Miles to go …

Sun Tech Days kick started yesterday in the beautiful city of Sao Paolo, Brazil. Over 1000 attendees, completely charged, willing to discuss their issues, amazing amount of energy and all there to learn about different Sun technologies – just a superb recipe to succeed and outpace everybody else in the world!

The GlassFish session was packed with 400 attendees and there were attendees all over the floor The slides are available here. The demos showed during the talk are listed as blog URLs in the slides.

Drop a comment if you attended the talk, are currently using GlassFish for development or production or would like to know more about it.

The winners of Open Source Community Awards (sponsored by Sun) were announced at the keynote. And I’m very excited to announce the two GlassFish Award Program (GAP) winners were present to receive in person. Congratulations to all the winners, very well deserved!

Reginaldo Russinholi won an award for “Translation of Hudson project to Brazilian Portuguese”. More details can be found in the submission.

And Claudio Miranda won an award for “Provide CLI/GUI support to add/modify/remove certificates to JKS”. More details can be found at in the submission and bug #4524.

And then all the winners together:

And here are some pictures from the evening reception:

The evening concluded with a wonderful dinner at Praca Sao Lourenco (Vila Olimpia) with Bruno, Claudio and Mauricio:

It is a great restaurant with wilderness ambience, and as always, great hospitality. If you are in the city of Sao Paolo, this is another great place to go!

And the evolving (2 more days remaining) album at:

Technorati: conf suntechdays brazil glassfish saopaolo

Embu das Artes is a small and spectacular village in Sao Paulo Metropolitan area. If you want to experience Brazil, this is the place! A perfect blend of arts, crafts, food, clothes, furniture, festivities and lot of fun. Check out some pictures:

Check out GlassFish in Embu das Artes:

And some local music:

And the evolving (3 more days) album at:

Thanks Mauricio for yet another wonderful suggestion!

Technorati: embudasartes embu brazil village arts crafts

1. Brazilians are very warm people. Men will typically shake hands and pat on your shoulder. Women may kiss one (or both) cheeks upon meeting/departing so be ready to reciprocate.
2. Brazil is a paradise for meat lovers. Most restaurants do not offer much (sometimes none) vegetarian choices. But they do offer some exotic fruits and vegetables, so you can certainly stay healthy!
3. Some handy Portugese phrase
   

   Hello	Alo / Oi
   Good morning	Bom dia
   Good afternoon	Boa tarde
   Good night	Boa noite
   Thanks	Obrigado for men, Obrigada for women
   No Thanks	Nao Obrigado
   Excuse me	Com licenca
   Please to meet you	prazer
   Goodbye	tchau (pronounced as ciao)
   Please	por favor

   Check out English-Portugese phrases or a searchable dictionary.

4. For Brazilians who claim to know some English, speak slowly and clearly with simple words.
5. People are very friendly and very much willing to help but language may be a barrier.  Carry your hotel address on a paper as local public mostly speak Portugese. And smile is of course the universal human language.
6. Withdraw money from the bank at airport. The ATM machines in the city are sparse and sometimes may not accept your ATM card.
7. Don’t miss 4 things: eating @ Churrascaria, drinking coffee, Caipirinha and Guarana.
8. Hotels have free Internet and breakfast, really cool!
9. If you are visiting a JUG event, make sure to carry freebies.
10. Restaurants are open late (read very late or early morning) nights, even on weekdays. For example, we walked into a restaurant at 11:30pm for dinner on a Tuesday night and were not rushed.
11. Most restaurants in food court offer food by weight.
12. Offices have a 2 hour lunch time (typically 12-2), wow!
13. TAM (local airlines) is Star Alliance member, so don’t forget to get credits for United Miles and use benefits accordingly.
14. The seasons in Brazil are completely opposite of those in Northern Hemisphere (which consists of 90% human population).
    

    Norther Hemisphere	Brazil
    Summer	Winter
    Fall	Spring
    Winter	Summer
    Spring	Fall

15. VISA is much more popular in Brazil than American Express. And cash works everywhere!
16. Football (futebol) is not only a national sport, it’s a complete passion here. Brazilians have won the FIFA world cup 5 times and very proud of it. So be aware of some of the popular players: Rivaldo, Roberto, Ronaldo, Rinaldinho, Kaka, Cafu.

And a very important aspect of being in Brazil, have fun!

Technorati: traveltips brazil

SUCESU-ES organized ES JUG (Espirito Santo, Brazil) meeting yesterday and I presented on GlassFish. The slides are available here. There were approx 100 attendees and I was pleasantly surprised to see almost half the audience had heard of GlassFish.

The complete agenda is published here and there were other speakers from Sun as well.

I did not get much time to talk to the audience afterwards because there were back-to-back sessions scheduled. But please feel free to drop a comment on this blog if you attended the talk and have any question/comment.

And they gave a great gift basked (loaded with Garoto chocolates), check out the picture of gift basket:

Thanks a lot!!

Check out some pictures:

The complete album is available here:

Technorati: conf jug esjug vitoria brazil espiritosanto glassfish

# 1: Churrascaria (yeah, they serve more than Steak). Had dinner at Porcao and it was fantastico! Check out how steak churrascaria is prepared @ Porcao:

And you can visit kitchen in any Brazilian restuarant, check me and Simon inside Porcao’s kitchen:

Wonderful food, great hospitality, a great choice not to be missed during your stay in Brasilia! More pictures here.

# 2: Guarana: a local Soda (kinda like Root Beer)

# 3: Brazilian coffee, Brazilian style

# 4: Brazil’s national drink Caipirinha. Learn a crash course (recorded at Porcao):

The list might evolve over next few days

Technorati: traveltips brazil caipirinha guarana porcao churrascaria