Out for Africa

When I was starting to write this blog wanted to focus on more "work type" topics, mostly dealing with agriculture or animal breeding. This was the initial plan, which has slightly adapted in the meantime. One thing I was clear about from the beginning that I would like to deal with my two main interests, the advancments in technology related issues and my passion for agriculture with special interest in developing countries.

While writing this post I am thinking about the reasons behind this. Although I had little formal education in "development studies" so far, I met a bunch of people from these regions. I have in mind my former and current colleagues and friends from the BOKU office or from the EMABG. Although I have never been in those countries, they became one of my main interests, through the people I met.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I got the opportunity to participate on the ILRI - SLU - FAO workshop called "Capacity building for sustainable use of animal genetic resources"  in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia end of November this year. I was even happier that I could be one of the presenters. According to the plan I will have half a day to present the R data analysis and programming environment to the participants. I had similar (although shorter) presentations few times before, mostly for EMABG students, so I have bit of an experience with it. Although this will be a different setting and a different audience, so I am going to adapt the contents accordingly.

I was traveling quite a lot inside Europe, but this will be my first jouney outside the continent. First one goes to Africa. 

One week, five countries

Most of the time I try to post some stuff here that might be interesting to some of you (or at least I hope). But as you might have noticed I write some “personal” notes as well from time to time, about things that I want to keep in mind or not want to forget. This post is one of the personal ones as well.

Last week I had the opportunity to visit 5 European countries in 7 daysIt was a nice experience worth to remember, so I am posting it here with some accompanying photos.

Monday: Munich, Germany – actually I was the whole previous week there on the Synbreed Summer School The lake was not integral part of the  course, but I like the photo :) My work... One of the best so far I guess...

Monday evening: Wageningen, The Netherlands – The EMABG Welcome event was running, and I had 2 presentations there. Good time! (p.s. This is the main building of the animal breeding people there, but they will move to new locarion soon dubbed as the "New Zodiac", so likely it was my last visit in this building.)

 

Thursday: Vienna, Austria – I spent the shortest time here from the 5, basically landing by plane going through the city to the train station, but it counts ;)

Thursday evening: Slovakia – home sweet home

Friday: Budapest, Hungary – finally some leisure trip with my family to the Tropicarium (said to be the biggest in central Europe) 

Sunday: Slovakia, a "ranch" neaby Galanta. Family time again :)

Going Mobile

A short post to mark the day I entered to mobile internet "community". Today my Android phone finally arrived so I played with it a bit.

First impression was only confusion what to press to get where I want. I know it should be easy, and "everything at your fingertips" stuff, but still it took some time to get somewhat familiar with it. I guess the feeling was similar when my parents generation is confronted with computers for the first time. Ok, maybe not that bad...

I synchronized the phone with my Google account and tried to send a mail. It was ok, except I unintentionally saved the draft like 5 times... But if worked out at the end...

My biggest challenge to data was/is a trivial thing of inserting phone numbers for the contacts.
To clarify: To my great surprise all my Gmail contacts are in my phone (most of them only email), but I could not find a way to include an additional mobile number via my phone without having to re-create that contact. So what I did is that I updated the contact info in Gmail online and voila' now I have "call mobile" in my phone as well. A bit crazy to deal with these things via servers located who-knows-where, but oh well... happens...

Learning German

Personal log.

I like to write a blog in general, as it allows me to remember things which I would forget in the course of time. Probably I am not keeping the track of all things on this blog that would “qualify” in terms of importance, but at least something…

Today I am continuing my push for learning proper German. After 2 years in Austria it would be nice to speak it fluently. I am in a lucky situation that I can survive and socialize using my English around here (at least at the university and also in the city). Everybody at our institute has a decent knowledge of it, and my placement in the office for MSc and PhD students mostly from other countries adds to level of comfort even more. English rules our office! Well… Sometimes it is Amharic given the large number of Ethiopians… :-) 

Back to the German language… I have studied it for four year in school but not used it for quite some time. When I started to work in Vienna I started to learn again several times, but left off with it for different reasons. Well… convenience mostly… But this time I should push until the fluency at least to the level of my English.

The question is how you learn a language. I read a bit about this on the Net and found out various opinions and as a by-product of the search valuable resources as well (notably Deutsche Welle). These might bring you until some point where you understand some lines in the newspapers, catch a phrase or two in the talk. You can reach this point relatively easily. After that it all comes down to the performance of a muscle. The sitting one… As everything, the knowledge of a language does not come by itself. Comes with hours and days spent by learning. No shortcuts are possible here…

In a way I am still on the beginning of the journey. Wish me luck…  

Youtube learning

I was browsing the Youtube today. I wrote "learn" to the search to see what comes up... After 2 clicks I got to the video below. This is what I have learned :)

Not too much, I know, but at least there is some result for the two minutes I invested into it.

Reboot

 In the past several days I was thinking about my blogging "career". I like the idea of having a blog, a personal space for my thoughts. But obviously I can't post as many times as I initially thought.

To clarify this point: At the beginning (a few months ago) I was starting this blog to write extensive posts about the topics of my interest, which are research (in particular in developing countries), new media and the education of the context of the previous two. I wanted to write long posts to disseminate good ideas and adding mine.

The main problem is time - the usual excuse. I was surprised how long it takes me to write a longer post. Even when I find some time to sit down and write, it takes me around 2 hours to put everything together. This most likely because I want to work out every aspect of the formatting/language. The posts evolve during the writing, which takes time of course. The best example is this post. I wanted to write 5 sentences, and look where am I now...

Anyway: I am starting with the blog again. If for nothing else it is a good writing practice (+ I hope it will be of use in the future somehow).

{{Welcome}}

OK, that's it! I just set up my very first blog :) Getting familiar with the environment and stuff...

As for the first post I would like to introduce myself and tell a few words why am I here.

Me:
My name is Gabor Meszaros researcher and sometimes lecturer at University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria, also known as BOKU. My field is quantitative genetics and software development with the main objective to improve the Survival Kit - a software package used for survival analysis.

On the Net I use the name "Gbaor" which is (as you might have guessed) a misspelling of my first name. I am (sometimes more, sometimes less) active on Wikiversity under the same name - Gbaor.

About this blog:
Well... I would like to drop in here sometimes and write about the stuff that interests me. This could be nearly anything, but to narrow down the things a little bit: most probably there will be topics around web 2.0, education, learning and research. I am also interested in animal breeding in general and animal breeding in developing countries in particular.

... and I am curious how this blog will evolve.

p.s. In case anybody reads this, leave a comment for a beginner blogger to boost his confidence ;)