Archive for the 'Personal' Category

In Spain at the minute

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/1/2008
in Personal
. 7 Comments

I’m in Spain at the moment. I flew over here on Sunday for my brother-in-law’s wedding. All good.

However, this has been a nightmare journey. I woke up on Sunday morning with a temperature of 38.8C. And Tomás, our four year old, had a temp of 38. We managed to get the kids and bags ready and arrived at the airport on time only to have our flight to Spain delayed by four hours.

We arrived at our hotel in Malaga (after deciding to overnight there) at 2:30am.

I drove to Seville the following (Monday) morning. I still had a high temperature and collapsed on the hotel bed when we arrived and awoke 3 hours later. I saw a doctor later in the day and he told me I had a bad lung infection and was heading for pnuemonia. I am now on antibiotics and getting better but still haven’t eaten since Saturday lunch!

To cap it all, Pilar and Enrique are now sick as well (Enrique’s temp was 39.9 last night) and there is no wifi in the hotel room so I am getting online extremely intermittently.

Still, the weather here is beautiful. I looked out the hotel window last night and one of the street signs which also gives the temperature was reading 17C. At 8pm. In January. Hard to beat that!

Happy Christmas all

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/12/2007
in Personal
. 4 Comments

I’m starting to wind down for Christmas and spending some quality time with the family.

A very Happy Christmas to everyone who reads this blog. See you all on the other side of the holidays.

Emigrating to Spain

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/10/2007
in Personal
. 58 Comments

My wife Pilar and I have decided to move to my wife’s home town of Seville in the south of Spain next year. This is a decision we have been wrestling with for some time now but this summer’s lack of sun tipped the decision.

We are going to wait until the end of the school year before moving to minimise disruption for our elder son Tomás.

The move will be quite a change.

The biggest challenge, for me at least, will be securing employment in Spain. My Spanish language skills are less than rudimentary! In Ireland I do a considerable amount of consulting to local companies evangelising web 2.0 technologies. This won’t be possible after the move unless the local companies speak English (and very few companies in the South of Spain speak English).

If anyone knows of any good resources for becoming fluent in Spanish in 24 hours (!) I’d love to hear about them. Also, any/all tips or intros to employers in that region would be gratefully accepted.

Access to education in Ireland for non-Catholics

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 11/9/2007
in Personal
. 7 Comments

Piaras Kelly has a post on his blog about multi-culturism in Ireland and he raises some interesting issues.

He references a situation which hit the headlines here recently when children of non-Catholic parents were unable to access school places for their children.

I was appalled last week to read the comments of Anne McDonagh, director of education at the Archdiocese of Dublin, who stated that the Archdiocese is not interested in providing an education for children of parents who are not interested in a Catholic education. Speaking to the Irish Times (subscription required), McDonagh said “We must stick to our enrolment policy of providing an education for Catholic children and siblings first. This enrolment policy has been public and unchanged since the Education Act 1998.” The comments came in the wake of an emergency school being built for 90 children who were unable to secure places in catholic schools.

While I agree with Piaras’ outrage at this situation, I think his anger is mis-directed.

The problem here is that successive Irish Governments have abdicated responsibility for educating the states children. They were happy to let the Catholic church educate the children because it saved the state a fortune!

And we now have the anomalous situation where the Dept of Education doesn’t employ any teachers! All teachers are employed by the individual school’s further avoiding any financial liabilities for the state if the teachers mis-behave.

As a result of this fiasco, the Catholic church stepped in and now run 90% of the schools in the country. This is something we should be grateful to the Catholic church for (and angry with the government for!).

The Catholic church has no mandate to teach children of non-Catholic parents - no more than we would expect a Buddhist school to be mandated to accept Catholic kids.

The education of children in Ireland is the State’s responsibility. If there are not enough non-denominational places in Irish schools, it is only because the state hasn’t provided them.

The running of the schools in Ireland by the Catholic church is an anachronism.

The Department of Education needs to face up to its responsibilities and take over the running our schools (it is the norm in every other country) and not leave it up to the church or any other organisation. This is not just my opinion, the UN has been telling the Irish Government this for at least two years now.

Congrats to Bernie and Ruth

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 6/9/2007
in Personal
. 1 Comment

As the post title says,

Congrats to Bernie and Ruth who got married yesterday - well done guys.

Thanks to Damien too for the tip-off!

Senior telecoms architect for hire

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/8/2007
in Personal
. 2 Comments

I don’t normally do this kind of thing but I am making an exception in this case.

My brother-in-law has recently started looking for a new job. He’s an extremely high-powered telecoms guy, currently based in the US.

From his cv, his career highlights include:

  • Management of telecom technology development, deployment and operations teams with up to 50+ staff and cost centers with yearly budgets of up to $40M
  • Successfully managed development & deployment of 30+ products & technologies
  • Worked in both vendor & operator environments, with both startup & growth organizations
  • Combined SS7 signaling networks of three ATT divisions, saving 10’s of millions of dollars

his professional experience includes roles such as:

  • Director of Architecture, Design and Planning - Managed Services Division
  • Senior Director and Chief Architect of Multi Media Division and
  • Sr. Dir. of Network Technology Development and Architecture

and accomplishments include:

  • Direct the design, planning and life cycle management aspects of the hosted and managed services from multiple Geo diverse Data Centers
  • Managed two directors and a team of senior architects. Led the overall technology architecture & QE activities for the wireless data, messaging & enhanced voice services for the consumer & enterprise segments and
  • Directed several Sr. managers and was instrumental in the formation of the Multimedia division. Led software development, testing and deployment of the J2EE based mMode / wireless portal and related data, messaging and location based applications

So, if you know anyone who could benefit from talking to my brother-in-law, drop me a mail at tom@tomrafteryit.net and I can arrange an intro.

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