Ireland day 1: Dublin (part 3) - Dublin at Night

In this post, I will mostly let pictures talk and maybe say only a few words on single ones. Most of them are bridges, which are illuminated by green light from below.Looks really beautiful, doesn't it?

Custom House at Night

Millenium Bridge

Ireland day 1: Dublin (part 2)

So, finally I got some spare time to write the rest of the Ireland series and the photos are all uploaded now, too.
The Historical Walking Tour started at the front of Trinity College. After walking through the front gates we had a look at the wonderful courtyard and the

A part of the Trinity College courtyard*

He told us some interesting stuff about the college's history, but I can't remember anymore, too bad!
Here is some nice photo of the Library Square:

Libary Square*

Trinity College had a lot of famous students, like Oscar Wilde, and also is - from what I understood - much involved in the Irish history and the history of dublin. For more details, have a look at Wikipedia.
Walking back to the front gate, you can find the Irish Houses of Parliament, which now inherits the Bank of Ireland.

Ireland day 1: Dublin (part 1)

So here I am now, in Dublin.
Flight was relatively relaxed, only few turbolences. I was a bit nervous before departure that I have forgotten something important so I would be taken off the plane in the last minutes, but everything went fine.
Isa recommended the three days ticket by DublinBus, the local public transport company, because I'll move to her tomorrow. I had some issues with the ticket's RFID chip, it was damaged so it could not be read. Luckily the bus from the airport(line 747) has its first stop at O'Connell Street, directly on the opposite side of Dublinbus headquarters and exchange was quite easily.
You have the possibility to get a "Freedom of Dublin" ticket for 24 € for adults and 13 or 14 euros for Students. With that ticket you can go on the dublinbus sightseeing and normal bus lines and drop off at any place you like. However, all desired places can also be reached by foot easily, so in my eyes you should think about it twice. As the ticket is valid for 3 days like mine (I paid 13.50 €  without the sightseeing feature) it is only worth if you either want sightseeing by bus or go to the outer regions.
After arrival I went to "The Times Hostel", which is a footstep away from Trinity College. On my way there I passed the O'Connel Bridge, which is wider than it is large.

Holidays in Ireland

Readings free time at University Dortmund is nearly over, it ends on 10th of October, but I still had to take some of the holidays from work, so I decided to spend part of the time into a one-week-trip to Dublin and Leixlip, a small town in County Kildare, Ireland.

Let me mention I never made such a trip before. Of course I've been traveling by plane a few times, but always with friends or family. Now I'm flying alone the first time, to a country I rarely know except from the news or wikipedia. I'm not scared, in contrary! I'm exptremly curious what I will experience and a bit nervous, to be honest.
So, I'll take the plane from Frankfurt Hahn Airport here in Germany to Dublin at 29th September and come back on 5th October. I'll stay one day at a hostel somewhere there,for approx. 15-20 € a night. I only once slept in a hostel before (in Munich) and I guess this will be interesting ;)

From Thursday on Isa, an Au-pair and good friend which I know from my old school, invited me to spend the rest of the days at her. She is a really kind, funny and lovely person(you know, that kind you can phone with five or more hours at a time and never get enough) so I'm very happy that we will finally meet again after 2.5 years :)


I don't really know what exactly will expect me either in Dublin or in Leixlip at Isa, so I'm very curious about all this holiday thing.
From what I guess Isa and me will have a lot of fun, because we have a lot of things in common, so I am very glad we have contact again since a few weeks.
We will see :)

Well a few things I know fore sure: In Leixlip it will be about 10-15°C outside temperature, with wind and rain, Guinness beer(I can't get enough of this wonderful stuff!) and the mysteries of different kinds of whiskey which will reqire some personal research, including an intensive case study...

Hopefully I get the opportunity to post some pictures and experiences omy f trip in here, so hang on!

