CONIECTO

I arrived yesterday in Ireland, flying from Duesselforf -Weeze to Shannon airport.
I had to spend the night before in Cologne, as the airport bus was leaving at 5:30 am.
Picked up a place I knew years before, and it didn't disapoint me: no credit card needed, a clean, peaceful and friendly place, supportive people, and...more computers in the lobby!

In Limerick, I had one hour to get to the University, and another hour to take posession of my desk and brand-new Dell computer, to say hello to my new colleagues and to regain my breath, before attending Erran Carmel's presentation organised by the ISERC. I recorded it on my MP3 stick, but later on I found out it was actually recorded on video by the ISERC (the link to it can be found on the bottom of the page, and the slides are also available for download). The presentation was titled "Offshoring - Distance Matters", and it was a comprehensive review of the problems raised by offshoring (not the same thing as outsourcing).

Carmel's most recent book, Global Software Teams: Collaborating Across Borders and Time Zones (High Performance Cluster Computing), speaks about the same problems.

After the presentation, Liam Bannon's team of the SOC-GSD project (that's us!) and Brian Fitzgerald's team of the Agile Approaches project had the chance of a less formal talk with prof. Carmel - a sort of round table were different points oof view were exposed, and the guest tried to answer to a few questions.

All I could do was to sit there and listen - I was jetlagged/tired/impressed, I had been travelling for 2 1/2 days, but the important thing was that I was finally here, and I had the chance of attending that presentation.

In the afternoon, a supportive colleague gave me a lift and brought me back to my B&B - a Georgian style house located right in the middle of the city, where, to the great dissapointment of my landlady who intended to drag me to a pub, I slept like a baby for 12 hours.