[EDIT] My special little project is done and you can enjoy it right here.
I want to say thank you to each and everybody responsible for making this experience the enjoyable 8 weeks that it was.
Until we meet again,
Angelo
[/EDIT]
So I’ve been working on something special for you guys and I’m going to find a way to share it with you as soon as it is uploaded in the best quality that I can possibly manage. It can only be a couple more hours :S.
So please be patient and wait for the better-quality version here.
If you cannot wait, have a look at this version but be advised that it is really crappy…
I haven’t checked but I think I might be the last person to tell you that this is our last week here in Ireland. In fact, it’s not even a whole week anymore and I am sad to leave System Dynamics and Ireland. I enjoyed the time here very much and I have seen more of the country than a lot of the Irish ever did. I have, however, left a ton of places that are worth visiting and I know a lot of the places that are worth visiting again.
I just want to give you an overview over the last couple of days.
I haven’t really done anything on Sunday because I was pretty exhausted from the week that lay behind me. There was a party at the house that I didn’t join because I wasn’t in the mood to be around a lot of people. The sun has also gotten to me pretty bad on Saturday and I was minding my sunburn and tried to ignore the mild headache that was probably due to dehydration. The party was a welcoming party for Thomas, Anne’s son who lives in Australia for almost 7 years now. He brought his wife who is from Cork and their Daughter Saoirse who was born in Australia. They’re here for Saoirse’s christening, Anne’s 60th and some other event but I forgot what that was.
On Monday, I took care of all the Europass paperwork and started to get rid of any lose ends to my work here. There are still a couple of cables in the rack that I have put there to get rid of other cables that are just in the way of everything but I didn’t get around to switching them and Eamonn seemed afraid to do it so I guess I’m not going to mess with it and just remove the surplus cables again.
I ordered a MacBook Air yesterday for 1366 € with 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, i5 processor and an external drive as well as 2 adapters for Ethernet and VGA. I felt filthy afterwards but I guess the good thing is that it was neither my money nor my responsibility once the thing gets here. I ordered it for one of the managers who needed it for mobility reasons.
I’m going to have a “full Irish” breakfast in an hour or so with Eamonn. It’s going to be my first ever and my last for now. I’m looking forward to it because I keep snacking on nuts and raisins.
Tomorrow I’m going to bring in some cake that I will buy later today at Lidl. I think it’s going to be some kind of double chocolate fudge thing and maybe carrot cake to give everybody a false sense of security about eating healthy. After all, vegetable cakes can’t be bad, right?! I’m scheduled to go to the Ferryman with Linda, Eamonn and Genevieve and whoever else would like to join us for a pint.
Friday is going to be quite a stressful day at least half of the day. I’m going to work in the morning pretty much just to say my goodbyes and clean up my desk. Around 11am, I have to hurry to Margaret to give her a final report on how the internship went. The Derrians are arriving at Dublin Airport sometime between 1pm and 2pm and the plan is to stash their luggage in my room at Anne’s house and go into city center because they want to check out the Guinness Storehouse. In the evening we’ll go out and buy beer (probably Budweiser or Carlsberg) and snacks and head to the airport to stay the night and wait for our flight on Saturday morning.
I am also working on something that you will get to see in my last post on Sunday. I enjoy working on it so I hope you’ll enjoy seeing what it is.
Steak, potatoes and carrot/onion/parsnip-vegetables, that’s what. I had a great time at their house and after dinner, Eamonn, his wife Angela and I sat back and watched the England vs. Uruguay game. Everybody that cares knows how the game went so I won’t go into detail here; I will just say that I think the outcome was absolutely deserved on both sides. It was an interesting enough game to watch.
When the game was over, we all got into the car and Eamonn drove me home using the opportunity to show me around the neighborhood some more. He lives in Malahide which is north of Dublin and we took the coastal route, detouring only through Howth to see the sun set from Howth Summit. It was beautiful to see the lights of the city on one side and the light of the dying day on the other. This could’ve only been made better if someone would’ve handed me a Guinness and maybe lit a fire to keep us warm.
