Dari's Weblog

Now there’s only 4 weeks left until I’ll leave Germany, 5 weeks until I’ll leave europe, 6 weeks until I’ll arrive in China, and 8 weeks until I arrive at my new home =P.

All my things are already packed into boxes for shipping or stored at my parents’ homes. All that is left to do is get a visa (which is in the works) and board the plane.

Currently I’m still working on a customer’s project in which I’m responsible for the process control development. Until now I participated in all the fun part of developing the machine. Now is a critical phase in which we need to bring the project to a presentable status for a field test, and after that I’ll be leaving the maintenance and debugging part to my successor – but of course there won’t be any bugs, only features. 😉

Afterwards, I’ll stay in Eggelsberg (Austria) for a week at our company’s HQ in order to organize a few last things and to get prepared for my future tasks.

But before arriving in China, I’ll have one week of vacation in Tokyo starting on October 8th. In Tokyo I’ll be visiting Bub, a friend since many years who is living in Japan since about two years already. (This trip had to be cancelled :(, see edit)

I’m really looking forward to that trip as I have never been to Japan before. Today I watched a documentary “wildes Japan” which showed some great scenery and amplified my delight for that trip.

After visiting Japan I’ll take off to Shanghai on 16th of October. Our main china office is in Shanghai and I’ll have a chance to meet a lot of new colleagues there.

Two weeks later, on October 30th I’ll eventually take off to Chengdu where I’ll be working in our local office on smart mold applications, and -more importantly- be reunited with my dear Cheng who has already been working in Chengdu since July and took care about finding an apartment for us! <3

2016 has been very eventful so far, and it seems to stay that way for a little longer!

Edit: Unfortunately my visa application was delayed for about 2 weeks. So I’ll have to skip the Tokyo trip, as I don’t have my passport now… 🙁 But for sure I’ll find another chance for that. Either, if the weather turns surprisingly good, it could be a spontaneous trip in November, and/or by the end of March during the cherry blossom festival.

When I went for the E-Camp in the middle of September, Cheng and I had already moved out from our apartment in Aachen… Goodbye Aachen, Goodbye Germany!

After stocking a lot of my things which I wouldn’t need too soon at my parents’ homes, I was still left with a lot of things I thought I would be using soon. So  I packed as many things as I could possibly fit into my car and headed straight to Eggelsberg, Austria!

…Or not, my first stop was actually in Nürnberg where I visited Max with whom I enjoyed a “Schäufele” and 2 or 3 beers with almost summer-like weather! A very pleasent last weekend after 2 months without work. 🙂

13.09.2015: Austria, here I come!

The next day I was the first participant of our E-Camp to arrive at the hotel and after I just finished carrying all of my boxes etc. to my room. I heard someone moving on the floor. The first new colleague I should meet: Matus!

Beginning of E-Camp: The next day we should finally all gather and start slowly with an introduction round and some general information. Our group was really international, 14 participants from 9 countries!

Basic Training: In the following months we have learned a lot together, and even though our group was very mixed in age -starting from 20 and me (30) being the second oldest- I can honestly say that we made a good team. Everyone was helpful and we supported each other learning all the different E-Camp topics.

During the basic training we still had enough free time to explore our new surroundings together and had a lot of fun doing so.

Labworks: And finally all of us had to prove ourselves by completing the labworks, which were composed of five 6-day projects. During this period of the E-Camp all of us were extremely busy trying to finish our projects, but we still managed to have at least some common free time during the weekends, and did a skiing trip in mid-January.

Amongs the projects were a CNC project, a 3-axes delta robot project, more motion control topics, a PID control project,  general logic control, and visualization work for all of them. It was a lot of work, but also rewarding when the machines finally behaved as you wanted after hours of coding!

All in all it was a great time during which we did not only learn a lot and got prepared for the job, but also had the chance to connect with our new colleagues and had a lot of fun experiences together!

Red Wednesday (or Chahārshanbeh Suri as I learned from Wikipedia) is celebrated at the last evening before the last Wednesday of the persian year, which starts with the beginning of spring.

This year it was on the 17.3.2015, Mitra lit several small grass fires and we jumped over them. This tradition origins from the Zarathustra and it is meant to fill your new year with health, luck, and good things in general.

Even though I do not believe in magical properties of fire, I didn’t skip the jumping part, and have not (yet) been ill this year.