The mysterious case of the missing headphone is now solved

In my previous post I wrote that my son found a way to hide really well my old Sony headphones, and therefore I had to buy new ones. I just came back from golfing and dining with friends a few minutes ago and got the news from my wife that the headphones resurfaced while I was away. They were inside this thing:

If you have kids, nephews or nieces, you probably know this is the fancy Fisher-Price potty, which:

• Plays 4 royal tunes as a reward!
• Converts to a sturdy stepstool!
• Can be used on a grownup toilet seat!

And apparently can also be used to hide Sony headphones.

I guess I should consider myself lucky that at least he didn’t use the potty for its default purpose during the week.

The Circus and le Cirque

Over the long weekend, my wife and I took L to see the Shrine Circus at the Centre Point Mall in North York.

Looking at the kids on the back of this elephant was a trip down the memory lane:

Despite all the controversy around the use of animals – a Twitter search for that event will return at least as many protests as praises – I have to admit that one of my earliest and fondest memories as a kid is playing with a lion cub in some anonymous circus, duly recorded in a badly preserved picture (I’m the one on my father’s lap):

The last time I’ve been to a traditional circus – i.e., excluding the Cirque du Soleil – I was a 9-year-old living in the same city I was born at. I vividly recall my friend Drausio petting a camel and getting sprayed with drool all over his face – no picture of that, unfortunately , and no relationship with the delicious camel drool Portuguese dessert, or “baba de camelo”.

Back then, having a circus coming to our city was a big deal, as the only other mass entertainment available for kids was to watch old movies on Sunday’s matinées. Old is an understatement: I actually remember going to a black-and-white Tarzan movie featuring Johnny Weissmuller. Most Disney cartoons didn’t get distributed beyond the large cities, but you don’t miss what you never had, so I have no complaints there. The pluses of growing up on the countryside outweigh by far the constraints – in my naturally biased view, of course.

Not much changed since: the Shrine Circus 2009 show was not very different from the ones I used to see so many years ago: no high-tech involved, just the artist, the act and the public, all frozen in time and space. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong here, but I think I just saw the last few breaths of a dying art. I quoted Evan Solomon (CBC) a few months ago saying that “when a new technology comes, the incumbent never dies: it simply goes after deeper efficiencies”. The innovation pipeline does not always work like that, as typewritters and the telegraph can attest. Radio, TV, movies, games and the Internet all fragmented the entertainment space in formats that are more easily consummable, forcing live performances to go after deeper efficiencies.Thus, circus performances will live on through the several forms of Cirque Nouveau, but somehow the amateur spirit is gone as shown in this Wikipedia excerpt:

Cirque expanded rapidly through the 1990s and 2000s, going from one show to approximately 3,500 employees from over 40 countries producing 15 shows over every continent except Africa and Antarctica, with an estimated annual revenue exceeding US$ 600 million. The multiple permanent Las Vegas shows alone play to more than 9,000 people a night, 5% of the city’s visitors, adding to the 70+ million people who have experienced Cirque. In 2000, Laliberté bought out Gauthier, and with 95% ownership, has continued to expand the brand. Several more shows are in development around the world, along with a television deal, women’s clothing line and the possible venture into other mediums such as spas, restaurants and nightclubs.

I used “amateur”, but the precise word is “mambembe” – no idea on how to translate that from Brazilian Portuguese. So, in the mambembe spirit, I’d like to conclude this post with this very amateurish video with my favourite circus song:

A Benjamin Button tale (kinda)

My first three weeks at RBC were interesting and, err, intense, firehose-drinking type of intense. Due to the nature of my projects I think I won’t be able to blog much about them here, but I’m still planning to blog regularly about other random things, so stay tuned, regular readers of “The bamboo raft” (yes, I’m talking to both of you, Bernie and Bénédicte).

My plan to restart blogging this weekend practically went belly up when my Bell Sympatico service started misbehaving on Friday, with my connection dropping every few minutes or so. Blogging offline was never my forté, as I sadly admit that not having immediate access to stuff like Twitter, Wikipedia and Dictionary.com breaks my rhythm.

So let me (re)start with a post loosely themed on Father’s Day. Three weeks ago, my son found this very old photo of me, taken when I was a 4-year-old:

He looked at the picture a bit surprised, then pointed to it and said out loud: “Ootash” (that’s how he calls himself).