On Saturday, I tried sleeping in, which turned out to be no longer than 9 am. This already includes the half hour of vividly turning around while trying to find a comfortable position. I had my usual breakfast of toast with Nutella and – today – a boiled egg of which I find one or two sitting on the stove every now and then. When brekkie was over, I packed a banana and a pear that I had lying around my room for the past 2 days, a Snickers bar and the bottle of water that I bought Friday afternoon at Tesco.
I could have taken the bus and then the DART but decided on walking into city center instead to take the DART from Tara Station. It saved me money and contributed 10000 steps to my daily quota right away. The train ride into Bray was beautiful enough because the rails follow the coast line and you can see beaches turn into cliffs and vice versa. When I arrived in Bray, I made my way to the beach which was relatively busy with people playing games on the grass or walking over hot stones and swimming on the other side of the walkway.
The cliff walk towards Greystones is obviously 6km long, if you believe the 2 signs that are put up at 1/3 and 2/3 of the way. The sun was shining mercilessly and I didn’t expect that seeing as the forecast was for cloudy weather. I guess the sun burnt the clouds right out of the sky like Icarus back in the day. It’s a very interesting walk winding along the coast of Ireland and there are a few places where you can sit down and rest while enjoying the view, the sweet song of the ocean and the voices of many a bird.
I made it into Greystones at around 3.30pm and walked past a few nice looking restaurants on my way to the DART. I didn’t bother eating there only because I knew I was going to come home to a prepared meal. It is in fact a nice plus for my wallet but kind of restricts social behavior, as well. I had to wait for the DART for half an hour and started watching Game of Thrones on my phone. The ride back was just as beautiful as the walk towards Greystones.
I got off at Tara Station and walked home from there, managing to put down 35073 steps for the day.
“…things just never turn out the way you expect them to.”
…ect them to…
…ect them to…
…ect them to…
I tried staying in bed but I guess all this walking makes you kind of addicted and I couldn’t find any rest. So I thought about what to do and around noon headed into town. I took the bus into the city center because even though I was restless, I also didn’t want to overdo it and my legs still hurt from the activities of the past few days.
When I arrived in O’Connell Street, I went to the Savoy movie theater to check out their times and found out that A Million Days To Die In The West was playing in just over an hour. I remembered George saying he wanted to go to a store called ForbiddenPlanet so I thought I might just see where that was. It was easy enough to find and it was open as well so I figured I can have a quick peek inside and see if they sell any cool belt buckles. ForbiddenPlanet is a chain of comic book/pop-culture merchandize stores and I believe Eric actually already had a post featuring the Belfast store.
I didn’t find any buckles or anything else of interest, unfortunately. After about half an hour I left the store to head back to the movie theater and went into one of the many Carroll’s stores of Dublin. I needed a few more postcards and also something for myself to take as a souvenir since I didn’t get to buy a buckle. In the end I ended up buying a set of six coasters with different Irish idioms on them. They’ll be nice on the small sofa table I have back at home.
A Million Ways To Die In The West was hilarious. It has this strange kind of humor that comes with everything I’ve seen from Seth MacFarlane so far. People argue that the best scenes have already been seen in the teasers and this might be true but as far as real humor goes, this movie has a lot more of it than a few flashy scenes with someone’s head being squashed by a huge block of ice – a scene that really was very enjoyable. After the movie I thought I might just follow the way the 16 bus takes in case I want to get on it at any point but my legs felt fine so I ended up just walking all the way home.
Dinner was waiting for me when I made it home and soon after eating I went to bed, trying to find sleep in my room that was hot from the sun shining into it all day.
