The first week has passed and a lot of things have happened here in Dublin. First of all, I have found my desk and sort of configured it (you can find a photo of the workstation here below). Then I have started training, which involves (but is not limited to):

• lots of videos
• an absolutely extremely huge amount of docs, tutorials, papers, wikis and clay tablets
• an adequately vast amount of coffee and snacks

Then, I have started to adapt myself to Dublin: I have activated a local mobile phone number, figured out which bank account I am going to open, and convinced myself that this week I should try harder than the previous week to find an apartment.

I have also shipped my last article to DevX.com . I still cannot disclose the contents (you’ll read it soon enough on DevX), however … I now recognize that when in October I agreed to set the article deadline for November, 16th I was completely fscked. So in the past week I was in Google during the day, and writing the article (and associated code samples) during the night (‘cause I notoriously start writing articles only when it’s clearly too late to do the work with ease). A very intelligent way to complicate your life and sleep very few hours per night.

More events are about to come, since this week the following activities await me (unless unexpected changes to the schedule occur):

• a possible trip to the datacenter, a classic which never fails to please everyone who works with computers. Maybe we will even be lucky enough to meet curious people in suits just like in Intel.
• the team offsite trip , where my whole team is going to experiment some real unexpected activity, such as canoeing, shooting, archery, zero-gravity flight and (depending on the weather) mars orbiting and landing, with the sole excuse of doing team building .
• today a colleague of mine which I encountered casually while out for a walk, asked if I visited my desk since friday … when I said “no,why?”, he just answered with “I don’t want to spoil the surprise…”. I am wondering what I am going to find tomorrow morning … :-)

As usual, a couple of photos. First: the original solution I have resorted to in order to be able to dinner with my girlfriend as I used to do while still at home in Italy (I already miss these days :-( ). Second: My 2×24 inch workstation along with MacBook Pro (I still do not have any interesting gadget on the desk, but I’ll try at least to recover one lava lamp , which is almost compulsory here in Google).

for Dario Bassan : if you look very closely at my workstation, you can see that I’m still bringing around your presents, telling the story behind them to whoever is interested :-)