I tried to explain, “No, that’s daddy’s picture when he was almost your age”. He vehemently disagreed, “No, Ootash”. There was no way on Earth that I could convince him that it was not him there.

Then I showed him this picture taken during my first week at IBM, back in 1996:

- “This is also daddy, many years ago.”
- “Não.” (that’s “No”, in Portuguese)
- “Yes.”
- (laughing) “Nãããão.”
- “Then, who’s this guy?”
- “I don’t know.”

After some more digging, I found these two pictures that clearly show why my friend Alexandre Neves says that a paternity test will never be required for “Ootash” and me. The one on the left also shows that my taste in clothes has always been top-notch.

Skip three weeks now. Yesterday, I was talking to my mother in Skype and, despite the frequent disconnects, I managed to tell her the story above. When I showed her my IBM picture, she commented: “You were so thin and elegant! And where is all that hair?”

Suddenly, finding that “Dont Go Bald”, “Bald Products” and “Bald People” are all following me in Twitter didn’t feel so bad anymore. Can that Ed Ulbrich guy help me here?

An almost belated Happy Father’s Day to all dads out there!

Leaving IBM

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet over the last month in all the social media channels I normally hang around. I could use the standard excuse and just say I was busy – and I was *really* busy in the last few weeks, including several speaking engagements and trips to Ottawa, Nice (France) and St Catherines (Ontario). However, Twitter pretty much ruined that easy way out, as nobody can honestly say that they don’t have time for writing 140 characters (despite what Jennifer Aniston thinks). The real reason for my silence was that I was going through some soul searching about what I really wanted from my career and after much consideration, I decided it was time for me to leave IBM and try something new.

As I still need to understand better the social computing guidelines for the company I’ll be joining, this post will focus instead on the company I’m leaving.

IBM has my undying admiration as one of the few truly global companies and a great place to work. I thoroughly enjoyed my 12+ years there, and owe much of what I know and what I am to the people I interacted with, IBMers and clients alike. IBM is not just a logo, a bunch of buildings, some hardware / software platform or a services methodology. IBM is this ever-evolving organism whose strength comes mostly from the diversity and reach of its people, and the capacity of reinventing itself.

Before joining IBM, I thought every IBMer would be like the PC guy from the Apple ads, but with blue suits. Once you get to know the real IBMers, you’ll find that the PC and the Mac guys are as real as Ronald McDonald or Tony the Tiger. Over the years, I had the privilege of meeting geologists, biologists, physicists, architects, athletes, musicians, writers, actors and philosophers, whose titles in their business cards – “Developer”, “IT Architect”, “Business Analyst”, “Partner”, “Project Manager” – could mislead you to think they are one-dimensional beings.

The excerpt below, from Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing book, describes well IBM’s main asset: diverse and geographically dispersed people, connected by technology and purpose. By embracing social media, “I‘m By Myself”, like the IBM typewriters, became a thing from the past.

“(…) Each one of us possesses a far broader, more complex range of talents than we can currently express within current economic structures. In this sense crowdsourcing is the antithesis of Fordism, the assembly-line mentality that dominated the industrial age. (…) Contrary to the foreboding, dystopian vision that the Internet serves primarily to isolate people from each other, crowdsourcing uses technology to foster unprecendented levels of collaboration and meaningful exchanges between people from every imaginable background in every imaginable location”

Thus, I just wanted to conclude this post with my deep gratitude not to the abstract concept of IBM as a company, but to each person in the huge IBM crowd who I had the fortune of interacting with in the Web 2.0 collaboration spaces or in offices around the globe. Thank you all and keep in touch.

Five things I didn’t know about Darwin

You should probably know by now that in 2009 we celebrate 200 years of Charles Darwin’s birth and 150 years since “The Origin of Species” was first published. I’ve been feasting on all the information flooding in the media about him, and I learned quite a bit about the man and the book in the last few months. Here’s my top 5 list, in no particular order.

1. A dinasty of sorts
The last publication by Darwin, written just 2 weeks before he died, was about a tiny clam found on a beetle leg. Nothing particularly interesting there. The person sending Charles the specimen was Walter Drawbridge Crick, a shoemaker and amateur naturalist. Even less remarkable, one could say, until you learn that Walter would eventually have a grandson named Francis, of Watson & Crick’s double helix fame, arguably the second most important insight in Biology, and perhaps in all sciences (Source: National Geographic Magazine).