I walked to work on Monday morning and pretty much on every morning since. I also walked home every day except for Monday because as I was walking towards Connolly Station where I used to get on the bus, I felt my shins starting to hurt and I decided to give my muscles a little bit of time to relax. Besides, my team walked 732491 steps last week of which I contributed 160000 alone. Unfortunately, my team mates don’t seem to take this thing as seriously as I am and I’m lucky if we can take and keep 3rd place. The other team had just under 3000 steps more and I’m hoping that either my team finally starts walking or the other team gets tired and does less steps this week. We’re definitely not going to win this because the guys in team one are either cheating or are more people or whatever but I doubt that all of them do 18k steps a day every day of the freaking week. I mean I do more than that and I know how much this sucks and I just can’t believe that they are all doing that. So I suspect cheating or just carelessness when it comes to calibrating the pedometer and it just counts more steps than are actually done. Nonetheless, we have a shot to even get to 2nd place but that would require my team to really “go the extra mile”.
The weather was also really nice these last couple of days with over 22°C and double rainbowsunshine all the way, oh my gaaawwd! No, it was really, really beautiful and not at all what you would expect from Ireland.
Work wise, I played around with my virtual machines again and I’m having some kind of problem with my DHCP because the machine that is supposed to get an IP doesn’t get anything. I still don’t know what the problem is and to be honest, it also doesn’t really interest me anymore. I might still finish it, just to have done it once but it’s not exactly my idea of a fun project.
I’m invited to Eamonn’s house for dinner tomorrow and he and his wife seem really worried about what to prepare for dinner. We had a very funny conversation over it today. He asked me if I was okay with rice and I said yes, asking what it came with. He said it’s an Indian kind of dish with chicken, curry paste and stuff. He looked nervous when I told him that I’m looking forward to it and for some odd reason I told him that I don’t really like to have Indian food at a restaurant just because of what it reminds me of. I had to spend 5 minutes promising him that I would eat it and that I don’t want steak instead.
We’ll see what they decide on feeding me, I’m just looking forward to the evening.
That is why on Sunday, I got up at 8.45am, had breakfast and at 9.20am left the house to go (as in walk) to Howth. Google says that I walked around 32km that day but it’s not as accurate and it was more than that because I also did quite a lot of back and forth around the paths there. I did 47634 steps which brought me to a total of 136467 steps and my team of 7 people to 643791 for the week.
I actually awoke to the sound of rain which kind of put my mood down but I was still hell-bent on doing this walk. The rain only lasted a few minutes and then the sun tried her best to dry up the streets and sidewalks. It wasn’t dry but quite warm when I left the house and started towards Artane Castle to buy water and a snack at Tesco.
I continued down the road a few minutes later and turned left at the T-junction, walking towards the Artane roundabout. I wound my way through the streets of Dublin this way and soon came to Dublin Road which is kind of a coastal road leading to the Howth peninsula. It started to drizzle even before I came to that road but as I turned onto it, the wind from the sea was so strong that the tiny raindrops „fell“ horizontally and felt like needles, piercing the right side of my face. I kept walking and soon felt like this was some kind of punishment I had to withstand to be worthy of the sight that would be at the end of this road. The rain kept on lashing me for quite a while and only stopped when I reached Sutton which is located right at the entry of the peninsula. Of course, the rain started again a few minutes later and continued all the way until I reached the end of Howth harbor and the public restrooms. I was so unbelievably happy to see those restrooms.
I thought about having lunch in one of the restaurants but I don’t really care for seafood that much and considering the prices displayed on the menues, I stopped caring about “real” food altogether. I grabbed the small bag filled with nuts and raisins that I bought at Tesco earlier and took a couple of hands full. 200g of this mix really fill you up even though the taste isn’t as satisfying as that a nice steak with French fries would deliver, accompanied by a nice Guinness. Anyway, it kept me going and so I walked around the peninsula, came by the lighthouse, the beach and walked all the way back towards my home. Those last kilometers were really difficult and I had to sit down a few times just to rest my feet. My ankles and even my hips started to hurt before I finally arrived home. I had the dinner that was waiting for me in the oven, took a shower and went to bed, happy that I had used the day the way I did.
