Mobillians by Brian King (CC-BY-NC)

This year’s FOSDEM was a special one for me. It was the first time I attended it as a Mozillian! I had already met quite a few European community members at MozCamp Europe last year but this FOSDEM was a great opportunity to meet even more Mozillians face-to-face. I stayed at the Mozilla DevRoom most of the conference but also spent some time catching up with my fellow GNOME hackers.

Chris and I gave a “State of Firefox Mobile” talk on Sunday. I usually don’t share my slides because they tend to be too short in content to be useful. However, we wrote some speaker notes that give enough information and context on what we talked about. So, here’s the deck alternating between slides and speaker notes—I wish Speaker Deck had proper support for speaker notes…

All in all, I had a great time at FOSDEM this year! PS: The weather during the conference was quite special too—in a painful way!

Back in 2006

It turns out that today is a special date which I almost forgot. Back in 2006, on this same date, 14th of October, Carol and I took a flight from Rio de Janeiro—where my parents-in-law live—to Helsinki where I started working for Nokia as a member of the Maemo UI gang. Today we complete 4 years living abroad.

Since then, I participated on the development three great gadgets, left Nokia to join my current gig at litl, went through a rather painful process to get our UK visa, moved to London, we became parents of the most beautiful little girl in the whole universe, met a lot of awesome people from all parts of the world and a few very special friends, learnt more about other cultures and about our own, and more. Much more.

What an awesome journey!

Brighton

This year, Carol and I decided to plan for some quick visits to smaller cities around London. The reason is twofold. First, we wanted to explore a bit more the country where we live. Secondly, we wanted to “practice” how it was to travel with our little daughter before our vacation in Brazil. We’ve made 1-day trips to three towns: Windsor, Cambridge, and Brighton.

Windsor. We visited Windsor in the end of 2009 when my father and his wife came to London to spend Xmas and new year with us. We went there for an obvious reason: the famous Windsor castle, one of England’s most popular places for tourists. It was a quite cold day but we managed to enjoy the sightseeing anyway. Windsor, the town, is cute and very quiet.

Cambridge. This was the first time we made a trip with Julia. Cambridge is a university-oriented town full of students all around. We took the sightseeing bus and walked around quite a bit – a very tiring experience to carry Julia in a sling during the whole time. We went to some of the Cambridge’s classic locations such as King’s College Chapel and Fitzwilliam Museum. Got a pretty good impression of Cambridge, even though it seemed a bit too crowded with students.

Brighton. That was definitely our favourite town. Brighton is on the south coast of England. The pebble beach is a nice place to relax. Brightonians seem to be easy-going people. It’s amazing how the sea affects people’s behaviour and attitude. To be honest, Carol and I even considered moving there after the visit but it would be a bit impractical to work in London and live there.

What all those towns have in common? A very obvious thing: you see more English people. It may sound weird to say that but in London you don’t really experience English culture because the city is very cosmopolitan. Even though those towns are not so far from London, it was interesting to notice that they are more homogeneously English than London. I took some photos from all three towns.

Where are we going next? We have some obvious suspects in mind: Oxford, Bath, Stonehenge, Cotswolds, and others. We’re also planning a weekend trip to Edinburgh and surrounding locations. There’s so much to see that is hard to decide! But we have no hurry and summer is almost gone now. Maybe next year, let’s see.

Porto da Barra

We’re back in London after 20 refreshing days in Salvador. As I said in my previous post, it was a very interesting experience to visit the city I was born in Brazil after almost 3 years.

The weather was rainy during most of our visit but the temperature was relatively hot all the time – especially if compared to London. One funny thing: the temperature went down to 17°C one day at night and the TV news mentioned that this was the lowest temperature in the last few years! That reminded me how hard it was for me to adapt to the Finnish weather when we moved there back in 2006.

I ate like a pig: moqueca, mariscada, baião de dois, sun beef, maniçoba, sarapatel, caldo de sururu, chicken stew, kibbeh, sfiha, empadinha, coxinha caturiry, acarajé, abará, bobó, pizza, crab, lambreta, coffee, and others were part of our lunches and dinners during our stay. The result: I gained 2kg. Got to work hard to lose those now as this is my highest ever weight!

More importantly, we had the chance to meet our parents, brothers and sisters, lots of relatives and some of our best friends from high school and university. Those are the ones who we really miss here. For most of them, it was the first time they met Julia.

The vacation in Salvador was great but it’s good to be back home. Now we just need to convince Julia that she’s supposed to shift her sleeping schedule 4 hour ahead!

Amsterdam

• Moved to a better/cheaper/larger apartment in the same cool area in London. Perfect! After all the hassle of the move, we are really enjoying our new home and neighborhood!
• Work at litl is fastly and intensely moving forward. So intense that I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out for GNOME stuff… I’m trying to catch up with my long list of pending GNOME tasks now.
• Really glad that we managed to come up with a plan for GNOME 3. There are still a lot of open questions which I hope will be answered as we move on the schedule. Another great move was our migration to git. We’ve got a very positive atmosphere inside the community now. That’s awesome!
• Cultural life in London simply rocks. I went to Stomp and Mama Mia, concerts of Richard Bona, Bosco de Oliveira, Vanessa da Mata, Ben Harper, a bunch of nice museums, parks, neighborhoods, open markets, etc, and planning to go to many more! That’s something I really missed in Finland.
• For some reason, my english accent tends to be a bit too American but I like the British English accent much more. I’m practicing my British English “Hello” and “So…” everyday. Maybe at some point I’ll have a a perfectly pronounced “Hello” but then there are all the other words to get the pronunciation right :-P
• Traveled to the simply beautiful Prague (photos) in March and to the weirdly amazing Amsterdam (photos, some more uploads pending…) in April. More travels being planned, yay!
• Got LittleBIGPlanet: fun, fun, fun. It’s the only game my wife and I get to play together (as she doesn’t like to play most of the games we have). So, it’s double fun for us.
• Looking forward to getting a new DSLR camera soon. I’m getting very annoyed by the unstable handling and the small viewfinder of my Canon 350D. I’ve heard Canon 450D has some good improvements over the 350D but I’m leaning towards a Canon 40D… Suggestions for camera models, places to sell my used camera, and stores with good deals for new cameras are welcome.
• Two awesome apps I started to use recently: GNOME Do and Miro.
• Latest playlist includes: Holly Golightly, Erykah Badu, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Soulive, The New Mastersounds, Jill Scott, Amel Larrieux, Anthony Hamilton, Miles Davis, Fiona Apple, Sonny Rollins, Roberto Mendes, Stanton Moore, Ben Harper, Clube do Balanço, Black Rio, a lot more. Actually, I feel it’s time to renew my music collection with some new albums…
• I’m in Twitter now. It took some time until I got the point of microblogging. So far, it’s been an interesting experience.
• That’s all for now. Time to sleep.

Anyway, if you’re around and want to have dinner/a beer this week, just let me know.