Catania, 24 hours before

"Previously... on GridCast"

After a Madrid-Milano-Catania combination, half of the UCM team arrived to the magic island of Sicily (the other half was already there since Saturday)! After the baggage claim, we were joking about that "nobody was going to wait for us outside holding a piece of paper with our names on it". We were wrong... there was a man honding a "OGF25/EGEE 4th EGEE" sign!

Basically, a special fare has been negotiated with a group of taxi drivers, so they were actually waiting at the airport for any attendees who requested their services. My congratulations to the Conference organizers for this initiative! Let's say that the Conference doesn't start when registering.

What can I say about our hotel, the Una Palace? Glamorous, located at the most charming street of Catania, it fulfilled all our expectations.

At night, all Spanish colleagues met for dinner. We chose an Osteria nearby where we could combine pizza and pasta (rigatoni alla norma, of course!) and a great selection of typical Sicilian desserts. One important point here is that our dinner ended almost at midnight (you know, Spanish jet-lag) and nobody from the Osteria asked us "indirectly" to leave. This is a example of the famous Sicilian hospitality. Of course, we returned to our hotel ASAP, as our Monday schedule started at 9 o'clock and there was much to do.

(And here goes GridCast starting credits ;-D)

And then the Conference began! Our group was very bussy this morning. At 9 o'clock, Tino, Javier and Raúl were giving a tutorial on Cloud Computing using OpenNebula. At the same time, Eduardo was chairing a session where representants of NGIs were exchanging their experiences using the GridWay Metascheduler.

At the end, Alejandro and I gave a tutorial on it. Everything went OK, even if we had some network issues at the beginning thay we could easily solve. As we understand that learning has a component of continuity, we are providing user accounts in one of our machines with GridWay installed, so attendees will be able to test it during this week and make some exercises. Of course, we'll provide help at Demo Booth #4, on which a further post is going to be focused.

Lunch was incredible! A well balanced meal that could be delighted under the Sicilian sun and on the venue's grass. Weather here looks like to be part of the Conference schedule, let's cross fingers for having more sunny days! Colleagues got "infected" by the environment and you could hear the graceful sound of chatting and laughing.

Finally, this afternoon's plenary was very special for GridCast. Guess why? Just look at the slide shown by Dr. Bob "Big Boss" Jones:
Things like this make me proud to be a GridCaster!

(dsa-catania)