A post in the category "Local". But local is somewhere else now.


I'm in Galway, Ireland right now. There's a lot to tell - but not as much as I would have liked. But let's start at the beginning.

As you might know, I'm here to write a Master Thesis at DERI, where quite a bunch of Semantic Web gurus do their research: You might remember my visit for FOAF-Galway.
It's rather warm (gulf stream!), rainy of course, but I did really underestimate the winds, I will have to buy a good windstopper :) I'm sleeping at Sleepzone, which is remarkable indeed: free and fast internet access via wlan, reasonable pricing, quality facilities, good electronic access control.

On the train from Dublin to Galway I met Andreas Harth (chat about SemWeb business opportunities et cetera), here at the hostel I ran into Jørgen W. Lang, O'Reilly's German translator of almost all their recent Perl books (chatted about writing books, tools and languages, et cetera).

Monday I'll start with the top priority item on my todo list: the definition of my thesis topic. It's somewhat clear, but still needs quite some refinement and writing out. Besides as much talking as possible with the relevant people at DERI the plan for the week also includes finding a suitable room and getting internet access at the university: Preparing, building up concentration, getting really ready to get things done.

More tales about the aspiring city of Galway soon, I hope to illustrate them with some photos, although it looks like I won't be able to 'moblog', haven't yet managed to get GPRS running.

If you want to you can skype me, my user name ist hannes.gassert, I'm always interested in stories from less peripheral parts of the world.

Oh, and before I forget: it's my first time at the Atlantic Ocean. I do like it a lot, the sea is wonderful indeed. It really looks like the above photo here.


Update: I'm at DERI now, I have a desk already, an IBM docking station + screen, I'm online and will have an email address in some minutes. Looks all like a perfect match. If only I was prepared a little better :)