Schlagwort: Carlsberg

Running Out Of Time

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.

Stay tuned, Angelo

Phoenix From The… Poo?

Even though I drank 2 full glasses of water after coming home from the BBQ on Friday, I woke up with a killer headache on Saturday. I believe that the Heineken is probably to blame for that because Carlsberg never gave me this tingly let-me-park-ma-chainsaw-in-your-head sensation. There’s nothing that kills a killer headache better than a nice long walk so I got up, had breakfast and went to Tesco to pick up a bottle of water and a few bananas and then made my way down towards Phoenix Park and the Dublin Zoo.

George had already made plans with his host family so I went on my own. I walked down towards the intersection where I used to meet George in our first week here and kept walking towards city center.

I walked along the River Liffey, my jacket tucked away in my backpack because it was quite warm despite the thick carpet of clouds covering the sun. The Liffey is an interesting River to watch because depending on the time and therefore the tide, you can see it flow towards the country, towards the sea or not at all.

The Dublin Zoo is pretty small and there aren’t many animals in it which I was kind of happy about. I hope the 12.80€ that I paid for my student ticket, are being used to make the animals that are “living” in the Zoo feel better. I won’t include any pictures of lions or tigers because for one, I only have one picture showing a lion and for another, I think those animals would be better off not being imprisoned here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not starting a crusade but seeing the Zoo as what it was and knowing how we treat animals, captive or free, I’m actually ashamed I went there. What good is it to keep an animal behind bars for “preservation” purposes? It actually only frees everybody else up to destroy the natural habitats of those creatures instead of preserving them!

Anyway, I walked through the whole Zoo in about 2 hours and I was really taking my time because my feet already hurt and because I had nothing else to do with my day. I watched screaming children of ignorant parents bang against the windows of the enclosures or yell at the gorillas to “wake up” because the animals weren’t doing “anything fun”. Seeing not only the big animals of the African Plains but also the apes like gorillas or orangutans sit in their artificial environments, minding their own business, I couldn’t help but think of the The Planet of the Apes movies and especially the last one that showed just how much our distant relatives actually understand of their situation. I’m probably getting a bit off topic here… sorry about that.

“The forest drips and glows with green,
The tree-frog croaks his far-off song.
His voice is stillness, moss and rain
drunk from the forest ages long.

We cannot understand that call
unless we move into his dream,
where all is one and one is all
and frog and python are the same.

We with our quick dividing eyes
Measure, distinguish and are gone,
The forest burns, the tree-frog dies,
yet one is all and all are one.”
Rainforest, Judith Wright

I walked home through Phoenix Park again but this time I walked on the grass because I thought I might as well put my body down there for a nap or something. That idea went as fast as it came when I discovered that there was so much deer poo in the park that it was actually astonishing that the grass still looked green and not blackish-brown. In light of this new discovery, I just kept on walking home.

I had burger and French fries for dinner and talked to Anne and the new housemates, 2 girls from Austria. They don’t know that I’m German and I’m still waiting for a good opportunity to surprise them with a German sentence.

I went to bed, thinking that on Sunday I would definitely not do anything. Well, things just never turn out the way you expect them to.

Step Up!

4th place so far…

643k steps and that only got us 4th place. The leading team, the Holy Walkamolies, has 161696 steps on us and all that after I walked my feet raw last week. I am determined to lead my team to victory, though. So up until now, I already walked 60000 steps and after work today I will go to the pharmacy to get cushions for my toes because I have blisters in the most annoying places of all. Once my toes stop bothering me, I will keep going and going and going like one of those freaking bunnies out of the Duracell commercials.

I want to go (as in walk) to the Dublin Zoo on Saturday and walk back home, as well. I’m hoping to score another 60k at least on the weekend if I go to Greystones on Sunday, maybe. Even with some of my team members hanging behind – and I still think they’re doing a good job – I believe we can gain on the Walkamolies and even let the other two teams eat dust because we’re not too far away from them with 674k and 690k respectively. I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

On Tuesday I sat in on a meeting with a guy from BT together with Eamonn and Emmet. System Dynamics wants to move their servers into a cloud environment. Well, sort of. The plan is actually to move the virtual machines onto new servers, connected with new switches, stored on new disks and stored in BT’s datacenter. I created a little draft with Visio to show what System Dynamics thinks how the setup will have to be and brought it to the meeting. My colleagues liked the way I did it and I listened in on them discussing different possibilities to set this thing up. Nothing is decided, yet and I believe I won’t be here by the time something “interesting” happens in that department but we’ll see how far this thing goes before I’m gone.

On the topic of being gone: It’s just over 2 weeks now until I have to go home. I’m happy I’ve seen as much as I have but there is still a lot left that I haven’t seen so there will be a vacation that has to be spent here within the next years. Something I’m already looking forward to.
The Problem with the flight home is the time it was booked for. It leaves at 7.10 in the morning and that is a terrible time to get to the airport in any convenient way, at least in Dublin and I don’t want to take a taxi, let alone have to get up at freaking 3 in the morning. So I’m actually planning on spending my night at the airport with the guys and a couple of beers. Probably not Guinness, though because it’s just too heavy and also not quite convenient to drink from the can It’s much more likely to be Budweiser or Heineken. Hell, if I get a good offer on Carlsberg, it’s going be that for sure. I’m not sure what we’ll do for dinner but there is supposed to be a McDonald’s that’s open 24/7 at the airport. I’m pretty sure that’ll do.

Tomorrow is the SD BBQ and the infamous Treasure Hunt. All I care about is steps, food and drinks and interesting conversations. Which is pretty much what it is. 😀

Cheers,
Angelo

Makin‘ Plans

Now that the road trip is over and I completed the last calculations concerning payback to the guys, I can go ahead and make new plans. There’s not much I can do concerning tomorrow, when my supervisors will come and check out System Dynamics for themselves but I can make plans concerning my/our last hours here in Dublin.

I didn’t worry about the time the plane would depart when I saw the schedule a couple of weeks ago but now that I know about the public transport situation here in Dublin and also the rest of Ireland, I can’t really wrap my head around just what the people were thinking when they booked the flight for this ungodly hour. It might be absolutely ok and even possible to reach the Tegel or Schoenefeld airport in time at any hour of the day but here in Ireland that’s another story. The first bus arriving at the airport is number 16 at around 8am. My flight leaves at 7.10am… What’s wrong with this picture?

So, in collaboration with the guys from Derry, we’re planning to stay at the airport from Friday night to Saturday morning. It shouldn’t be a problem IF… we bring enough resources to keep us beertertained. Budweiser, Carlsberg, Heineken or any other liquid of the canned variety will take care of that but I guess I’ll come back to that when the date draws closer.

Tomorrow afternoon, there’s also the hike that is organized by the Sports&Social Committee here at System Dynamics. I’m taking part in that to see the Wicklow Mountains and raise my step count for the SD Summer Step Challenge 2014. I hope my team “The Caribous” will win or at least reach a good second place. 😉

We’ll see and I’ll keep you posted!

Angelo