Kategorie: Dublin

Workout

I returned The Notebook to Travelling Languages yesterday after work and used the opportunity to ask about our trip to Connemara this weekend. I’m really looking forward to it but I guess everyone knows that by now. I have also made plans for the weekends in June. Nothing’s written in stone but I want to go to Howth and Greystones/Bray because the views are supposed to be great and I can hop on to the DART for both so it’s not going to be too expensive.

So I was telling you about buying my hiking boots. Naturally, you have to break them in before they get comfortable. Well, I am trying to do that since yesterday and seeing as I only have today and tomorrow to kind of soften the leather a bit, I actually don’t believe I will achieve much until I need them this weekend. However, I had a nice long walk yesterday because the bus that was supposed to be at the station in “2 minutes” finally arrived after about 30 minutes of waiting for “2 minutes”.
Of course, it didn’t stop to let anybody on because it was full. Now, the good thing about the real time information of the Dublin Bus is that… ummm… it is that… phew… umm… okay, there is actually zero, zip, nada, zilch… *taking a breath* …bupkis, diddily squat, nothing good about this crappy display. Those things are lying through their LEDs and they are devoid of any emotion so they can’t even feel bad or good about it. They are lying and they just don’t care!

So after waiting roughly another 10 minutes only to have the second bus pass me by without stopping either, I decided to eff this ess and walk home.
This is the route I took: https://goo.gl/maps/g2sqR

It turned out to be a nice “walkout”, my heart racing not only from the exertion but also from the rage boiling inside me. That rage ebbed off while the exhaustion grew and after another hour, I arrived home to three Spanish girls trying to cook what I assumed was to be an omelet. Ann was watching them as they were following the recipe of one of the girls’ grandmother. Now, it was actually only potatoes and eggs in the pan but I was told that it’s “not easy”. I settled with expressing my agreement and underlining that with the widely known fact that the fewer ingredients a dish has, the harder it is to prepare… just think of preparing tea – that’s a science in itself. 😉

This morning it dawned on me that I had left my hoodies at work and since I didn’t want to wear my coat, I came to work wearing my leather jacket. I ♥ my leather jacket! It will come in handy today because the Dublin Staff Relay is happening after work and it is supposed to rain in the afternoon and while I hope that our tent will be enough to protect us from the downpour, it sure is nice to have an extra layer of protection. But let’s just hope for the best!

Cheers,
Angelo

Edit: I just wanted to check the weather again and it first showed me the forecast for Germany. You guys have 31°C while I have 13°C and rain. Now, I knew what I was getting into but there is no reason I shouldn’t be able to be even just a little disappointed right now.

Surprise surprise!

The last days passed very fast. I had to do a lot of work and my boss decided, that my workmate and I must develop a new network infrastructure in the next weeks. The reason is that the location is a new place of the company. The company has a functional network but he needs different subnetwoks for different functions. I also assembled a few PCs for customers with special requirements and wishes. I prefere such tasks, because I love to deal with hardware.

The warehouse is full of hardware and Peter(my boss) told me, that I can use every item that i need for my tasks. I found a lot of Cisco equipment which is in a good condition. I was suprised that I found such devices in a warehouse full of „old“ hardware. It is also a good training for me to configure Cisco routers and switches, because I am looking forward to pass the CCNA exam in a few weeks.

Who knows what I will find in the next days.

Your George.

 

Getting Ready

Monday was kind of a slow day. I was still stuffed from Sunday evening because Eamonn (my host dad) made potatoes and potatoes and beans and a few more potatoes and fish and soup. He also talked me into having a pint of Guinness with him and later when I complimented him on the food, he slipped me another pint. I had a really bad night that night because my stomach was aching in almost every possible position that I tried to sleep in (and there aren’t really that many sleeping positions). I did have breakfast, although I didn’t think I could fit anything in that morning. Work was good, as I put a couple of cables in place, to replace some of the old patching and worked on the documentation of the whole thing some more. I got offered a server to install a couple of VMs to try whatever I liked and I love the opportunity to try that out some time this week.