Cheers,
Tobi

Amplifiers and ground loops

In the students home where I lived, a bar was openened yesterday and I had to put some professional audio equipment there which I lend from a good friend of mine. It was a very big success and my first time I was the DJ, but people sung and danced 8-)
Because the whole equipment, means the amp rack, 2 top speakers and one huge subwoofer of exactly the size of an ground loop. I assume my computers power supply unit is responsible for that (its been actually 20 Euros, which was really cheap for 420 Watts some years ago).
Today I luckily found a very nice solution around this issue: My work laptop does not produce a ground loop, so it is predestinated for a PC to amplifier rack connection. On my main PC I use foobar2000 (there is no good linux alternative and sadly, I'm on windows again for some reason). So I found edcast which is capable of streaming to Shoutcast and IceCast from foobar(it's actually a DSP plugin). Because I hate Winamp and Icecast is OSS, I used the latter. Now it nicely streams my foobar playlists to the VLC media player of the laptop. Theres a control delay of about 5 seconds, but regarding the point that the audio gets ogg encoded and VLC buffers 1200 ms, I'm really fine with that.
Now the whole students home has to listen to the music I like, it is very loud in my room now. I even changed my IM status message to "Students home now listening to [track] by [artist]"...

In short: The advantage of no power

In the second week of this month I went to munich again, because working together in the office with Jens and Manuel is much more fun than sitting there alone.
Somehow I forgot that USB-cable I usually use to charge my cell phone, so it ran out of battery after a few days. Since then I was very astonished how I good I can live without it. The reason for this might be that mainly used my cell phone as a (alarm )clock with telephone/SMS functions. First I used KAlarm to wake me up with my favourite music, but this wasn't very energy friendly(okay I want a beach right in front of my appartment in Dortmund, but not THAT fast :P), so I bought a normal alarm clock which can receive the time signal of the atomic clock in Frankfurt(its signal range is over 1500 km, so you might be able to receive it as well). Purpose was that if I travel around putting batteries in and out, I didn't want to have to set the current time each time and it costed about 8 € which is a fair price.

Since the batterys got no power, I do have it, means total control over when I want to call, to whom and so on.
This is real freedom! I just love it :)
Maybe I should buy a wristwatch and put the cell phone away (nearly) forever...(and the secret services would not be able to trace me anymore....big brother is watching you ;) )

Donations, plus and a few words about Jesus and religion

Yesterday I had some my kind minutes and I donated one month last.fm subscriber to a good mate in New Zealand and was happy about doing so. Not that I am not a very friendly and nice person, but I love to make other poeple happy.
Today I was thinking what to write in my next article and I thought "you always wanted to donate some money for a good purpose".
So, why didn't I do it before? Lets shift that question a bit for now.

First time I made thoughts about donating money was about 2 years ago. I was in 12th class at german high school and in religion classes we read a really awesome book called "Was würde Jesus heute sagen"("What would Jesus say today") by a german politican called Heiner Geißler. From this book, a learned many things and thanks whoever I read it.

A few words about myself

Hey!
My name is Tobias and I was born on 26 Oct 1989. I currently live in Dortmund and study physics, but my heart still is in Remscheid(Germany) where the discoverer of the X-rays, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, was born.
Physics is really fun to me, because all physicans are staying children and love to play(including me).
There's just another point to mention: I love programming, mainly Java and Visual Basic.net.
Most people think physics and informatics are unrelated to each other, but in my opinion that isn't really true. In both you have to solve problems in a strictly logical way. Because I code since I was in 2nd class of elementary school it really formed my way of thinking this way, to have a problem, split it into tiny pieces, reduce it to something simple and then just solve it. Same way as you do in physics, too.
The bad thing about physics is that in moste cases it is way to expensive as a hobby, but programming is not.
So I stick with programming. I currently work for a small, but really great software company called headissue which develops for a ticketing page for events in and around there using Java. The work there is very much fun to me, although the problems to solve sometimes could drive me nuts.

Privately my main interest is for Last.fm and its API, so I'll post here about that from time to time, too. My main projects are LastFmLib.net, a .net library for the API and LastFVS.
LastFVS is something similiar to Google Moderator, but way better. It was annoying that there were feature requests in the web services forum but no overview and no vote counter was available. LastFVS perfectly fills that gap, offering a good voting functionality, login via last.fm account and a comment functionality which supports some BB-codes, too.

Hope you will visit my blog from time to time, I promise that I'll try hard to present you an interesting mix of (mainly technology, programming and last.fm related) topics :)
If you'd like to, you can also subscribe to the atom feed of this blog. If you are using Firefox, the FeedSidebar add-on is a good point to start with.