Just a reminder: These photographs are resized to conserve space so if you would like to see any particular photograph in its original size and quality, please contact me when I’m back in Germany. 🙂
On Friday afternoon, Eamonn offered to take me to Galway on Saturday and maybe on Sunday to go up Croagh Patrick with him. Unfortunately he cancelled but offered to take me to Glendalough on Saturday instead.
Around 1.30pm, I met him and his wife Angela in the parking lot of Tesco and off we went in their car. We took the M50 that, much like the A10 for Berlin, runs around the city of Dublin. It is a tolled road but it is the quickest way from one side of the city to the other.
We drove through the Wicklow Mountains and stopped occasionally when there was something to see. There were definitely a lot of things to see as you will notice in the gallery below. In Roundwood, a small town along the way, we stopped for lunch and I had a burger with rocket, the famous green stuff that apparently everybody loves… personally, I think of it more like Reinald Grebe who put it something like “the weed that comes from abroad, is a lucky one”. Rocket is just a fancy dandelion and it doesn’t taste even remotely good. Fortunately, the beef and the onions were able to cover up the taste of it. The fries were awesome as well and I was absolutely satisfied when I had the cup of tea afterwards. The food was Eamonn’s treat which I found very generous of him.
We went on to Glendalough which is a glacial valley in Wicklow. There are different difficulty paths that run through the whole valley, along lakes or up mountainsides. It’s a very beautiful place to be and up on the mountains that enclose the valley, the air is serene and filled only with the many voices of nature. I took a lot of pictures that you can see in the gallery below but unfortunately none of them were able to catch the real beauty of the place. I’m starting to believe that no picture will ever achieve that. *sigh*
View Towards Dublin
National Park
Water
More Water
Deer
Glendalough Valley
Glendalough
Waterfall
Glendalough Valley
The Path
Sun Piercing the Scenery
Glendalough Monastery
Tower Plaque
Tower Entrance
When I came home that day, Anne and her Family were having a BBQ so I joined them for dinner and later had 3 Guinness with Eamonn (Anne’s husband). It was a very nice evening and it went on for hours. I went to bed around 12.30am and set my alarm for 9am. Come back tomorrow to learn what I did on Sunday and why I had to get up so early.
Have you guys ever had a song stuck in your head because you heard it somewhere, even though you didn’t hear the whole song but actually only caught a snippet over a conversation in a pub? For me it is this song that’s stuck in my head since yesterday evening. I heard it in the Glencormac Inn at the bottom of the Sugar Loaf Mountain in Wicklow. A group of 14 people from System Dynamics went up the mountain after work. It was a good hike and at the end of the day I had 17898 steps on my pedometer and a couple of sandwiches as well as 2 Guinness in my tummy.
Down there at the pub
Halway, almost all the way around 😉
Allllllllllmost there
Whoooohooo!
Also, Mr. Bavar, Mrs. Teichmann and Mrs. Neumann came to System Dynamics yesterday to see how and what I’m doing here. It was nice to be able to show someone what I actually do here instead of just having to describe it as best I can. Nicola and Eamonn were talking to them as well over tea and coffee.
Because I didn’t want to go to the hike in my work clothes, I changed into jeans and a t-shirt. Unfortunately, I’m a man of habit and my habit is to keep my Leapcard in my pants pocket… my work pants pocket…
I didn’t have any change for the bus but Bridgitta, a colleague from SD, gave me 3€ so I could at least take the bus home. I decided to walk to work this morning to bring my step count up and also because I didn’t have enough money at home. It was a nice exercise, took me just over an hour and brought me 8k steps for today. I’m now up to ~9500 and I’m thinking about walking home, as well. That would easily be another 17k-18k steps for today but I’ll sleep in tomorrow because I have to get a rest at some point. Depending on the weather, I might walk up to Howth around noon tomorrow but I might also just do that on Sunday or even next weekend. We’ll see…
Arriving at Dublin Airport around 7.20pm on Friday, George and I went to Avis to pick up our car. After my VISA was declined, we had to book an insurance packet with Avis directly which cost us 12€ per day on top of what I had already paid in advance. It’s still very cheap to get a car for the weekend and after that minor setback, we were off to the guys in Derry. The drive up there was nice and after around 20 minutes on the road, sitting on the right side of the car, shifting with the left hand and driving on the left side becomes quite natural. The only thing that bothered me up until the end was the indicator being on the left side of the steering wheel which made it virtually impossible to use while shifting gears in a roundabout for example. When we arrived in Derry we had a small birthday party for George with Budweiser and Cake.