2. Evolution
The word “Evolution”, so associated with Darwin in our collective mind, never appears in “The Origin of Species”. The closest you get is the last word in the last sentence of the book, a poetic gem of scientific literature: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” You can check that yourself by downloading a PDF version of the book here (Source: Quirks and Quarks podcast, CBC).

3. Survival of the fittest
Even more puzzling is the fact that the term “survival of the fittest” was first coined by Herbert Spencer in the book “The principles of biology” (1864), and only shows up in late editions of Origin, duly acknowledging Spencer’s authorship: “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection.  But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”. (Sources: The Phrase Finder and Gutemberg project).

4. The destiny of species
Long before coming up with his theory about where the species came from, many of Charles’ objects of study ended up in his stomach. Darwin used to eat several of the animals he helped describing, including, but not limited to, water-hogs (capivaras for Brazilians, a REALLY big rat, in fact the largest rodent in the world), birds of prey like the caracara, and armadillos. I guess that to provide a comprehensive description of a species, behaviour and looks were not enough: the more information the better . I learned about this bizarre piece of trivia while watching the excellent “Darwin’s Legacy” course by Stanford University, available in iTunes U., but you can find a very good description of Darwin’s culinary adventures here.

5. Brazil according to Darwin
Charles, to put it mildly, didn’t enjoy much his time in Brazil, affirming at the end of his “Voyage of the Beagle” travelog: “On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country.” I’m not sure if slavery in Brazil was worse than in other parts of the world, but being the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery suggests that the Brazilian society of the 18th century relied heavily on it, to the point that even today Brazil still has the second largest population of black origin in the world (after Nigeria). On the other side, Darwin was awed by the forests in Brazil: “Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and decay prevail.  Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature: — no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” Both quotes are a bit surprising given their quasi-spiritual tone. Finally, to conclude on a lighter note, this is Darwin’s account of Carnival folies in Salvador, Bahia, written on March 4th, 1832:

This day is the first of the Carnival, but Wickham, Sullivan & myself nothing undaunted were determined to face its dangers. — These dangers consist in being unmercifully pelted by wax balls full of water & being wet through by large tin squirts. — We found it very difficult to maintain our dignity whilst walking through the streets. — Charles the V has said that he was a brave man who could snuff a candle with his fingers without flinching; I say it is he who can walk at a steady pace, when buckets of water on each side are ready to be dashed over him. After an hours walking the gauntlet, we at length reached the country & there we were well determined to remain till it was dark. — We did so, & had some difficulty in finding the road back again, as we took care to coast along the outside of the town. — To complete our ludicrous miseries a heavy shower wet us to the skins, & at last gladly we reached the Beagle. — It was the first time Wickham had been on shore, & he vowed if he was here for six months it should be only one.

Watching Darwin braving the festive Carnival crowds in Salvador would have been priceless. If only we had Flickr and YouTube back then!

Spelling Changes: Brazilian Portuguese

I have a deep passion for my mother tongue: the spoken Brazilian Portuguese is musical, suave and deliciously illogical. In my first month living in Canada, while unemployed and looking for some extra income, I decided to teach Portuguese 1-on-1. In the first class, my student-turned-guinea-pig asked: “Why do you say ‘Eu moro no Brasil’ and “Eu moro no Japão”, but you use ‘Eu moro em Portugal’ and ‘Eu moro em Moçambique’?” There was never a second class, as both sides agreed they would be better off with me sticking to bits and bytes instead .

While in São Paulo for the holidays, I learned that, as of January 1st, 2009, Brazil adopted new spelling rules for the Portuguese language. The changes are supposed to eventually be implemented in all the other seven Portuguese-speaking countries: Portugal, Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe. Granted, this list is no G7 club, but it’s worth to mention that Portuguese is the 6th language in the world in number of native speakers, way ahead of popular languages such as French, German and Japanese.

You can find more details about the spelling reform here and here. And test your knowledge here.

