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Archives / 2004 / December

  • Thailand: life is back again slowly

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    Even if a lot of shops or hotels are seriously damaged, life is back again in Kata, Phuket island.
    My father in law, like many Irish men, is not  a great swimmer, and the recent events have now stop him to approach any pool or sea.
    My mother in law, Anita Whooley, who follow the events here for Ireland, was with the Irish ambassador in Krabi yesterday. The situation there is very serious and she had to see a lot of body bags.
    I helped yesterday cleaning around a resort, and we had to stop quickly after one of the guy on my left discovered a body, under some debris. Hard and shocking, when you are not used to that.
    Anyway as I said in this post title, life is back again, I was today enjoying my first swim with my wife in the Hilton pool since the events, and as many here, we will be at the beach tomorrow.
    My thoughts are also for Leo, still looking for his wife, and for Barry Murphy, having his girlfriend missing, and there to help other tracing their relatives.

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  • Thailand report

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    First thanks to everybody for your warming comments. Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to help people in hospitals.
    It's a difficult job to comfort people who are such in shock, surely when you are not a professional on the matter. Lot of stories to account for, some with happy endings, but most of the time unhappy news.
    I think it's a terrible thing to have no knowledge about a missing relative. I spent some hours with Leo, from Belgium. He is absolutly sure his wife is still alive, he swear he saw her in an hotel room close to him. But today we still have no news from her. An Irish family has also been reunited after being separated fro hours, fearing the worst for each other. A Dutch old man living in Australia, escaped from his flooded room, but sadly has to let his wife drowned in the room. They were married for 33 years.
    It seems also this morning that a lot of Europeans are missing, and probably more than you can hear on television. A lot of news have to come from the remote island around Phuket and this doesn't seems to be good news.
    The life here anyway continue, and only the beaches showed the magnitude of the destruction.
    My wife is actually at the City hall in Phuket, to keep a desk information for the missing Irish people, and I will join her later on. Hundreds of Irish are still missing.
    I heard also that in north west of Phuket island, close to a national park, a lot of bodies are still there on th ground, eventually hanging in the trees.
    Of course, I also give my sympathy for the locals, most of the dead being fishermen.

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  • Codus

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    Codus is a comprehensive code generation tool for object-relational mapping. It takes an existing database and automatically generates all of the code for updating, deleting, inserting and selecting records. In addition, it creates web services for distributed programming, strongly-typed collections, and a full set of unit tests.

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  • MSDN party last night

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    Clare and Rob were again the stars yesterday for the MSDN party event in the Hilton. 50 attendees, and I hope 50 new INDA members :-)

    Robert Burke is an excellent speaker and I am going to ask him to speak at a session for our user group Ireland .Net Developers Alliance.
    And he kept a very nice surprise at the end when one of his slides about communities was with a big mention to Developers.ie and a screen grab of the site. Thanks again for that :-)
    I should have the slides today and they will be on the site

    It's funny to see through the blogs if people are still recovering from the night before. 10AM now and no sign of blogging from the two Microsoft chaps :-)

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