Schlagwort: Heineken

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.

Treasure Hunt and BBQ

Friday was System Dynamic’s treasure hunt and BBQ. The BBQ was actually not on board of the Jeanie Johnston as I had wrongly assumed but on the Cill Airne. That is also where our hunt for boo… bounty ended. We were very fast and had no real problems with solving all the riddles but unfortunately, some idiot ran his car into the entrance of Trinity College recently and so we had to split up because the clue we needed for the final puzzle was on one and the clue for the next stage on the other side of it.

That was where we lost a lot of time because the other part of my group decided that it would be best to just go further around Trinity College while Eamonn and I waited at the entrance we all came in from. After waiting for a minute, we decided to go around the corner where the others should have gotten the next clue already. It wasn’t even that far but our team mates were just nowhere to be found. We collected the clue and went to the next stage as fast as we could when one of the others called Eamonn to ask where they had to go. We told them to meet us at the next stage and also where that was. When we got there, we collected the next clues and soon after, the others arrived.

It was very humid that day and I was drenched and so was everyone else. All that was left to do was to take a grelfie (group-selfie) with the Oscar Wilde Statue in the background and then head back to the boat. We arrived about 2 Minutes after the leading team and solved the riddle but unfortunately for us, it’s not enough when a member of your team just yells it out to the committee, it had to be reenacted. How do you reenact a scene from Titanic when your clue reads “I’m the king of the world”? Exactly, you go to the front of the freaking boat and take a picture of the whole thing. We were farthest from the door at that point and after the answer was out, the other team stormed of. The game had been lost and we felt cheated because it actually didn’t say anywhere that we had to take a photo. We consider the game won even though we weren’t awarded anything.

We were all given a captain’s hat, a black paper wristband and 3 golden doubloons. The hat was for fun, the wristband gave us access to the barbecue and the doubloons were to buy any kind of drink at the bar. I used my first doubloon to buy a pint of Heineken and stayed with that until I got more doubloons later that evening. It was but then that I saw the bottle of Captain Morgan behind the barkeep and ordered a Capt’n Coke right away. I had two of those before Eamonn and I made our way to Connolly Station to get the bus.

At the end of the night I had over 30k steps on my pedometer and didn’t think that I would be able to do anything on the Saturday. Stay tuned to learn what I did on said Saturday despite the growing pain in my legs.

Cheers,
Angelo

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

Road Trip

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

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

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!

And. Here. We. Go!

Well not quite… It’s only Saturday evening and I need to tell you about what happened the last couple of days.

On Wednesday, we met Margaret for the first time. She seems nice enough and is – as far as I can tell – quite committed to making our stay here as enjoyable an experience as can be. I found out where I was supposed to be working, had it not been for a change in personnel in the Beaumont Hospital, which is only about 10 minutes from where I am staying now. They cancelled because, with the changes going on, they wouldn’t have the time to take care of me properly. Margaret however, told me not to worry because she was expecting to hear from another company that very evening. I was not concerned in the least because I was kind of looking forward to another couple of days of vacation. 😉

Thor’s day, was in fact so uneventful that I don’t even remember what I did except for uploading the report I had written on Wednesday but hadn’t have the energy to fill with pictures, yet. Ah! I bought a little container of Nivea Night Cream that was supposed to help with healing my lips and nose because I had actually rubbed them raw with the tissues and the Vaseline only made it worse. The cream helped a great deal although the first couple of times it burned like a sonovabitch but I guess they couldn’t just print:” Don’t apply on raw flesh; hurts like a sonovabitch!” on the container…

Yesterday was our last day of school here in Ireland though we’ll be learning a great deal in the weeks to come. When are you ever done learning, right?! We had a little exam and saw Due Date afterwards. It’s a movie with Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) and Zach Galifianakis (Hangover) who plays a character that nobody could ever stand. It was a lot of fun and I actually didn’t remember this movie being that funny.
After being presented with a certificate for the completion of the course, Toni, George and I went to eat a burrito. We had about an hour after lunch, to get to the Guinness Storehouse and Margaret’s office which is right around the corner of the aforementioned. We decided to walk instead of taking the bus, which turned out to be a good idea because for one, it was a nice and sunny day and the other, we walked by Christ Church Cathedral. Now, I’m not religious but I do appreciate nice architecture and the Head of the Church kind of does, too.

CCCathedral

CCC looks really cool with all its really interesting features that come from the repeated reconstruction and probably also adding of specific features, popular at certain times. Margaret later told us, that visitors are actually allowed into the crypt beneath the Cathedral and that is something I am definitely going to check out.
When we arrived at Margaret’s office, she gave us a small tour through the building which actually holds a huge variety of different start-ups and a lot of IT-based businesses. She also handed me the information concerning my work placement but I will write about that later [probably next week ;)].