Not everybody is happy, as you can tell. In my case, it was as if my mother had just deserted me. In this case, it was actually just my mother tongue, but still I felt a bit betrayed after all those years learning when to use diacritics, accents and hyfens. Then I found that the Portuguese alphabet had grown to 26 letters, adding K, W and Y. As a kid in kindergarten it annoyed me that I could not spell my own name using the letters in the wood blocks. So it’s not only bad news after all.

It’s nonetheless disturbing that in today’s world a language can be officially changed by some kind of political decision. Trying to standardize the written language across countries is even worse: it’s like the Roman Empire trying to outlaw Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Romenian or French. Languages evolve differently and there’s no going back. Just let it be.

P.S. -  If I could, I would add a song track to this post: Língua, by Caetano Veloso (full lyrics and sample audio can be found here).

Gosto de sentir a minha língua roçar a língua de Luís de Camões
Gosto de ser e de estar
E quero me dedicar a criar confusões de prosódias
E uma profusão de paródias
Que encurtem dores
E furtem cores como camaleões

Gosto do Pessoa na pessoa
Da rosa no Rosa
E sei que a poesia está para a prosa
Assim como o amor está para a amizade
E quem há de negar que esta lhe é superior?
E deixe os Portugais morrerem à míngua
“Minha pátria é minha língua”
Fala Mangueira! Fala!

Flor do Lácio Sambódromo Lusamérica latim em pó
O que quer
O que pode esta língua?

Flashback: Hawaii Superferry questionnaire

Back in September, I went to Hawaii for a week with my family, and we decided to go from Honolulu to Maui by ferry. It’s a slow trip compared to taking a flight, but worthwhile especially if you are traveling with kids.

As you approach the boarding lanes, a Hawaii Superferry employee goes through the standard procedure of checking your vehicle and asking you questions about what you are taking with you. Even though you are hopping from island to island in the same state, the procedure resembles crossing the border with a neighbouring country or boarding an international flight, which makes sense in today’s world, and also for environmental reasons. So both sides engaged in this somewhat flat but polite conversation that goes like this:

“Are you carrying any firearms or ammunition?”
“No.”

“Are you taking any domestic animals with you? Any livestock?”
“No on both accounts.”

“Do you have any flammable materials in your baggage?”
“No.”

“Any plants, seeds or soil?”
“Nope.”

“What about human bones?”
“No. Wait. What???”

I know that there must be a reason for the question, some historical precedent or technical legality justifying it. But I can’t help but wonder if anyone was ever caught in the process. “Human bones? Hummm, let me see. Hey sweetheart, are those bones in your bag human?”

Moleskine art

About two weeks ago I was having major troubles uploading pictures from my trip to Switzerland to Flickr, and went through a painful cycle of deleting everything and uploading the whole batch again. Unfortunately, during that process, I lost some nice comments people made to the deleted photos, including one by Susan Rudat, who commented on this picture taken in Bern:

I visited Susan’s photostream in Flickr and I felt like a new world just was revealed to me. I had never heard about it before, but found that there are several artists, like Susan, who create wonderful art in Moleskine notebooks. Her work is copyrighted, so I can’t add samples here, but I encourage you to take a look at some of her sets, such as Places and ’skine color. Simply awesome.

(Susan, if you ever read this entry, I would like to suggest you publish a sample of your work under a Creative Commons license, so that others can spread the word around what you do.)

I’m obviously not in the same league as any of those folks, and I have not had much success with my attempts of drawing using a tablet, so I decided to give it a try by starting small. Following a tip by Bernie Michalik, I went to a DeSerres store and bought one of their moleskine-imitation books, which cost half of the price of the real Moleskine ones, some cheap pencils and ink pens, and started fooling around with the new found hobby. Here’s my first sketch, a drawing of my son in the 10 seconds he stood still watching something on TV:

With 100 more years of practice, I can hopefully join one of the Moleskine Art groups in Flickr

I have a lot to thank Bénédicte and her Carnet de Dessins blog for being an inspiration and taking me out of my geek / Web 2.0 comfort zone and go back to the non digital world of pencil and paper. I may never become an artist, but I’m enjoying doing things that do not require a keyboard for a change.

Accent reduction and the Brazilian way of speaking English

Almost 10 years ago, I took some courses on accent reduction at IBM. If you know me in person, you must be thinking – that didn’t work, I still can’t understand you

In fact, I don’t think my accent is any different now, but the course was good to raise awareness on the English words Brazilians have the most trouble with. I’ve lost count of how many times I heard fellow Brazilians saying something like “people from China/Korea/Japan/India/Russia have such a hard time learning how to speak English, I can’t understand what they say”. There’s a subtle prejudice in that line of thinking that most people don’t realize.

One of the instructors in the accent reduction course had a good explanation for that. Imagine 3 people: John, a native English Canadian speaker, Ana, and Wong. Both Ana and Wong have been living in Canada for 5 years, learned English as adults and speak their respective mother tongues at home. Ana is Brazilian and Wong is a Cantonese-speaking Chinese. John understands most of what Ana and Wong say, but occasionally misses things here and there during a conversation. The same can be said for Ana and Wong towards John. But Ana has a hard time understanding Wong and thinks that’s because his English is not very good, as she can perfectly understand Carmen and Adrian, her Colombian and Romanian colleagues, speaking English.

Of course, one possible explanation is that Wong’s proficiency in English is not that good. But often what happens is that they all speak English equally well – or equally poorly – from John’s perspective. But Wong’s flavour of English is very far from Ana, Carmen and Adrian. Clear as mud, eh? Here’s what I mean, in a picture:

One can make a credible case that Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian are all Latin or Romance languages, and English is heavily influenced by Latin – arguably 60% of the English vocabulary has its roots in Latin – so it’s ok to assume that Asians would have more difficulty with English than we do. I agree that’s probably easier for a Portuguese-speaking person to learn a workable English vocabulary, but accent is a different story altogether. Cantonese has much more phonemes than Portuguese, so in theory Wong could be better equipped to notice the many nuances of spoken English.

Here are some of the English language traps Brazilians – including me – have a particular hard time with. I added links to Dictionary.com in case you want to check the pronunciation (you have to click on the gray audio icon).

1. Vowels
bat (morcego), bet (apostar), beet (beterraba), bit (pedaço), but (mas) – they all sometimes sound the same, so you have to rely on the context to tell what’s being said. Particularly embarassing is when I try to say “sheet” or “beach” without blushing everybody in the room . There are many other cases: sheep and ship, super and supper, man and men, etc.

2. T
The letter T in English sounds a bit different from Portuguese with a discreet sibilant sound, but it’s definitely not like “tch”. So, it’s common to have Brazilians pronouncing “tea” like “chee”, and “two” or “to” like “chew”. Think Herbert Vianna from Paralamas do Sucesso singing “Uma Brasileira”: One more time. That’s a good “t”.

3. Assuming similarly spelled words are pronounced alike
Nike does not rhyme with Mike. Nike is pronounced Nai-kee.
Other examples of tricky pairs are:

• sword/word (word actually rhymes with bird)
• food/book (food has a long “oo” sound, book is short)
• cover/over (note that “dove” is also tricky)
• own/town

4. Voiceless Consonants
This is a very peculiar thing in Brazilian Portuguese. When we say “pneu” (tire) we kind of pronounce an “i” between the p and the n: “pineu”. The same happens with “cacto”, “subtrair”, “gnomo”: we say “cáquito”, “subitrair” and “guinomo”. For example, pay attention to Chico Buarque saying “subtraída” in “Vai Passar”. English is full of voiceless consonants, and we tend to do the same when we say things like cryptography, dogma, verdict and others.

Naturally, I’m completely overextending myself here, so please correct me if you noticed anything wrong on what I said above. I remember a roommate of mine from Peru telling me in Portuñol: “Yo no comprendo como tantos Latinos viven dos, tres anos en Brasil y no aprenden a falar português”. I may as well be doing the same in this post. Also, there are plenty of Brazilians who speak English very well, and English itself is spoken in different ways around the globe, so my observations can’t be generalized. When I say “we”, I actually mean “those Brazilians who, like me, are totally inept to speak English well”.

One problem in learning English in Canada is that most people are too polite to correct me, so I probably say things the wrong way all the time without realizing it. You would be doing me a big favour by correcting me, so please don’t be shy. I promise I won’t be offended

Updated: Added a reference to “beach” – thanks Alan!

