Lemons

"when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade".

So the saying goes. Well, life gave me a FinnAir strike, so I won't be making to the conference. I am of course greatly disappointed by this setback, since there were many things I had been planning to do in Helsinki. Indeed, this conference was shaping up to be one of the most inspirational, indeed exciting of the year, we have all been looking forward to it for months now. An infrastructures conference for Africa - just when AfricaConnect and CHAIN are starting... At a time when EPIKH is producing rivers of great results after two years of work with SAGrid. We had many great things to present here, and a working meeting with the Brain Gain Initiative, to start work on porting of some applications which are being used in places like Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe...

The launch of the CHAIN project which we're working with through a partnership with UbuntuNet is next week in Rome, which has as one of its goals the creation of a Regional Operations Centre for Africa, to allow more streamlined collaboration at a technical level of African e-Infrastructures with EGI and others. Work has already begun, since July actually, on http://roc.africa-grid.org

I has really looking forward to a visit to CSC in Espoo as well, which will have to wait until another time - perhaps combined with the EGI User Forum in Vilnius next year.

So, this is not the first or last time that air traffic has created a change in plans. We all remember very well the effect that that unpronouncable volcano had on our plans just after EGEE-UF5 in Uppsala. If one were superstitious, one might begin to suspect that Scandinavia had it in for us...

Of course, I'm not superstitious (except when it comes to it comes to putting bread upside down on the table) - and this is but a minor setback. There is so much work going on, and so many people involved that I'm very glad to say that my personal absence makes absolutely no difference.

Alla prossima,

Bruce