Vitor Rodrigues

Originally uploaded by FireinCairo.

Popularity: 9% [?]

When I moved to the US about 2 years ago, one thing changed in my life habits: I stopped downloading “illegal” stuff from the net. No more divx movies or MP3 musics. I started listening to online radio (www.sky.fm hs been on my top list since then) and using Netflix to all my movie needs. And the truth shall be told: I never really felt the urge to download this kind of stuff from the internet. Online radio has a good variety, and Netflix delivers the movies next day. Downloading movies would sometimes take one or two days for me because I never had much credits on eMule, so Netflix was faster than downloading and with better quality.

After I moved to Canada in the Fall of 2006, my music habits continued, but not my movie ones. I still go to the cinema, but there is nothing like Netlifx over here. I mean, there are alternatives, but not with the same quality/price/stock/speed. Netflix-alike companies charge more over here because people do not return movies some times, and some mail-mans also like to evolve their movie collection using those DVDs. I always wondered if Netflix would work in a less responsible society than US and Toronto example (which is everything but Canadian) just proved it won’t.  I even tried some online alternatives like amazon and iTunes but the ratio price/service didn’t satisfy me. Also, iTunes movie stock in Canada is miles away of Us or UK. So I replaced my movie renting with watching some online TV.

This week, when reading  about DRM in some posts on P*, I decided to investigate something I’ve heard about a few times over here: the Private Copying Act (pdf). Yep, it looks like in Canada downloading copyrighted stuff for personal use is not illegal. It is, however, illegal to upload copyrighted content. If you use p2p programs and you allow uploading while downloading, then you are breaking the law. Knowing about this Act was a good thing, as I started to use isFree a few months ago and I was never sure if it was legal or not. Another reason why I never felt I was “breaking the law” while using isFree is that the tv shows I watch (LOST, Heroes and CSI) are always broadcasted in my cable tv before they are available on isFree. That way, I was just using isFree almost as a Tivo system to watch the shows when I have free time and not when I’m cooking or biking.

The Private Copying Act also explains other thing that I never really understood: the high price of writable media when compared with other countries. It has been a few years since I paid more than 1 Euro per CD, and I always questioned myself how could they be so expensive in here. Well, I guess the $0.77 levy fee paid on each CD helps explaining that. One more mystery solved

This won’t change my daily habits too much, as I will for sure continue listening to online radio, and I’m thinking about buying a TV so I can make use of the cable tv subscription at home, but it makes me think more about buying an MP3 player to use when biking, hiking and filling it with the music I want, as long as I find a website to download it for free without having to do any upload

 

Popularity: 7% [?]

Originally uploaded by Bitpicture.

The first big snow storm of this winter is gone, and left is only the pain in the back I got shoveling the driveway

Popularity: 4% [?]

It is a generally accepted idea that Apple has a fantastic marketing team. We see their ads, their launch parties, their website, their design, and we almost want to buy the product just because it looks cool, nice and great, but we didn’t even try it yet. Today I was surprised by another company’s marketing ideas. Believe it or not, it was Microsoft and it’s Vista marketing campaign! I should say that I know nothing about Vista, besides the fact that was launched this week and that was being developed for a long time. I still have no curiosity in learn about it or its new features, since I don’t plan to use it in a near future.

To the official Vista’s launch in Toronto, Microsoft built a very cool ice house. The house has been a huge attraction in downtown Toronto, and the house visitors have the opportunity to see the the new msft OS and Office packages in action. This was a great way of calling people and try to impose the “coolness” factor. I checked the house today from the outside and it looks cool. I will try to visit the inside part tomorrow to see how does a ice toilet works!

Despite the factor of the ice house being a huge attraction by itself, the location chosen (the same used by Sony for the recent launch of the PS3) was also very good. It was just outside the main entrance of the Toronto Eaton Centre, that is just the biggest shopping mall in Toronto (and the 3rd biggest in Canada), and currently Toronto’s top tourist attraction regarding number of visitors. What best location can you have to demo a product than a place where all the families go and most of the tourists also go?

After checking out the ice house, I decided to stop and the Indigo store inside the mall to read some magazines and look at the bargain books (sometimes you find really great value in there). And what was my surprise when I looked at the “Hot & New” section at the entrance, and it was all about Vista! There were more than 10 different books on Vista, from the Bible to the Idiots series. That I was not expecting, but I should say that it was also a good strategy. While I was reading a magazine close to the Vista stand, I would see people stopping and looking at the Vista books with plenty of interest and commenting about it. They definitely caught people’s attention to their product launch.