Updated again: I forgot to include one important item to the list above:

5. Intonation.

Brazilian Portuguese has much less variation in the way we speak. For example, we typically say a very soft, flat “Congratulations”, the same way we would say “Parabéns”. In North America, when you say “congratulations”, you can almost see all the whistles & bells, a festive cake with 1000 candles and the clown parade that go along with it. If you say anything that way in Brazil, people will think that you are trying to sell them something expensive.

Wrinkled shirts

This happened on Sunday night in Istanbul.

All the hotels in the city were full, so Bernie and I had to move from the nice Conrad Hotel in Besiktas to the unlisted Villa Zurich Hotel, close to Taksim. I arrived there Sunday night, and my shirts were all badly wrinkled as if they had spent the weekend inside a bottle of Coke or, as they say in Brazil, in the guts of a cow (“na barriga da vaca”).

So, I called the reception and asked for an iron and an ironing board. The person there asked me why I needed an iron for. A bit surprised, I said, “well, my shirts are wrinkled and therefore I need an iron”. Then the person replied: “You want iron for your shirts?” Even more puzzled, I said: “Yes, would that be possible?” and heard “Okay, I’ll send that to you in a moment”.

After about 15 minutes, somebody knocks in my door. I open it, and this person from the hotel has a tray with a glass some white liquid and a straw. I stared at the white glass for about 10 seconds, thinking: this is getting really bizarre. Then I asked: “What’s this?”

The person said: “Didn’t you ask for yogurt?”

Then reality sank in, and I exploded with an uncontrollable laugh. In Turkey, Ayran is a popular salty drink made of yogurt and water. I’m not sure if it’s pronounced the same as “iron”, but with my thick accent I can’t actually blame the reception person for the confusion. The poor guy was probably thinking: this guest is weird, he uses yogurt to starch his clothes.

If you ever go to Turkey, make sure you bring your Picture Dictionary, as known as Universal Phrase Book with you. It can come handy if your Turkish – or your English accent – is as poor as mine. This is ayran:

And this is iron:

New York – Part 1 of 2: The city

This blog was not supposed to be a travel blog. I just happen to be traveling a lot in the last 12 months. I hope I can stay home more often soon to be with my wife and son, but at this point that’s more wishful thinking than anything else, as there are a few more trips coming my way in the next month.

Now, once I go on a business trip, I try to make the most out of it. On April 6, I went to New York to participate of a client event, and had a few hours to spare in the city, so I went for a Brazilian churrascaria (man I miss that) and some sightseeing too. As usual, I posted the pics to Flickr and a sample here:

This time around I’ve got a bit disappointed with this Brazilian steakhouse (Plataforma Churrascaria Rodizio). I had been there a few times in the late 1990s and early 2000s and it feels like a different place now. Not too bad, but this restaurant used to be REALLY good. I also went to the other extreme and got some of the world-famous street meat:

That was very tasty, I loved it. It just occurred to me that maybe my food critic impressions say more about me than about the places I’m assessing .

Then I wandered around aimlessly and took some more pics:

I also took some time to go to the Rockefeller Center’s observation deck, as known as Top of the Rock. From there you can get a good view of the Empire State and Citigroup buildings, but the view to the Chrysler building – my favourite skyscraper – is kind of obstructed. I know, picky, picky, picky.

All in all, a short but packed few hours in the city. If I go again, I’ll try to squeeze in a museum visit or a Knicks game.

English or Portuguese?

For I while I struggled on whether or not I should write this blog in Portuguese, as most of my friends and relatives live in Brazil. On top of that, I feel much more comfortable with my mother tongue: even after 11 years living in Canada, I still can’t claim I speak English well. My writing is not as bad, as I have more time to think it through – and google my way around what I don’t know – but I still find plenty of grammar and spelling errors whenever I read old posts of mine. Writing in English may even be perceived as a snob thing to do: who am I trying to impress, after all?

I may still change my mind, but the main reason I write this blog in English is that I don’t use it as a vehicle to communicate with my friends and relatives. As a matter of fact, I only told 2 people in Brazil so far that I actually have a new blog. The only other people that probably know about it are those who follow my rare twittering and some co-workers who read my internal blog. I decided to keep a low profile until I find my hand on what I should blog about, and also to have some meat here before announcing it to more people. Writing it in English makes it more consummable by the public at large, so for now I’ll stick with the plan.

