Another long blogging break…
I keep on lecturing people that blogs are like Tamagotchi, you have to write regularly in order to keep them alive, and I am the first not to follow what I am preaching!
I guess I have to overcome two major mental obstacles:
– that even if it’s fun and I like doing it, blogging is not a distraction, it is part of my work and I don’t have to experience any guilt when I feel like blogging;
– I don’t have to persevere in postponing to blog about one topic until I fulfill my self-imposed duty of finishing an older draft – this strategy won’t take me anywhere!
After I left my parents’ home to go to the university in the capital city, expecting to get liberated from all the strict rules they were imposing on me, I discovered with astonishment that I was re-inforcing those rules on myself more severely than my parents used to do it.
Old habits die hard – and it looks like I can’t prevent the history from repeating itself. My current position gives me all the freedom I could have ever dreamed of, and – probably because no one else is imposing me anything – here I am making new stupid rules for myself!
Well, lots of things happened since my last post. I missed the Social Computing seminar at Oxford, but then I also missed the TechCamp in Dublin because of a bad flu.
I was invited to give a lecture on Social Software at Trinity College in Dublin at the end of October – oh, my, oh my! what a Cinderella feeling I had entering the main gate at Trinity! I used to dream that place night and day back in 2000, when my paper got accepted at the IS/IT Evaluation Conference but unfortunately I couldn’t find the funding to attend!
Teaching at Trinity – nice experience, bright students, impressive atmosphere! When I asked if they ever tried to contribute to the Wikipedia, the students pointed me to this article😉
Then I decided to skip the Fringe at KCC Europe – too much work to do, nobody was able to tell me who else was going there, the knowledgenetworker wiki page was last updated in July. It sounded to me like a silence conspiration – or maybe I was looking for excuses?! I’m sorry I missed it now, I feel kind of disconnected from the KM community. And I still wonder why so few people blogged about!
I started a new blog at elgg – this is why – trying to support a bunch of young people who really deserve it. Time is never enough, my involvment in that project is not the one I’d wanted it to be, but I still hope it will make a difference…
Then I had to travel to Romania, for the last meeting in the Pellea project, the one who provided me with the chance to organise that online blogging course in Romanian last year. The time was short, the weather changing from Indian summer to snow and frost, and there was no way to meet everyone and to do all the work I planned.
On the way back, a short break in Amsterdam – beautiful city, lots of hidden treasures, magic places like this one, I’ll be always happy to go back there. A few misadventures in restaurants ( I was served a “vegetable soup” that proved to contain a big piece of meat, 2 1/2 h spent waiting for one pancake), but the biggest surprise was reserved for the Dublin airport at my return.
The immigration officer told me I am not allowed to enter Ireland, because I lack a visa. A 24kg suitcase, a sore throat and 10 days of travel behind, this was the last thing I needed. I tried to explain no one asked for a visa when I came back from Frankfurt, I showed him my residence card, and I was pretty sure I was right. In the end, I proved to be wrong, the documents I have by now only allow me to stay in Ireland, but not to travel back and forth.
So this is the end of travel for this year – no more ‘s-Hertogenbosch for the final meeting of the PACE project. A pity – I would have loved to participate in the conference organised on this occasion and say good-bye to the partners I worked with in the last 2 1/2 years!
But…you can’t have them all, isn’t it?!
December 01 2005 04:02 pm | Uncategorized