The tour at the Guinness Storehouse was self-guided which was cool because you could set your own pace. While the process of brewing a Guinness is much like that of brewing any other beer (e.g. Kilkenny, Berliner Pilsner, Becks, Heineken, etc.), George, Toni and I had the opportunity to participate in a course, teaching us how to taste a Guinness the way it is intended.

GuinnessTasting

We went on upwards to the Sky Bar after finishing the class with honors. Well maybe not honors but at least we had a small Guinness before now getting a bigger one. The view from Sky Bar is great. If it hadn’t been as crowded, I would have taken the time to read all the information provided on the glass all around the bar but we just barely managed to find a spot to take a few pictures before leaving there and finishing our pints in the middle of the room.

GuinnessBeard

The Sky Bar being the end of the tour, we decided to go home and not linger on too long. I came home to a salad with eggs, ham and cheese and a cup of tea with Ann. We talked about a variety of different topics ranging from the way her house used to look 25 years ago when they first moved here to the disgraceful murder of a young woman in Galway who was stabbed by a 27 year old man, yesterday. Ann’s daughter Deirdre came by later to do Ann’s hair and I took that as a cue to go to my room. Before going to bed I booked a trip with Travelling Languages (our school here in Dublin) for the 24th and 25th of May for 145€ to Connemara. It’s supposed to play further into my language learning experience here and I’m looking forward to it.

I met George today at around 12 o’clock. We wanted to go to O’Connell Street to buy shirts and a tie for him at Penneys as well as postcards and stamps. I was looking to buy shoes that would withstand the Connemara weather but all they had at Penneys were flip-flops. We had lunch at Papa John’s, a pizza place, for 8€ each including a soda from the infamous Coca-Cola brand. It was a lot of fun, waiting for the little doohickey to vibrate so you know your order is ready. When I was walking home a couple of hours ago, it started to rain again, naturally. But as Roger Miller put it:” Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.” I’ll let you be the judges to which kind of person I am in this case.

Rain

Have a good night!

PS: This post scriptum is actually only here so I can brag about having over 1000 words in one of my posts. I hope you’ll understand. It was a lot of fun! 😉

A Very Warm Welcome

To say it was cloudy when we arrived at Dublin Airport would be quite the understatement. However, the carpet looked beautiful from above and kept us warm from below. I don’t know what the temperature was but I had to open all 3 of my jackets on our way to the bus.

After hunting down our luggage we made our way outside where Damien, our driver from INTERNSPLUS, waited. He gave us our welcome pack including an Irish sim (which I’m not going to use) and instructions for the first week in school. We have to attend classes at a language school near the Trinity College in the city and since Monday is a bank holiday, we have to stay the whole day on Tuesday. Wednesday through Friday it’s supposed to be 4 hours from 9am to 1pm so there’s time to see the city afterwards. There is also going to be a welcome meeting on Wednesday after class.

I was the first one to get off the bus and Damien brought me to the front door of 31 Elm Mount Heights where Ann O’Connor is now harboring me. She showed me to the room where I put down my bag and backpack and took off my jackets. I went down to have a cup of tea and a sandwich in the kitchen. I talked to Ann for quite some time and asked her about the things I would have to keep in mind while staying with her and her husband. She told me that there is also a guy from Saudi Arabia and a guy from Switzerland in the house and that she has been a host for about 2 years now. She mostly has full time students here and I’m the first one to have a work experience.

After my second cup of tea Ann told me that she had to run some errands, gave me the key to her Wi-Fi and I went up to unpack. My room had obviously belonged to some girl before because she kindly left her hair all over the wooden floor. I got rid of the hairs and started unpacking.

Later that evening Ann’s daughter and two of her sons where supposed to join us for dinner. I sat in the kitchen while she prepared lamb chops with potatoes and assorted vegetables and an apple pie. We talked a lot which I really enjoyed.

The evening was great and the food awesome. I stayed up until long after 2am that night, talking to Ann, her son Patrick, his wife Denise (who both kindly invited me to their house warming party and Denise’s Birthday) and the rest of the family. Patrick told me about the national sport Hurling and said that the championship is about to start. He offered to take me to a game one time and I’m looking forward to it.

Patrick also offered me a chance to have a Guinness and after having three Heineken already I felt reluctant to refuse the offer. So after 2 Guinness, a couple of jokes and singing Dubliners songs, Patrick and Denise where the last to leave the party and I went to bed after they had left.

I felt very welcome that day and considering it was only the first day and they had just met me, I’m looking forward to the days to come.