Diskurswelt.de

Saturday, I had my last exam: Distributed & Mobile Computing. Just like Economics and Advanced Databases it went pretty well. I don’t really know what to expect in the two management subjects, but that did not matter anymore that day, because we had a barbecue at our place. Chris was the hero of the day: he had finished his exams the week before and when I returned in company of some friends to our home, we were delighted to see that he had already lighted the barbecue. Awesome!

We spent all the afternoon and evening lying in the grass, enjoyed some of the good stuff, talked about all the world and his brother and did not leave the green before the last rays of sunlight were gone. After dark, we went to the last Erasmus party in city centre. Of course, it was in Anthony’s flat and almost everyone was there. Great fun!

Unfortunately, our friend and housemate Isma could not join us – he had left already on Friday due to another exam in Spain. See you, amigo.

Friday, Natalia and Luisa invited us to go with them and some others to Thomas Read, a pub in Dame street, where a guy called Brian performed rock, pop, country and Irish folk songs for hours without a break. According to the girls, he’s there every Friday night. Although, the prices are quite dear it is a good place to be on a Friday night.

It is that time of the year again: examinations. My timetable is not much better than last semester’s. I’ve got five exams in one week.

The examinations in Distributed and Mobile Computing make up 50% of the final grade, the ones in International Business and Advanced Databases 60% and the Management and Organisational Behaviour 2 and Economics 2 exams 70%. I asked for permission not to split myself into two on Thursday and take the exams one after another. Fortunately, the examination office decided in favour of my request. Thank you so much.

Booked some flights today: my brother will come over in the first week of June. We are going to spend some days in Dublin and around. On the 8th of June, I will accompany him on his flight back to Hamburg and then will stay in Germany for good.
So let it be written, let it be done.

While this entry might be a rather boring for the average reader, it might be of value for future or potential ITT Dublin students. You have been warned.

In Advanced Databases there was one practical CA in one of the labs and one theory test in class. In the former we had to create DDL and DQL statements using Oracle’s object-relational features. The in-class test was about indexes (including some calculations) and the architecture of Oracle instances. Both CAs were not too hard if you had put in some work before and I am contended with my results.

Wow, 64MB of flash storage! The three best students in this semester’s first CA in Economics were rewarded with an unbelievably huge flash drive. I achieved 100%, so I got one. If anyone has a creative idea what to do with merely 64MB, tell me via the comments.
Needless to say that I did not really make friends in class with that result. „Does lightning strike twice?“ they asked me cheeky before the second CA. Well, I did not crack the 100% again, but still, I had a very good result and was the best in class. I’m somewhat proud of that (would I tell you otherwise?), because I was able to answer macroeconomic questions that are rather heavy on theory, despite the fact that my command of the English language is far from perfect. I’m confident and don’t have a reason to be afraid of the upcoming exam.

For International Business I had to research the reasons for Ireland’s success in attracting Foreign Direct Investment and argue what should be done in order to maintain the current level of FDI or at least minimise reductions. I had a bit of a hard time to finish it, because of all the travelling during the Easter break. Actually, I wrote some bits of it while waiting for my flights at the airports of Dublin and Frankfurt. All in all a very interesting assignment; I am not too happy with the result, though.

This semester’s Management and Organisational Behaviour CA was very different from last semester’s, in which I had worked together with Immanuel. The two Irish girls that had joined us disappeared even before our first meeting. So I was prepared to do it all on my own this time. However, three Irish lads invited me to join their group. I happily accepted as they seemed to be nice and, in comparison to others in the class, showed some motivation. What a misconception!
The assignment was to carry out a literature review on one of three proposed topics. We had all the time in the world for that: from the beginning of the semester until the first week after the Easter break. When after some weeks the others still had not done the necessary readings in order to get into the topic, we had some kind of „crisis meeting“. It turned out, they did not even know what we were working on:
„Aren’t we working on Corporate Culture?“ one guy asked.
„No!? Organisation Development. We decided that ages ago.“ I replied and could not believe what I had heard.
That was the moment I should have pulled out and do it all myself. I did not; I was too nice, too patient. Instead, I worked and send them updates about my progress via mail including the latest version and some ideas what they could work on. No reply. In the end, after a lot of to and fro the inevitable came: I „fired“ my team after the Easter break, because they hadn’t done anything at all. I then completed everything including their parts in the remaining days: 21 pages. It was the right decision and absolutely worth it: I got a really good mark that I probably would not have gotten if I had stayed with a dysfunctional team. However, I was a bit angry at myself, because I could have saved myself a lot of stress if I had trusted my feelings earlier. A lesson learned.

For Distributed and Mobile Computing we had to analyse an interactive, secure website of our choice from an HTTP perspective. I decided to work on Bank of Ireland’s 365 online and found out that they should work on their use of Caching-related headers.
The other assignment was to develop a simple inter-active website targeted at low-end mobile devices and defend all the design decisions made in a separate document. Using very basic php5 and SQLite I built „PubTracker“, a web app that facilitates spontaneous meetings while you’re out, in one evening and wrote the document in another afternoon. The reason for all these short times? The above outlined MOB project. However, sometimes constraints can be a very positive thing: although the application is really not special at all, I’m a bit proud of it as I believe that the code is clean, concise and very elegant. Maybe, I am going to publish it for others to poke around with it if I find the time and quiet.
I had my presentation this Tuesday and the results are not yet published, but Jeremy said that the lecturer seemed impressed. Let’s see.