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We are off to the beach!!!

Published

on 5/7/2008

. 0 Comments

We have been in Spain for nearly two weeks now. Most of the boxes and bags are unpacked. We have a phone line, gas, broadband, mobile and electricity accounts in our names and we put a deposit on a car (a Prius). It has been busy.

The most difficult thing to deal with has been the banks - both Spanish and Irish. Bank of Ireland have been particularly unhelpful and inflexible.

My brother-in-law has a time share in Almeria he couldn’t take up this coming week so he offered it to us. This afternoon we are heading to the beach for a week! I’ll be the one under the umbrella, trying desperately to stay in the shade!

Goodbye Cork blogger’s dinner

Published

Tom Raftery

on 14/6/2008

in Personal

. 4 Comments

Photo of a previous blogger’s dinner in Proby’s

Conor O’Neill has very kindly decided to organise a goodbye Cork blogger’s dinner in honour of my imminent departure for Spain.

Conor is calling it the Hasta Luego Blogger Dinner (Hasta Luego is Spanish for Goodbye, in case you didn’t know)!

If you would like to join us for a bite to eat, a few drinks and a good time the dinner is this Tuesday the 17th in Probys bistro (afaik) at 7pm.

Head on over to Conor’s blog post and leave a comment there so he has a rough idea of numbers to book, but given that it is a Tuesday night, even if you are late signing up, come along anyway. I don’t see the restaurant turning away patrons!!!

Thanks Conor for organising this for me. Much appreciated.

Lisbon Treaty exit poll

Published

Tom Raftery

on 12/6/2008

in Community Interest

. 18 Comments

I voted in the Lisbon Treaty this morning. Probably my last time voting in this country (as I am moving to Spain next week!).

I’m curious, if I run a poll here and enough people respond truthfully, we should get an accurate exit poll!

So, if you voted in the Lisbon Treaty, how did you vote?

[Update] Apologies, I accidentally closed the poll earlier when trying to make it legible in IE6!!!

Open again now.

[Disclaimer - obviously this is totally unscientific but it will be fun to compare the answer here with the final answer tomorrow]

We are outta here!

Published

Tom Raftery

on 6/6/2008

in Personal

. 32 Comments

Image via Wikipedia

I mentioned previously that we are emigrating to Spain.

I booked the one-way tickets for our flight to Spain yesterday.

We are leaving Cork on the 21st of June, flying via Dublin, to Malaga on Sunday 22nd and driving from there to Seville.

It has taken a while to get things organised (and there is still loads to organise - broadband connection in Spain for example!) but now the move is very much a reality. Scary!

I’m going to miss Cork immensely but am looking forward to this new adventure.

UPDATE: Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice has very kindly taken it on himself to organise a going away Hasta Luego Blogger’s dinner on the 17th. Thanks Conor and I look forward to seeing as many there as possible.

RedMonk cleans up at the IIAR awards

Published

Tom Raftery

on 4/6/2008

in redmonk

. 2 Comments

When I agreed to join industry analyst firm RedMonk a couple of weeks back I knew I was joining an interesting company of really bright people but I had no visibility of how well they are perceived in the industry.

This week the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations released their survey of analyst relations professionals and RedMonk (a firm of now four analysts!) rated in the top five in most categories, up there with the Forresters, the Gartners and the Ovums of the world!

In the analyst of the year section we took 3rd and 5th place for James Governor and Michael Cote respectively! The only analyst company with two of the top five.

We were fourth placed analyst firm globally after Forrester, Gartner and IDC. And serious kudos to Michael Cote for being named third placed analyst of the year in the US.

Uh, oh! Guys, I have just realised how high you have set the bar for me!

UPDATED: Post updated to include a link to the survey! D’oh!

Web 2.0 Toolset Overview presentation

Published

Tom Raftery

on 3/6/2008

in Web 2.0

. 6 Comments

This is the Web 2.0 Toolset Overview presentation I gave to the members if it@cork last week.

Thanks to Damien for manning the camera.