Work
Archived posts from this Category
Monday, 4th January 2010
Posted by Judith on 04 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Work
Pretty crummy forecast, although it didn’t rain. My parents are off on holiday for a month, so I took them to Girona where they caught the train to Barcelona airport. They treated me to a slap-up farewell lunch on the way.
Geoff had to stay at home to do some work.
Monday, 28th December 2009
Posted by Judith on 28 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Work
Sunny and warm, but howling, so no flying for us. It would have been good walking weather, but we decided to stay in and do some work, podcast editing, etc. Tomorrow we have a forecast for 20C. Blimey.
Monday, 21st December 2009
Posted by Judith on 22 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Work
We were hoping to go skiing today, but the forecast was terrible. We like skiing when it’s sunny, not when you’re in cloud and snow.
Instead, Geoff worked on the conference environment for the SDP conference, which seems to have suddenly crept up on us. I recorded another section of a podcast and am planning a web cast on thermalling. More news on that later…
My sister and family should have been arriving in Spain tonight, but the bad weather in Stansted had them grounded. It’s now hanging in the balance whether they’ll make it here for Christmas.
Monday, 7th December 2009
Posted by Judith on 07 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Work
High cloud today and we had a post-conference evaluation meeting at 11am, so I arranged to record a podcast with Kelly Farina about efficient thermalling first thing in the morning. He did the recording from from a sun soaked beach in Thailand. After the meeting I recorded another, with David Thomson, on winter flying. Should be edited and available when we’ve had a bit more bad weather.
Sunday, 29th November 2009
Posted by Judith on 30 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Work
The forecast was for rain most of the day. It didn’t materialise until 4pm but no matter, it was howling as well, so it’s not like we benefited from the dry weather. The plus side is that it snowed in the mountains and we’re hopeful that the ski resorts will open soon.
This is the worst autumn we’ve know for flying weather since we started coming here in 2003. The weather per se hasn’t been that bad, it’s just been too windy, or our work days have coincided with the flyable days. We’ve never had so few hours airtime in October/November. At the moment December doesn’t look too promising, but we’ll see. I’m still hopeful for Christmas day on the beach.
Friday, 27th November 2009
Posted by Judith on 28 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Work
Last day of the conference and we’re knackered. There’s a (not entirely unjustified!) perception that generally Geoff and I don’t work much, but we started working on this conference in May, and just because we work pretty flexibly, doesn’t mean we don’t put in the hours. So what’s it like running a JISC online conference?
After all the preparation is done, all the content converted and we’ve actually started the conference, we both sit in front of two computers each. We monitor separate live rooms of Elluminate, which is an electronic meeting place, where the presentations take place. At the same time we monitor the Web Crossing conference environment for technical problems and assist the facilitators and presenters. We have to add/change information in the conference, update the live twitter feed and the programme. We are constantly checking our email in case people report technical problems, or have other queries or comments. We process and make available the recordings of the live sessions. We send out a constant stream of publicity and updates on events. At the same time there is a near constant back channel of conversation going on between us and the three JISC conference co-ordinators through skype text. It’s basically communication overload for us. We work with a great team of co-ordinators, Sarah, Ros and Lou, which makes it all a lot easier.
The conference ended up having 444 participants, 1533 discussion postings, seven hours of live presentations (web casts), 21 hours of activities (tours, socials, etc.) in Second Life, and 4 hours of Elluminate sessions for delegates. Plus numerous other non-live presentations, papers, videos, walkthoughs, etc. And a conference blog with 89 posts and 9 videos.
All week we’ve been looking forward to getting out of the house and the first treat is always the big meal we have in the restaurant opposite our house. Jose, the proprietor knows that when we appear looking tired, pasty and hungry in November and February that we have had a conference and he feeds and waters us accordingly. So all week I have been keeping myself going with the promise of roast red peppers, followed by his special steak with roquefort sauce, lashings of wine and ice cream. When we got there, Jose had been taken to hospital – no dinner for us. I was gutted! We were rescued by Cala Paula, who squeezed us in without a reservation. And (the irony!) we’ve sat indoors through 5 days of epic flying weather, enduring texts from friends saying how good the flying is and where the hell where we, only for the forecast to turn rubbish tomorrow! Arrrgggghhhh.
Monday, 23rd November 2009
Posted by Judith on 24 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Work
The conference starts tomorrow, so we worked all day to get final stuff ready, sort out people who’d lost their login information, have final update meetings, etc. It was probably the best day of for flying since we got here. Cumulus everywhere and a good wind direction. If we had curtains I would have closed them.
We’ve been out and bought a mountain of food, drink, chocolate and booze, as we won’t be leaving the house for the next four days. Unless something interesting happens in the next four days, I won’t bother blogging. Roll on Saturday.