..or how I managed to get dead frozen selling Romanian language lessons on Bedford Row on Saturday;)
A year ago, I found out about the existence of an organisation meant to bring together the Romanians living in Limerick. I started going to their monthly meetings whenever I could find the time, and I met very interesting people from all the paths of life there. At the first IRCBA meeting this year- I heard about the Excursions Performance festival and the “Sell your language” happening organised by Ania Bas as part of it. Me and my colleague Daniela Butan decided to give it a try.
We found Ania (who is Polish) and Helena Zelesakova (Slovakian) on Bedford Row, and we joined them. I must say that the “would you like to buy a language?” approach didn’t suit me, so I kind of turned it into “would you like to buy a language lesson?”. Daniela and I offered 5 min Romanian language lessons for 1 eur - a rather competitive price, taking into account that Slovak and Polish lessons cost 1.50 and 2 euros!
A lot of bypassers didn’t pay any attention to us, but quite a few asked for more detail, and a few accepted our offer. It was interesting to see how perfect Romanian pronounciation someone can achieve in just 5 minutes!
I didn’t make any money on the day, but I managed to learn some Irish in exchange!
I would have loved to see a lot more people involved in teaching their own language - the mix of languages offered was exclusively East European, while there’s such a variety of people coming from different corners of the world living in Limerick!
January 25 2009 | Events and Limerick and Uncategorized | No Comments »
A frosty afternoon… Nowadays I have to leave the university shortly before 5pm, otherwise it’s too dark to cycle by the Shannon
When I got into town, it was 5:10 - the exact time indicated by one of our colleagues for watching the sky and see Venus and Jupiter next to the New Moon.
The lights of the city and my own clumsiness in using the camera didn’t let me get a perfect picture of what I saw - but this one is nice enough - you can see Venus very clearly on the right bottom part of the Moon! Jupiter was there as well
An explanation of the phenomenon can be found here. I must say I had tears in my eyes because of the cold and I kept wondering if it wasn’t a simple illusion…
December 01 2008 | Events and Life and Limerick and Uncategorized | No Comments »
My department organised a great event yesterday - the first Irish Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. About 50 people from different universities, companies and public institutions attended the event, which turned out to be a success! Several research groups from Cork, Dublin, Galway , Limerick and Maynooth presented their current research and projects, and I must say it was very interesting to find what was going on - not only in the other universities, but also in our own!
I found a lot of interesting connections in the presentations of Tim Hall (EMRC), Mark Magennis(NCBI) , Aphra Kerr(NUIM - NIRSA).
Mark Leslie(Martello Media) presented three of their projects, and the “fun palace” designed for the Visitor Centre at the Cliffs of Moher really caught my attention. I’m as mad as everyone else for the horrible impact that building had on the environment, but I’d still like to see what came out!
The ScanCam one of the participants was wearing at his neck raised privacy concerns (taking shots at every change detected in the environment- 5000-7000 pics/day). Our colleague introduced an interesting application that was actually trying to make sense of these images by selecting the less frequent situations out of the huge pile.
I was fascinated by the story around the design of a digital piece of jewelry presented by John Mc’Carthy from UCC. Different interactive artefacts made me think of the wide spectrum of opportunities for augmenting human intelligence made possible by technology: the topographic torch, the touch table, the search of digital archives, or artistic events such as the re-creation of the 1831 riot in the Queen Square in Bristol.
I also had the chance to discover that one of our colleagues in TCD is actually studying meetings and the electronic support for meetings (unlike us, who are focusing on software engineering, he’s looking at the medical domain).
The breaks allowed for a lot of networking, and the gorgeous weather brought us outside, in the nice ambiance of the Kilmurry village.
In the afternoon, we had a group discussion on possible future actions for keeping in touch, creating awareness mechanisms on each other’s work, and becoming more visible in Ireland as a community. The ideas kept buzzing, and we put together a wiki page to keep track of what was said and remains to be put into practice.
A few other people blogged the event: Mike Bennett, Eoin Brazil.
And of course we had a short note (and some comments!) on the IDC blog as well!
Although several people were involved in the organization, my colleague Luigina Ciolfi was the heart and the force behind this event. Kudos, Lui, for all the hard work! I enjoyed every minute, and judging by what I’ve heard, so did most of the participants!
May 03 2007 | IDC and Ireland and Limerick and conference and iHCI | 1 Comment »
