Diskurswelt.de

Last weekend was great! Yoann asked everyone to come to the Metro on Saturday, his birthday. Although one could already hear the bad 90s music from hundreds of metres distance, it was pretty cool. Almost everyone, who was already back in Tallaght, showed up and we really had a great time together. I haven’t had so much fun while going out in months.
The day after, Thomas, Chris and I were invited to come to Anna for dinner (yummi wraps!) and I helped her migrating all her data from her old laptop to her red, new Dell. Did I already mention that I could possibly start working right away as a customer service representative for them right away? I already helped and gave advice to so many people that configured and ordered Dell laptops over here that I would like to ask: „Where is my bonus, Mister Dell?“

Enter Examinations:
Wed, 12:30-14:30 Corporate Social Responsibility
Thu, 15:30-17:30 Management and Organisational Behaviour
Fri, 09:30-11:30 Human Resource Management
Fri, 12:30-14:30 Economics 1
Fri, 15:30-17:30 Software Development 5

„O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee!“
Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3

Fortunately, this is last week’s exam time-table and not this week’s. This means: it’s already part of the past. Yay! Despite the circumstances, the exams went pretty well. Of course, I was not able to learn and prepare everything to the extent that I originally wanted to, but my instincts did not let me down and I correctly identified the most important aspects and learned them.

However, I am not very happy with the exam as well as my performance in Software Development. I do not know if it was just me, but there were way to many small syntax questions, where you could write everything in between two short sentences and a full-fledged thesis. Thus, time became an issue.
In my opinion, some of the questions were a bit stupid. If there are more searches than inserts, why would you keep things sorted by regularly sorting them instead of inserting at the right spot in the first place? And why the hell would you want to use a Bubblesort? Moreover, as often in class, there was a lack of sound object-orientation in the interfaces that had to be implemented as specified.
Of course, fatigue reared its ugly head after all these hours of examination and my performance (as well as my handwriting) went dooown. But I am not too worried: the examination only makes about half of the grade and the CAs and lab work hand-ups that make up the other one were almost perfect. More than 95% I think.

After this examination marathon, there is one more exam next Friday: Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I thought I deserve one or two days off now to recharge my batteries. So yesterday evening, Herr Doktor and I went to meet Tom at his place, where we chilled and played some games on the Xbox 360. Boy, it was good to see him again and I’m looking forward to tonight, because we’ll probably go out with some other guys that I haven’t really seen in a while (Chris!).

Wednesday’s CA in Software Development was rather easy (singly-linked list) and therefore went pretty well although I lacked some hours of sleep. In the evening we celebrated Klaus‘ 21st birthday with a few pints of delicious Bulmers in Captain Americas, Tallaght (good: they had student discounts and a pint was just 3€, bad: karaoke night, which means bad singers at a way to high volume).
It was nice, but I had to leave early, because of the presentation on Thursday. Here are some photos:

By the way: that night I met Colin, a nice and friendly guy from my HRM class, and confronted him with the rumours about his (ex-)membership in an Northern Irish boyband. Although he was a bit surprised, he did not deny it. Quite the contrary: he promised me to show me some of his „cheesy, commercial“ (his own words) music someday next week. Research using Google and YouTube was so far rather… shocking!?

Here’s the reason why I could neither go with the InCuSo to Cork, nor to Kilkenny:

CAs. Lots of CAs. So I spent most of my time in my room writing. Grr! I left the realms of eustress far behind, but I have to admit that there were some good hours, too.

Maria, Daniel’s girlfriend visited him and we celebrated her 25th birthday on Thursday with a yummy chili con carne and Immanuel, Anna and Georg came to our house.
On Friday, Chris and I played some games of pool (even worse than the last time) and met Dr. Strangelove, Ismael and the Spanish girls at Tramway Court. In their apartment, we had a few drinks (Calimucho, börks) and played a funny Spanish party game, which involved a hooker, a killer, the killer’s colleague and a policemen before it got weird, because people started dancing and singing and Chris faked a striptease. No, it was not what you know probably think it was…
Yesterday, we met Tom and Natalie, who took the plane from Copenhagen again, and went to the cinema, where we watched Changeling, the new movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Afterwards, Chris and I went to his flat where we joined Alejandro and his girlfriend Jane (from Northern Ireland) as well as Carmen and her boyfriend Pedro (from Spain), who chilled in the living room. Jeez, Daniel was damn right when he referred to these days as „the couple days“!

Time is flying! This week will most certainly be very intensive as I not only have to prepare myself for the tests in Software Development and Innovation & Entrepreneurship, but also have to meet with my HRM group to compile a presentation on our project, practise it and finalise the project in corporate social responsibility, which became a bit chaotic due to strange requirements by a very ignorant person (not one my group members). On Friday, I’ll be through with all my CAs for this semester.

Next weekend there’ll be a day trip with the InCuSo, then my friend Flo (a.k.a. Idefix) will come over from Germany for some days, the day he leaves I’ll probably go to Galway with the InCuSo, on the 15th there’ll be a Christmas party and shortly thereafter I’ll be sitting in a RyanAir plane that is heading for Northern Germany.
In a blink of an eye my first semester at the ITT Dublin will be over. Wow!

I’d really like to take some more time to contemplate the last days as well as the coming ones and what this means for me, but I guess I should better go back to work.
In case you already forgot how I look like, because I was sitting in my cave all the time, here’s a recent (decent?) photo:

Yesterday, we had a closed-book CA in the Software Development class. The task was to implement some basic I/O and functions that did some basic calculation with arrays of doubles. Three of the functions were very similar and after half an hour I was basically done – 90 minutes before we had to hand in our source code.

The other seemed to be still working. I read the instructions and specifications on the sheet again. And again. No, everything done. I did not dare to leave that early – a dilemma. Some minutes, which I spent with code clean-up, slight refactoring, documentation, later, I still seemed to be the only one, who was finished. Okay, let’s test, monkey-test. Still about 45 minutes to kill. Hm, boring. I uploaded my work on moodle and left.

Later, I found out that Stefan and Lukas/Klaus had a similar problem. Each of them was finished and did not want to be the only one, who leaves reeeally early, as well. Wasted time. Next time we’ll probably agree on some secret code noise: Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »

Finally, I have all my learning agreements. Althought some still lack a signature, I’d like to take this as a reason to tell you about my courses: Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »