Tuesday, June 28, 2005

JavaOne

I've been having fun in JavaOne. I have gone around, talked to a lot of interesting people, listened to some good talks (although most were, in the end, quite useless), and got to remember a little of San Francisco (well, last time I was here was about 14 years ago!). The only bad thing so far is that I just couldn't find any good candidates (that was one of my primary objectives here). It's not that there are no good people around, but every potentially good person I talked to, either lives and works in another country or likes their jobs and didn't really find interesting what I had to offer (they were impressed, but not really their area of interest).

Anyway, I still have an evening and two days ahead of me to keep meeting people. I think I already gave out about 20 business cards (but no flashlights - didn't quite fit any of the conversations). As strange as it might seem, they gave us a whole 2h30min of break between the last afternoon session and the evening session. Bad thing is that I'm not hungry at all! Oh, and the evening sessions go all the way to 11:30 pm.

The conference model is very interesting. They have a keynote speaker in the morning and then 1 hours sessions throughout the day (about 6-10 happening at the same time). In the evening they have what they call the Birds-of-Feather sessions that are more informal and focus on specific experiences. Yesterday I went to two of them and they weren't that great.

My general experience so far is that POJO is the keyword (Plain Old Java Objects). And XML sadly is becoming the middleware of choice for everything. Web services is what everybody is betting on. 1 second delay parsing and processing XML is just considered "negligible time" (I heard people saying this today but on the context of Spring object initialization). It is scary where the thecnology is getting, but exciting at the same time.

Ok, done with my technical rant. Time to decide what else I can do without having internet access on my work laptop and not being hungry at all.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

To San Francisco I go...

In 5 minutes I should be starting the process of leaving my apartment on my way for a 6-day trip to San Francisco! Staying away for some days feels great, but it is also a little scary (I can't ignore the fact that I have a lot of work to do and I won't be able to do this work while I'm there).

Not much time to write much else... And it's not that I have much to write, anyway. I just heard yesterday another proof that Israel, especially Jerusalem, has this powerful, almost magical influence on people. I'll be monitoring how much time its effect lasts.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

I wished I had a better one

One more weekend is gone and I wished it was a more productive one. I did some work, but I don't feel like I've accomplished anything. I have received some of my furniture (and that's an interesting story that I'll tell later), and did visit some fitness centers. I have talked with my "health advisor" last week and he said that I should force myself to do some exercise by joining a club. Initially, all the clubs that I've looked around here were very "nice" and expensive. They offered towels, shampoo, soap... The one I visited today required you to bring your own towels and everything else, but it was about 1/3 of the price. I think I can buy many towels with the price difference!

Anyway, now for the more interesting story: the furniture. Well, I bought some furniture some weeks ago and they were going to deliver it today. So far so good, right? Well, so they tried to call me since wednesday to confirm the delivery and I was only able to have some time and call them back on Friday. When I got to the automated service they mentioned that I had two deliveries outstanding: one for the June 19th and the other for July 27th!!! I tried to talk with the service representative on Friday, but they left me waiting for 10 minutes and I gave up.

So, yesterday I called the salesperson that sold me all the furniture to understand what was going on. She was shocked and asked me to call her again on Friday, because she was taking the early week off and would only be able to get an answer from her manager on Thursday. Very sad. But there is one good thing: Now with my new headboard and rails, I don't have to use those hideous bedskirts any more. I don't know who invented those, but they are just terrible. Makes making the bed much harder and changing the sheets even harder (because if you want to change the bedskirt to match the new sheets, you have to remove the whole mattress and then put it back up). Sometimes there are reasons to be happy.

Another sad point of the day: I had a concert to go today. I left about 10 minutes later than I planned... But the problem is that I got even more trafic than I thought and I arrived by the concert hall already 15 minutes late. I still had to park and walk in... So, as it was a free concert I decided that I should just go back home and get back to work on my 3-computer-ed office - I feel like a geek!

Monday, June 13, 2005

Happiness brings pain...

The worst type of sadness is the one caused by a happy moment. One that you see everybody around you jumping up in excitement while all you want to do is to go a dark corner and stay there alone for some time. The interesting thing is that this happened to me quite often lately. I could go through all the cases, but I'll only mention the latest: yesterday my elder syster got engaged!

Isn't this great? A sister that many times said that she would never get married seems to have found her love and now, after about 2 years together, is engaged! What makes all this sad? That should be very evident: I never met the guy. I talked to him on the phone once for 10 seconds when I wanted to talk with my sister (he kept trying to be nice to me and I bluntly interrupted him asking to talk with my syster). It is scarry that I'm becoming this other person, distant from what is happening with my family. Yesterday I wished I could drop everything I have here and move back to Brazil...

I wished I had a lighter note to end this... Maybe "MY SISTER IS ENGAGED!"

Sunday, June 12, 2005

SIFF

Sometimes Seattle is able to impress me still. Today I went for my first movie in the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). It was a movie called "Man About Dog", an Irish comedy about three friends that decide that they want to win money on Grayhound racing. It was interesting, sometimes funny, but what impressed me is that the director was there at the movie theater for a Q&A afterwards.

