Nothing new in the far north

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.

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.

Clontarf and Fairview

The weather was really nice today so i decided to walk to the city centre. On my way i got to the Clontarf Road, a long road that goes among Clontarf.2014-05-25 12.38.182014-05-25 12.39.05

2014-05-25 12.41.15

Really nice to walk there and a beautiful view. Later on my walk I came across Fairview, its the district under Clontarf. There is the Fairview park thats probably the biggest part of Fairview.

 

A caring weekend

Hey everyone,

yesterday we had a few problems with the network in our company. Jonas and I tried to fixed it, but after some troubleshooting we expected that the issue is out of the „Computer Factory“. In the evening Jonas, Toni and I walked to „The Stages Head“ pub and enjoyed the Irish live music. The atmosphere was awesome because after a few hours the pub was full of people and everyone talked to each other, sung and laughed. We stayed there until the pub closed and took a taxi to get home dry. Today Paul and I bought some beans, eggs, bacon, bread and sausages for a typical Irish breakfast. It tasted awesome. Paul invited four of his friends for the breakfast and after that we had a nice and funny conversation. I relaxed the rest of the day and spent some time on the Internet to talk with my family and friends.

Yours George

The replacement of a motherboard of a SAN Volume Controller and some other things

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.

Friday

Hello everyone,

now it started, a long weekend because Monday is a bank holiday but not all companyies have closed on that day. Some people of us have to go to work for example Leo.
Marco and I wanted to travel to home by train yesterday but the train doesnt stop on our train station, so we had to go one trainstation from Cultra to Marino and we arrived very late at home.
On Friday I did a big step to finish my project, I  installed a DPM, SQL-Server and Reporting-Server and configured them correctly(I hope) so on Tuesday I´m going to finish the project.
Yesterday Eric and I watched a lot of the serie Burn Notice it´s like McGyver but 20 years later.
Today we want to go to LIDL and I want to buy some german food if they have this.
In a multinational store they had german bread and I´m really happy.

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.

 

Dublin Staff Relay and Where To Find Me

Thursday was a very nice day. I’ve started playing around with one of the servers here that is not in the productive environment of SD and set up a couple of virtual machines. It’s nice to see, that I haven’t forgotten everything that I’ve learned in the Windows seminar in my first year. I was able to set up an active directory, DHCP and DNS and was fumbling around with users, groups and respective policies.

At around half past four in the afternoon I set out with Linda and Genevieve towards Phoenix Park and the Dublin Staff Relay. The drive there was crazy because the traffic was unbelievably bad and there was one particular funny/exciting moment, when Linda drove up the bus lane all the way to the next intersection and when we were waiting there to cross the road, sirens came out of nowhere. We both thought that we were busted but when an ambulance came around the corner, we laughed delightedly at the daring maneuver and that we got away with it. However, we were still pretty short on time so Genevieve jumped out of the car and ran for our tent with the runner’s numbers and we tried to find a parking spot somewhere. After a couple back-and-forths, Linda found a spot on an adjacent field that was accessible from the road. We carried drinks and food towards the tents, looked for ours for about 10 minutes and set everything up, when we finally arrived. We were surprised to see, that we were actually sharing a tent with quite a lot of other companies like Mitsubishi and Europcar.

022 Dublin Staff Relay

I didn’t really see a lot of the running but that was fine as I got to talk to the people instead. We had a couple of beers in the tent and most of us went to the pub afterwards. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones to have that idea and the pub was crowded, so we had to stand around with drinks in hands. It was a very nice evening and I talked to pretty much everybody that came to the run. I have to remember to buy the next round when we go out again because I was freeloading 3 drinks and I don’t want that to pop into people’s minds when they think about me. 😉

I was given a ride home by another colleague and went to bed at around 12 o’clock. Needless to say, this morning was far from being a good morning. I stayed in bed as long as I could and actually even longer than I should have, had breakfast, filled my water bottle and left after already having missed the first bus. Fortunately, I was still quite early and the office stayed quiet till well after 9am.

I’m also going to go home early today because I have to wash my clothes for next week as I will leave Dublin tomorrow morning for Connemara. I’m very excited about that as you must know! J

Seeing as I will get a visit next month, I will follow end this post with a short description of where to find System Dynamics.

The River Liffey cuts Dublin into 2 parts. Close to the harbor mouth, the „recently“ built Samuel Beckett Bridge spans from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay over to the North Wall Quay. The first thing you notice about the bridge is the shape it has. The Beckett Bridge looks like a harp and is easily distinguishable from any other bridge in Dublin.

017 way to work  018 way to work

When you get closer to it, no matter on which side of the Liffey, you will see that O2 has an office building right next to the bridge. On the bottom right of that building, there is a passage that leads you to Whitacker Court and if you turn left the door into the building will be on your left hand side. It’s of no use to describe the rest because you won’t get past that door unless the woman down there buzzes you in. I found out that she is not really the door opener for the building but belongs to another company in the building and she also seems to leave that front desk fairly often.

019 way to work  020 way to work

Cheers,
Angelo

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!

One is not enough

Hey everyone,

the third week is nearly over and it doesn’t get boring. In the last two days I organized a lot of stuff for the stockholder, the PXE-Server and WSUS.

I cleaned the whole office and built a nice bench for our WSUS and PXE project.
A workmate and I installed all cable in the office so that it is easier to test the incoming hardware and to operate on the desks. We also repaired an old printer. The printer is now working on both workplaces and the Cisco switch is also connected to our servers and works fine.
We are looking forward to create a domain and test a very nice tool for the pxe installation.
I examined our network „rack“ and was horrified. It does not look as bad as the racks in Angelo’s company but now i understand a little how he felt while he tried to took apart the mesh.
Beastly job..

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We also finished the „6-monitor-build“ for the stockholder and gave him a little
presentation how it looks like.
The PC works nearly noiseless and don’t need too much space.

6monitors

The next project will be a little PCs which support between 10 and 12 monitors.
I am glad that I have the opportunity to pursue my interests.

 Yours George