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: 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

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!

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“.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.