Conference

Next week sees myself and Barry off to Glasgow to present two papers at the "Mind the Gap" conference at the University of Strathclyde.

 

Etape du Tour 2011

Tommy O'Reilly, a great supporter of Co-operation Ireland, is taking on the challenge of next year's Etape du Tour in support of our charity.  Tommy would like some company, so if there is any mad like-minded cyclists out there who would like the challenge of cycling in the French Alps, this might be your chance.  Here's what Tommy has to say:

Vietnam to Cambodia Bike Ride

There are numerous charity challenges out there and for anyone wanting to take on a personal challenge and do something positive, both for themselves and to support a favourite charity, taking on a sporting challenge may be the way to go.  The Vietnam to Cambodia Bike Ride scheduled for February 2011 is Co-operation Ireland's next big trip of a lifetime.  

Communicating our work

Co-operation Ireland has been extremely busy the past months. We have introduced a number of new projects, targeting some of the most disadvantaged communities in our society. The fundraising department re-instated the Belfast – Dublin Maracycle and have organised two exciting new overseas sporting challenges - Trek Killmanjaro and Vietnam to Cambodia Bike Ride.

Communications is particularly important for us and we are currently developing a comprehensive plan for promoting all our work, through on-line and more traditional methods of communications.

I miss FreeBSD

My ISP wants me to run openSuSE Linux instead of FreeBSD on our hosted server. It took me a while to get used to administering Apache/PHP/Drupal based sites on openSUSE rather than FreeBSD because SuSE and linux in general keeps config files in many different places. That's OK, as long as the documentation is good. I must confess that I much prefer the FreeBSD handbook to the OpenSuSE documentation. I find it hard to navigate my way around the OpenSuSE site, and too many wiki pages are empty stubs.

Co-operation Ireland - Morgan Stanley

The Co-operation Ireland – Morgan Stanley project ended last week.  This project aimed at giving a group of young people from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and London an opportunity to engage in an event that could possibly have life-changing impacts.

Contested Spaces - Terraforming

The technical issues that had plagued us over the last few weeks are now resolved and we can begin work on creating the environment for the game which the two groups of young people will play.

At the moment it is a barren island on which we will 'build' our own environment to a set specification.

Co-operation Ireland - Morgan Stanley

January past I was in London at the BETT show and meeting a few people with respect to impending projects when I had a meeting with our CEO Peter Sheridan and our GB Executive Mike Murphy about fundraising and social media.  At the end of the meeting they invited me to come with them to meet with some people from Morgan Stanley with whom they had made contact.  These were Morgan Stanley employees who had an Irish connection and who wanted to help Co-operation Ireland

CONTESTED SPACES

The Co-operation Ireland Contested Space Project supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation will be commencing soon.

The project seeks to take advantage of the unique teaching and learning opportunities provided separately and together by synchronous and asynchronous learning within a three dimensional visual, immersive and virtual environment. The virtual environment is Second Life, and the participants will be meeting and interacting online within the environment that will be secure and safe for them to do so.

Disaster Recovery

While everyone else in Co-operation Ireland is getting ready to help with Maracycle, I've been stress-testing our disaster recovery mechanisms. The good news is no data was lost. The bad news is that recovery takes longer than expected, but I still recovered two computers in one working day.

Scenario One:
Laptop has close encounter with a beverage container. Beverage emerges as clear victor.