The next morning started off with a nice breakfast after which Joel came to Tobi and Paul’s place and then we were off to meet Max on a parking lot near to where his girlfriend was staying. Paul was kind enough to burn his road trip CDs for both our cars so after a few minutes our cars both looked kind of like this.
It took a little getting used to driving with another car behind me so when I came upon a place I thought was beautiful and well worth taking a couple of pictures, I pulled over with Paul rushing past me. Granted, I was kind of quick in my decision making and didn’t really have the time to indicate my desire to pull over so I wasn’t surprised that Paul didn’t make it. I was actually glad because I myself barely managed to come to a stop before the pocket ended. After that, it went rather smoothly. I tried watching out a little more and we reached every place safe and sound. We even came across a nice place where I had the chance to transform my Renault Mégane into a Dodge Ram. Well, sort of… 😉
Pimp my Ride, Hillbilly Style
The first stop of this journey was Mount Errigal in County Donegal. The Saturday sun blessed us with an amazing view as well as a nice tan/burn. We climbed 688 meters all the way to the tippy top which took us roughly two and a half to three hours and about an hour for the way down. I had to change my t-shirt and the others had to change their shoes and pants because the bottom of the Mountain was quite boggy. We started toward Galway at around 2pm and got there at 7.30pm. We spent the night at a nice little B&B run by Larry Bogan who’s a very nice man. Before going to bed, we decided to go into city center to eat something and maybe also have a pint of Guinness. It turned out to be quite hard to find a place that everybody could agree on and so we ended up in a diner eating burgers and drinking milkshakes. We were all pretty beat after climbing that mountain and driving down to Galway so we went home after that dinner.
Mt. Errigal
Mt. Errigal
The next morning, Larry made pancakes for us and we had toast and fruit as well. We left his B&B at around 9am, walking on the beach of Galway Bay for a bit, taking pictures and collecting a few shells; well, I did that anyway. After that we were off to the Slieve League Cliffs which are not as famous as the Cliffs of Moher but reach almost 3 times higher. The look down to the Atlantic waves smashing against the walls of the mountain was entrancing and so was the drive up and down the narrow roads there, going up and down, left and right.
Galway Bay
Sliabh Liag
Sliabh Liag
Since Paul had to return his car before the rental place closed, we had to make our way back rather quickly and also get gas before returning the car. We managed it all fine, got back to Tobi and Paul’s place and had a little time to relax before we made our way into the city to have something to eat and drink. Since their favorite restaurant was closed, we ended up getting bat wings coated in cornflakes and dipped in scalding hot fat. The Hillbilly’s Family Meal comes with 6 pieces of chicken, 4 helpings of fries and a 1l soda. I went to bed at half past twelve and got up at 8 to have a final breakfast in Derry, before leaving for Dublin via the Giant’s Causeway and the Causeway Coastal Route.
Beautiful Ireland
Dunluce Castle
The Giant’s Causeway was beautiful, the rope bridge tiny – from up where we looked at it – and the Causeway Coastal Route was amazing, breathtaking and fast. I had a blast riding that road like a dolphin rides the waves of the ocean.
George
Giant’s Causeway
The Chimneys
Der Causeway und ich
Giant’s Causeway
Giant’s Causeway
Rope Bridge
George and I stopped at a restaurant which made the famous ‘golden seagull’ its emblem and took off ‘flying’ down the M1 Motorway towards Dublin. Now, when I say flying, I don’t literally mean flying like but I was going almost 180km/h at one point though the overall speed limit is 120 if not lower. But what can I say; it’s frustrating, having a fast car that isn’t allowed to go fast.
