Sorry, that should have been woman had a moment of sheer pride and joy but it doesn’t sound quite as fetching as Girl Got Giggle. So it was a moment of sheer pride and joy standing at the edge of the CHQ in the Docklands, watching 5,000 people or so watching the spectacular Pearl show. Show – what kind of a word is that? Spectacle of course. Pride and joy was that little moment that went – you all used my software…
We had the honour of providing the online ticketing system for the Pearl @ Docklands and National Lottery Skyfest @ Cashel this week – funny how little things trigger that sense of pride? Our national day, our national festival and we got to be a service provider for it. I probably shouldn’t have that little buzz, it’s just another event really, but I do. And then I had the pleasure of being introduced to many of the team behind St Patricks Festival 08, as Sarah – you know, the one with the ticketing system. And then them saying, oh that Sarah! The first time, I quivered, waiting for the guy to say something bad. But it turns out it was all good! They were able to get numbers and stats on all sorts of things – like where people were coming from, how they were travelling there, if they were staying in the area … all things that you need to know when you’re trying to manage huge crowds like the 20,000 expected at Cashel this evening.
At the same time as our servers were handing out tickets to Skyfest and Pearl, we were also helping almost 2,000 people donate in excess of 120,000 Euros online to the 98FM Care4Kids Radiothon at DonationPoint.ie. DonationPoint is one of the other companies I’m involved in (I’m called technical director, but most of my direction is over…) and this is the second Care4Kids Radiothon we have supported. It’s amazing to see the generousity of Irish people, and heartbreaking when you hear the stories of how people have had to interact with the 4 Dublin Childrens Hospitals. You can still help out at www.donationpoint.ie – and there is more information at www.98fm.ie .
So it was with a lot of disappointment that I couldn’t find the Conway Institute in the dark on Friday evening, after watching some of Pearl at the Docklands. The lovely Dr Antonio Campos-Torres from the Marie Curie Molecular Neuroimmunology PhD Programme who organised the International Neuroimmunology Symposium at UCD this week had invited myself and Cathal to the closing reception. Cathal, in case you don’t already know, is our superstar webmaster/technician who looks after our customers better than I can. But he was off on holidays, and I was lost in the middle of UCD so I never got to go and say well done, and thank you for being such a pleasure to work with to Antonio – nor to meet our friends at Unique Dining who were catering the event. They had catered the NEO Ireland members away day at Derrybawn House last May and their food, yum!
Now I’m off to have a long weekend, and get ready for the next onslaught! Although I don’t think we can bite off much more than we bit for the last few months. We launched new systems and applications for the Pine Forest Art Centre (I love the new look and feel), as well as for NEO Ireland (more butterflies!) as well the many conferences and exhibitions, networks (like NetWorth – you should pop over there if you feel like joining a new network) or Tricia Murphy’s lovely Networking Salons (you can contact Tricia to get onto the invite list at www.tig.ie).
Definitely time to debrief and relax for a coupla days – sayonara!
