Vitor Rodrigues

Originally uploaded by Vitor Rodrigues.

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Originally uploaded by FireinCairo.

Popularity: 24% [?]

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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

 

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I decided to switch from prepaid cellphone service to a monthly plan… The plan price is $20 for 200 minutes…. Not so bad, BUT, there are some extra charges:

• $8/month for “system access fee”, whatever that is, considering I’m paying $20 for the service itself.
  
• plus $1/month for 911 access fee
• plus $7 to display the caller’s phone number. This is just nuts. I need to pay to see who is calling me. Note that the caller can still choose to show or hide his/her number.
  
• received calls are charged at the same price as made calls
  
• activation fee of $35, even after being a prepaid customer of them
  

 add the tax to it and the $20 monthly plan is now $40 per month… I’m still deciding if I should go back to prepaid… but for a country where I pay more for insurance per year than my car is worth (year 2000 ford focus sedan), nothing looks strange anymore…. I doubt that there is such thing as consumer protection around here…

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Originally uploaded by Vitor Rodrigues.

Popularity: 12% [?]

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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: 9% [?]

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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 :-)).

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Originally uploaded by Vitor Rodrigues.

Popularity: 14% [?]

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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.
 

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Originally uploaded by vitor.rodrigues.

Popularity: 12% [?]

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