot of repositories to get a better understanding how the frameworks are working. The code itself is a combination of javascript with a SQL Database in the background.
I am really satisfied about my placement and couldn’t be happier in this type of environment with a small and young team in the background willing to help me wherever they can.