And at the end I came home thinking: if only Linux had an opportunity like this…

In other news: I gave a try to GIMP 2.3.14 and it rocks! Some very good new features. More on that soon.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Originally uploaded by Vitor Rodrigues.

For the first time in many months, I really gave some rest to my laptop during my vacations. Last week was spent mostly with family, girlfriend and friends. So, only now I got to do the review of the year 2006:

•  started the year looking for a regular job to start after the end of my internship at IBM in Silicon Valley (my internship was going until August, but Visa applications need to be filed by April, so you need to have everything set by then).
• after a few job interviews, got job offers from both IBM and eBay (received both within a 20 minute interval ).
• decided to accept IBM’s offer. Although eBay’s offer was economically better, I really enjoy the work environment at IBM, I have most of my friends there, and more important than that, I was proposed new job responsabilities that made me prefer this position.
• presented at some internal conferences about using a Wiki environment in a big scale software testing project.
• presented at NPUC about using Wikis to give power to team members in the creation of an information repository for cross-team utilization.
• hired as a regular employee in March, 5 months before the end of my internship.
• published a IBM white paper on XML Indexing in DB2 9 pureXML.
• decided to accept an opportunity for a 1-year international assignment at IBM Toronto Laboratory in Canada, from August 2006 to August 2007.
• after 18 months in California, I finally enjoyed some vacations in Portugal, visiting some places I hade never been before, like Tomar, Sintra, Evora and Vila Vicosa.
• move to Canada.
• co-lectured a workshop at CASCON 2006.
• visited New York for the first time.
• published a techincal paper in the IBM developerworks website.
• finished another soon to be published white paper also related with DB2 pureXML.
• contributed to the DB2 pureXML demo.
• came home for Christmas and New Year.

Lots of stuff happening, mostly at work. I have the feelling that I could have done more, but I’m still happy with the results. I did more/better than what I was expecting one year ago.

In the personal life, besides the long awaited vacations in Portugal, all the other events where caused by work or work related (look for job, move to canada, trip to NY).

 For 2007:

• professionally: improve presentation, communication, organization skills.  Find time to invest in side/innovative projects. Read more.
• personally: more local exploring. Sometimes there are lots of interesting stuff in the place we live that we ignore and only later we realize how interesting that place was. Start to read. Save more money (hint: no more gadgets ).

Popularity: 17% [?]

Originally uploaded by Vitor Rodrigues.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Exactly one year ago, I was making fun of some friends in Portugal because they were complaining about the cold and rain and I was going to work every day wearing just shorts and t-shirt. This was December!… in California!

Today, one year later, my friends in Portugal have the same cold and rain and I have…. the opposite of last year -8C in the middle of the afternoon and in a Sunny day. My "record" was -13C last Monday, but I’m kind of looking forward to the -20/-30s of January. 

It is a nice experience tough.

For the curious, the Firefox extension I use to display the Weather information is the popular FoxCast.
 

Popularity: 7% [?]

Originally uploaded by vitor.rodrigues.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

12 hours of flight can be transformed into 32 hours of travelling, if you have to "visit" 4 airports and one of the flights gets delayed, making you spend the night at the airport waiting for a connection flight. The (not!) awesome United Airlines declined to pay for a hotel room for the about 50 people with lost connections, because, according to them, the delay "was in the taxi way, so it’s not our fault". Well, for some reason that wasn’t explained, the airplane left the gate in direction to the taxi way almost one hour late. Considering that my connection was 15 minutes after our arrival to Washingotn Dulles Airport, that hour would have been enough for me!

After leaving Carapeços (Barcelos, Portugal) at 8:00h of September 25, I just arrived Toronto (Canada) at 11h30 of September 26.

I’ll be in the Toronto area for one year, enjoying the freezing weather of Canada, and also enjoying my work at IBM Canada, working as a technology enabler for DB2 9 pureXML™.

1st impressions:

• traffic is hell! Even worse than Los Angeles.
• The streets/houses are old and not taken care off.
• the IBM lab is just beautifull, and with excellent conditions.
• I need to get a network cable, because the wireless signal in my office is very weak…

Popularity: 17% [?]