Today, I switched some of the ports and so far nobody complained. I guess I will take that as quiet confirmation of my good work because nobody affected was actually aware that I have changed things. I also had to “fix” a printer earlier today. The Lady at the front desk changed the toner and after that the printer got hung up on the idea that it would be cool to process the job using the manual tray. There was no paper in that tray, naturally. So I did what the printer asked me (or anyone who would be willing to listen) to do: push the “OK”-button to use another tray. I did that and the printer was happy to oblige and print to the end of all days or at least till it runs out of toner again.

People here are getting ready for the Dublin Staff Relay on Thursday which I will attend to help with the organization because I can’t really run 5k in much faster than 45 minutes and I believe that’s just not going to cut it. I still like the fact that I’m being invited to all those company events. The staff here tries to maintain an internal social network which is an awesome idea because as I explained some time ago, most of the people working for System Dynamics don’t really get to see each other when they’re on-site with the clients.

After work today I went to O’Connell Street to one of the many camping/outdoor shops there and bought a pair of hiking boots, for ~70€, for my tour to Connemara this weekend and also the upcoming company hiking event I will attend in the first week of July. I’m very excited about this weekend and I hope that the weather will turn out nice so I can take lots of pictures of Ireland’s wildest region for you guys… Or no pictures and just enjoy the hell out of it 😉 we’ll see 😛

Take care
Angelo

Nightlife in Dublin

The weekend has been pretty eventful. The evening at the „Karma Stone Bar“ was great and the music was good, but all in all a little too noisy. We stayed until the Bar closed and Ryan drove us home after the night, as we planned.

On Saturday I spent most of the day relaxing and getting some sun since the weather was surprisingly warm and nice for Ireland. In the afternoon I went for a walk and took a look at the stores around my neighborhood. It’s very convenient to have them close by in case I need anything fast. My “Hostdad” and my “Hostbrother”came home really late, it was already 2 am when they arrived. They have been at an event all day and brought friends with them when they came home.

The party went on until 6 am. Today I prepared everything for work, cleaned my room and did my laundry.

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

First deal in the second week, already

Hello everyone,

the first week of work is nearly over and I have done a lot of research. These last couple of days I worked on the PXE server. Unfortunately i could not finish the work on it, because the installation required a DHCP setting with static IP-addresses. I am not familiar with the setting and did not want to cause any errors in the network.To be on the safe side, I decided to search online for important information and spoke with my boss about the network settings. We will try and solve the problem next week.

Besides I sorted a lot of hardware that will be sold in the next days and weeks and run a few Windows 7 installations.

 table

Today I had a meeting with a stock holder. He wants to work on small PC with the option to connect eight monitors on it. Furthermore it should be a very small PC, because he wants to travell with it.

In the evening I will go to the „Karma Stone Bar“ with Angelo, Toni and my housemate. The son of my „host-dad“ works there and he invited us. Rayn said, that they have some famous international beer like „Becks“ or „Heineken“. After that, he will drive us home. It is very obliging, because after midnight the buses drive only to the city centre.

Sláinte!

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

short summary of my work experience

I’ve worked for 3 and a half days now. I don’t have to much to do because our projects start the next weeks. So I had much time to talk to the employees. The company is really „colorful“, we got many people from different country’s here. And it is much fun to hear all the story’s and experiences. And I don’t feel that bad when i got words wrong or pronounce them wrong because nearly everybody does that too. I’m really looking forward the next weeks.

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… 😉

The internship has started

Hey everyone,

the last days were very nice and the time passed away quickly. On Saturday, Pauls family was here for afternoon coffee, cake and dinner. We talked a lot about Ireland, Germany, culture in both countrys and the first experiences that I have collected in Dublin. The people here in Dublin are more comfortable and more polite than the people in Berlin. Maybe that is because the city is much smaller as well as the population.

Monday was my first day at work. I am very glad to have the opportunity to work here in the „Computer Factory“. We had a warm welcome.

First Joe showed us the area and on which places we will work during the next 7 weeks.
He defeated us in billiard and told us what he has done in his whole career.

And it was a lot of fun.

Today we cleaned some PCs and Christopher and I chose one for our WSUS update server.
We upgraded the amount of the RAM so that the server will have enough resources for challenging tasks.

20140513_152956

We installed „Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2“ from a disk for a temporary test environment.
Christopher installed the Windows Server Update Services role, because we decided that he will
manage the WSUS server and i will try to install a PXE installation server.
Besides that, we got some information from the internet about the server roles.

  I am looking forward to have a wunderful time in my internship.