Life in Brazil
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on this site. As Jorn Barger famously observed, a year before he started the first ever Weblog: “The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post … and vice versa”.
So it is for me. In the past eight months I’ve been to Canada, the USA (twice), South Africa, the UK (twice), Switzerland, and Australia, and now I’m living in São Carlos, Brazil. And I haven’t made time to write as often as I would have liked.
São Carlos is a nice little city. There are dozens of lawyers, dentists, plastic surgeons, apartment buildings, and SUVs; but also plenty of dilapidated houses, cracked roads, prostitutes, and the occasional beggar. The central city can be quite noisy, as several companies advertise by paying drivers to meander through the streets with loudspeakers strapped to the roofs of their cars. Yesterday, it was noisy for a different reason: the holiday of Nossa Senhora de Aparecida (Our Lady of Aparecida), the patron saint of Brazil, which inspired some people to set off fireworks at midday. And every few weeks there are fireworks of a different sort — the city is sprinkled with ash, as some sugarcane plantation nearby is razed to prepare for the next planting.
My work on Launchpad is a bit frustrating at times, but also lots of fun. It’s exhilarating to be surrounded by smart people, like I was at Ubuntu Down Under. And it’s good to see Launchpad slowly but steadily improving, as we prepare for the influx of people who will be taking advantage of its integration into Ubuntu 5.10 …
… Which was released a few hours ago. Wow, it really has been a long time.