Eurocopter
Back in Germany
On Saturday we got back to our flat in sunny Munich. The weather reports I have seen were vastly overrated. At best, it is the same as we are getting in Britain. There is some snow, it’s cold but nothing overly extreme about it. Seems that it has been a lot worse further north though.
I would add a photograph of the snow here but I don’t have one so I’ll add one of it from before we left a month ago. It doesn’t look a lot different now.
I’m back at work today. There wasn’t really much happened while I was gone but then most other people were off as well. I made a release just before I left, was about the last thing I did on the last day. Although I rushed it out to fix a lot of bugs that people were struggling with I was dreading that it might have made loads more and I would be inundated with emails when I got back but no, there a couple of minor things but that is it. On the whole, it seems that everything works.
Pay day
Tomorrow is the end of our sixth week at Eurocopter and our first pay day. This will be good because we have been living on a tight budget for the last few weeks, we were given an advance last month but that barely covered the rent so this month we will have some money left over. We might actually be able to go out for a drink.
As a result of this, I haven’t really done anything since my last post. I have spent the weekends in, watching TV. Boring I know, but free. I did have the media server and my Xbox shipped over last week. I installed Windows Home Server on it, upgrading from XP. I have to say that it is a really good operating system. It was Tom who recommended I get it as he has been using one for some time. The storage pool is a great idea and works really well. It is very easy to add new hard drives as space runs out or old ones die and then to remove the older ones from the pool. It is all managed for you, you just make new shared folders, set the permissions and WHS handles the rest. A useful feature is also folder duplication. This can be enabled on each share individually and ensures that everything in it is always on at least 2 separate drives in case of failure.
I was thinking about my FYP yesterday, while it might be a bit early to start anything properly, I am thinking of a few ideas for what I want to do. My problem is that I am not sure what is expected. I don’t want to do something massively over the top that takes a long time and then doesn’t work properly because it was too ambitious. On the other I don’t want to go too small and lose marks because it wasn’t ambitious enough. I was thinking about using some kind of version control though, to protect me from myself more that anything. I have lost count of the number of times I have done something, then changed my mind and deleted it all, then changed my mind again but it is too late. I also have several copies of some programs where I have changed my mind about what I was going to do, made a backup of it and worked on. The comes the problem of maintaining 2 copies of the same program. A few months down the line, I come back to it and have no clue what I was doing or why there is 2 copies of the same program, what the differences are etc. I am really my own worst enemy. As to which version control system to use, I am learning towards Subversion, I have looked at several different ones and it seems like it will do everything while be easy to use. TortoiseSVN should help there. Coupled with my new WHS server, I can store the repositories on there and enable folder duplication.
All this however, will have to wait, because if my wages do clear tomorrow I should think this weekend will be spent in a Bier Garten.
Munich
We’ve been here for just over 2 weeks now and things are going well. We have had no Internet up until today but besides that it hasn’t been too bad. The language barrier can be awkward at times but a lot of people speak English and I am starting to pick up odd bits of German.
Getting an Internet connection has been a nightmare though. We went into the store to sign up 2 weeks ago yesterday and were told that it would take about a week. Not a problem we thought, anyway the paper work starts to arrive (all in German) and it seemed that we wouldn’t be activated until the 28th, 2 weeks after we first went in. We discovered that Burger King has free wi-fi for customers so we went there a few times and then found out there was an Internet cafe across the street so have also been there. So then the router arrives, we set it up hoping maybe we were activated early but no joy. So the 28th came and went, still no connection. Seems there is a fault that won’t be fixed until next Tuesday so in the meantime we have bought a mobile data stick from Vodafone. €30 for the stick and €10 for 7 days connection. €40 for a week of Internet might seem like a lot but we may decide the scrap Telekom and keep it because it is twice the speed of the DSL line we should have by now.
The weather here only really has 3 states. We have seen 2 of them so far, will be a few months for the third. There is endless blue skies, 30C+. And torrential rain. There isn’t really any middle ground on them for long, we have gone from 1 to the other and back again in about an hour. The third is 3 feet of snow but that is 5-6 months away yet. Fortunately a lot more places have air conditioning here so inside it isn’t too bad. Even when it is raining it is still warm.
Mid way through my second week of work at Eurocopter, I’m finding the work to be good, I would like to move onto some different areas throughout the year so I hope that will be possible. Flexi time is a great invention, we can go in and leave whenever we want as long as we get the hours in at some point. I am trying to build up some now so I can get a few extra days off. Or have a lie in once in a while. German laws prevent us from doing more than 10 hours a day though and we have to do 8, but if we keep it up we get an extra day off every 4 days so it only takes a month to get a week off. This does mean getting up early though every day. We are usually trying to get in on the first bus which means leaving the flat at 5:40am to get to work for 6:25am the buses don’t run as often at that time of day so we have a 15 minute wait at the station. We can get the second bus and leave here at 6:10 to get there for 6:40 like we did this morning. This also means if you don’t feel like working you can go home at 3.
We haven’t really had much time to go and explore Munich, although now we have travel passes they wouldn’t give us circle 1 so we still have to pay to go to the centre which is annoying. I hope that we will also get some time this year to get out of Munich and go to the surrounding areas. Maybe go to the Alps one day or something. If we do, I’ll be sure to get some photos. Before that though, here’s the view from my window.
Packed and ready to go
All packed