April 2006

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2006.

back from brazil

April 24, 2006 in OLPC

I’m back from Brazil. There’s a part of me that’s still impressed that the technology exists that allows me to travel from one side of the planet to the other in less than a day. Sadly, all I had was the camera in my phone so all I got were some pretty low res pictures.

Anyway, the trip was a lot of fun and I think that we got a lot done. We met with folks studying a proposal for OLPC in Brazil. After those meetings in Sao Paulo, we went down to FISL in Porto Alegre. It’s a huge conference. I heard that there were over six thousand participants, and given the number of people on the floor and in the conference rooms, I can believe it.

We had a small OLPC booth there, and brought one of the laptop mockups as a demo. The booth was very well attended. Lots of people had questions about the hardware, the software, how goverments will pay for it, and the social issues that surround the laptop. But it was good to see that people were really interested in the project. We had a couple of great volunteers in the booth. In particular I would like to thank Jecel and Paulo who probably spent more time in the booth than I did answering questions in the local language. Without them we wouldn’t have been able to answer all the folks who stopped by. Lindsay, one of our awesome OLPC people that came down with us is fluent in the local language, but there’s only one Lindsay. Jecel and Paulo helped to make it happen.

in brazil

April 16, 2006 in General

I’ve landed in Brazil after a nice overnight flight from Boston via New York. This is my first trip to Brazil, so everything here is interesting to me. The people seem nice and everyone is an order of magnitude more attractive then me. I’m in Sao Paulo, a huge metropolis, and pretty different than any city I’ve seen in the states. It’s modern and interesting, but at the same time you can taste the poverty hiding at the edges. I wonder what this city was like 10, 20 or 50 years ago? Has it changed a lot over the last decade as the rest of the world has gotten smaller? I suspect so, but I don’t have the benefit of knowing what it was like. It will be interesting to see it in a few years.

I’ll be in town for a couple of days for some OLPC-related meetings but then I fly down to Porto Alegreo for the 7º Fórum Internacional Software Livre. I’ll be hanging around the OLPC booth and trying to meet people from the Brazilian Free Software community. So if you’re at the conference and you’re interested in meeting, track me down. I’m the guy who looks out of place and is shaking his head at the people who try to talk to him in anything other than English. I’ll be happy to talk about GNOME, the Mozilla project, Red Hat, OLPC – whatever.