If you are a member of the SIFF, they have movie previews all year round when they invite the directors of these movies to later talk about the movie. It involves a lot of money! And very interested audience...

I wouldn't say I'm too sad that I have only gone to this single movie in the almost 4 weeks of the festival (the largest of its kind in the US), though. It's not that I'm that into the whole international movie scene (or any movie scene - I haven't even watched Episode III yet), but I'm just interested in the culture that this brings, the awareness that a country is not alone in anything that they do.

Oh, just as an aside, before the movie they showed a short film called "The Carpenter & his Clumsy Wife"... A movie that was a little gross, lots of dark comedy, blood... Ultimately disturbing, I was glad it was just a 10-minute short movie!

Friday, June 10, 2005

Friendship

Sometimes I just don't understand what is going on around me. Yes, I do tend to disappear and not send email, but this doesn't mean I don't care about my friends. I might complain about things that is a little difficult for other people to understand, I might be living in a different reality, but this doesn't make me less of a person, less of a friend.

There is no easy way to explain who I am and what is important to me (they are mostly interrelated). I have this strange tendency of never knowing what to say to people. I like to listen, I like to read, I like to know how people are doing; but I can't say I am a big fan of actually being there for everybody. I'm changing that, though. I think I have to give up on being myself a little and try to be a nicer person for a change.

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Surreal morning

I'm always a little worried when I have those mornings where things are just a little off of the normal that they seem wrong. Today I timed myself perfectly to get to the bus stop at the same time as the bus, but it was about 4 minutes early! Because right now they cut the number of buses that stop at my bus stop by half, I would have to wait for about 25 minutes for the next bus, so I decided to walk to another bus stop (about 10 minutes away) where I had more options.

Getting there I looked at the times of the buses: 8:01, 8:10, 8:20... I looked at my watch: 8:08 so I felt alright, I just had to wait for 2 minutes. That's what I thought! The bus arrived at 8:15! And it was half full and at that stop it is usually only about 1/4 full. I got a bad seat and waited.

Next stop I recognize somebody entering the bus as one of the usual riders. The interesting thing is that he was getting the bus about 3 stops after what he usually gets. Next stop the same thing happened with another person.

Then it arrived at my stop and usually only a few people leave but this time there were masses of people leaving the bus at that stop.

As I said, it's not that something huge happened this morning, but when you are used to certain things and they are a little off, it just seems very strange! Little sleep does help to make things even stranger too... Anyway, long day ahead!

A proud workaholic I am

I know this is not news for most people, but yesterday I again felt that I'm proud of being a workaholic. I was at work at 8:15 in the morning and I left work at 10:40 in the evening. When I arrived, nobody of my group was there. When I left, I was also alone... But I felt like I was doing something important. I was actually trying to decrease the amount of work other people have to do and this makes me proud of myself.

Very interesting this fact... I spent some minutes thinking about it while in the bus going home last evening: I like to work in order to make other people work less. I should receive a prize for it! :-)

Anyway, not much else to say, unfortunately. I could go in length about Apple switching to Intel chips or that more Laptops were sold than Desktops (I helped that I guess) or even the continuing skyrocket rise of Google, but I guess I'll just retire and try to start my day around here.

I hope everybody is feeling great there and excited about their lives.

Monday, June 06, 2005

Silence

I know I have been silent for some time now. It's just that it's better to be silent than to say something useless sometimes.

A few things to report today, though. First and foremost, on Sunday I started the day having a tough issue with my computer. I have Linux installed and Windows 98 as my chatting machine. However, I wanted to make some updates, but Windows 98 is not really supported by Microsoft any more. So, after a long discussion and many blue screens on my Windows 98, I decided to sell my soul and install Windows XP instead.

So far so good, right? Not really! I've installed it but forgot to turn on my firewall before starting the installation. Result: my computer was compromised even before I actually started it. Lots of fun! I turned on the firewall and installed everything again. This time it worked! I installed all the service packs and it seemed to work fine... Right?

Not really... Suddenly I get a message saying that I'm running out of disk space! Mind you that I only installed Windows XP, the service packs, and browse the internet for a little while. The partition that I had for windows was pretty small, 4GB, but it was 4GB anyway! It should fit more than just windows and its service packs!!! That's just ridiculous!

So, after all these fights (and of course losing my dual boot in the process, so I couldn't even log on to my Linux) I decided to do the unthinkable: I bought a PowerBook G4! Crazy, huh? Well, I'm having fun! It's just very cool and neat looking. I'm on my couch right now typing this with it on my lap.

But I spent even more money on Sunday. I bought the furniture that was left: a coffee table, two end tables and a bedroom set.

Now that I'm poor, I think I should eat something. It was a tough day at work.. And I'm going to have some tough weeks ahead!

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

My trip

Checkout my trip below:



Total: about 1100 miles (1770 km)

Pictures coming soon! I didn't take that many good pictures because the weather wasn't that great and also we drove too much to really stop and take pictures. But it was great anyway. There are some very great things to see in Oregon if you like nature. Very interesting beaches, wonderful mountains with an assortment of lakes and waterfalls.