Giving the car back at the airport was easy enough since there was no damage done to the car, the tank was full and we even threw out the garbage. We made our way into the city by bus and when I came home, I put my clothes in the washer, went to Tesco to get some cash as well as deodorant and had dinner and a pint of Guinness with Eamonn, my host dad. After that I took a shower, shaved and went to bed.
In short: whoever said that driving 250 miles is hard, is not well informed because after driving roughly 1331 kilometers this weekend, I think 250 mi are a piece of cake. 😉
Even though I had a major fuck-up *salutes Major Fuck-up* yesterday afternoon at work, because I didn’t quite think things through, I still love working at System Dynamics. It’s just the right size to have enough going on to keep someone busy and it isn’t big enough to force you to concentrate on just one aspect of IT. I like the wide range of insight you get into different things depending on the circumstances. For example, I fixed a printer even before someone actually noticed (or informed us anyway) that something was wrong. Later I got to play around with the network some more which is when the fuck-up happened. I kind of forgot to make sure that the switch I put into the network wouldn’t mess up the spanning tree setup SD has running here and after showing Eamonn how to configure trunk ports, it hit me when people started banging on the server room door. Unfortunately, I’m also kind of quick on the whole “write memory”-aspect so there was no quick and easy way to fix what I had just done. However, there was that config.txt, which I had saved just a couple of days ago, so I quickly grabbed a USB stick and pasted the old configuration back to the switch. Problem solved, roughly 10 years of life expectancy lost but everyone had access to the servers, the network and the whole freaking world again. I’m really terribly sorry about that and I can’t believe I didn’t think about this possibility before messing around in the productive environment BUT this will also never happen to me again, lesson learned.
Later today, George and I will go and get our car from Dublin Airport and drive up to see the guys in Derry and have a beer to celebrate George’s birthday which was on Monday. We’ll spend the night there and in the morning, make our way down towards Galway where we’ll spend another night before heading back towards Derry and then Dublin again. You will probably read about everything we do along the way in either George’s or my posts. Considering the pressure we’re under with this road trip, I really wish there was a better way to deal with the whole program in a way that doesn’t force you to come right back home after the work is done. I would’ve liked the opportunity to maybe stay 2 weeks for a holiday and to have time to really enjoy this country.
I hope you’ll have a great weekend as I hope we’ll enjoy ours.
Angelo
Since last I saw you My heart didn’t beat My tears kept on running And my soul did weep
For your beauty is perfect pure and divine Oh if I could only forever sit by your shrine
I would sit there and be Till the end of all time For that end would be also – I’m sure of it – mine
After the weekend in Connemara, I had to call in sick on Monday because I woke up with a headache and nausea that made it hard for me to even write the emails to the different offices that needed to be informed. I lay in bed the whole day drinking tea and water and sleeping in between. I only had to take one Ibuprofen in the morning, though. I consider this good because I don’t really like being on painkillers.
I went to work on Tuesday and had new/further tasks to perform concerning SDs network infrastructure. I’m still tasked with the documentation but my work concerning switch documentation is mostly done and all that’s missing are the desk numbers and respective ports in use. Now I was asked to also create a new diagram showing the network layout. Now, you’ve seen the pictures; it’s a hell of a job, figuring out what goes where and what is what in the first place.
All the while, I’m also still fumbling around with my virtual environment and I want to get the most out of it because I might have to know my way around it later. I actually didn’t do much – if anything – concerning the virtualization today. I was busy making my way through cables and switch configs because another side project of mine, is to teach Eamonn the ways of the force… uhm the cisco switch cli.
I fear I won’t have enough time to finish even one of my main projects before my time here comes to an end. It’s almost mid-term and I’m looking forward to our trip to Derry-to-Galway-to-Derry-to-Dublin this weekend.