But don’t get me wrong: I really love writing and talking in Portuguese. Doing that gives me this warm feeling of being at home no matter where I actually am: “Minha pátria é minha língua” summarizes this idea well. Furthermore, Brazilian Portuguese is a beautiful language in my naturally biased view. Rich, full of historical influences, with many peculiar sounds, and deliciously illogical.

English is more of an acquired taste, but I think now I have an admiration for it. There is a minimalist elegance in conveying a lot of ideas using so few words.

I wish I could learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and German. You never really think outside the box until the moment you replace the damn box. This may sound silly, but the language you use to express yourself affects your way of thinking.

However, no language can accurately express all the complexity of ideas and sensations that go through our brain. You don’t say what you think or feel, you only say what known words allow you to articulate. This gets worse when speaking a foreign language, as your vocabulary and internalization of expressions tend to limit you even further. So, I’m often left with this perception that none of the people who interact with me in English really know me. What they know is this subset of me that is externalized by my poor command of the English language.

I said this before: In Canada, we always talk about visible minorities, but very rarely we talk about audible minorities. My Asian looks play a much smaller role in my social interactions than my thick Brazilian accent. I recall watching a movie – a bad one, but with a memorable quote – where one of the characters says: “don’t think that because I speak with an accent, I think with an accent”. Recognizing this need is the first step to address it.

Dominican Republic

I just came back from my vacation after a week of sun, sea and sand. It felt really good to not have a computer around for 7 days to put things in perspective. Buildind sand castles is definitely more fun than blogging or public speaking or business consulting. I could do that for a living if it paid well. Of course, I have ways to go before considering changing careers:

I stayed in a nice resort in Punta Cana. I’ve never been a big fan of the huge resorts in the Caribbean, as they feel pretty much like a Second Life of sorts: everything is fabricated to look like the stereotyped tropical paradise. But I confess that this time I was just looking for a place to relax, and that is their specialty.

I took a day to at least get a glimpse at real Dominican life and went to Santo Domingo. The Dominican Republic has been through a lot since the first Europeans came in the late 15th century, and just walking down the streets of Santo Domingo and seeing the poor countryside tells you that the world is anything but flat.

Back to Toronto, I have a huge backlog of emails and urgent tasks to deal with, so enough of blogging for today. As a filler for content, here are some pics I posted to Flickr:

Small settlement between Punta Cana and Santo Domingo

Street art

Columbus, hopefully not pointing to the Hard Rock Cafe

Sundial

Diego’s Columbus Alcazar

The French Embassy (formerly known as Hernan Cortés’s House)

Franciscan monastery ruins

Presidential Palace

The oldest cathedral in the Americas

Cathedral’s main nave

Ugly modern monument (Columbus lighthouse)

Late April’s fool tale

Almost 10 years ago, I took the airport express bus at Pearson (Toronto’s main airport) to go back to my place, but I was so tired that I slept really hard minutes after the bus left the terminal. When I woke up after 2 hours or so, I found myself in the airport again!!! My wife always teases me about that story, and jokes about me sleeping very easily, and risking to do it again in my business trips.

Yesterday, April first, I took the 7:10 am flight from Toronto to Ottawa and, as usual, was sleeping (and hopefully not snoring) moments after take-off. When I woke up, I felt like I had slept for hours, and the flight attendant was announcing that in a few minutes we would be landing in… Toronto!!!

For a moment, I thought that I had done that sleeping-through-multiple-trips again. Then I realized that my plane could not land in Ottawa due to heavy fog in the region. The whole process to allocate all passengers to other flights was really messy and full of errors, but thankfully everything worked at the end. I remember that before coming to Canada somebody told me this not-so-funny joke:

Q: What’s is the best way to orderly evacuate a stadium full with 50,000 Canadians in an emergency?

A: You announce: “Please orderly evacuate the stadium because there is an emergency”

That’s a big stereotype, but yesterday I was surprised at the overall reaction to the situation: lots of confusion, mis-communication, duplicate boarding passes, mishandling of baggages and not even one passenger freaked out. Everybody was very calm and went through the whole ordeal in a very civilized manner. A few passengers in other flights even gave up their seats after they were already in the plane to allow others with urgent matters to fly, without even being asked. Some see this as a problem, as being too accommodating, but the reality is that screaming at others would not solve the problem in that situation, so I’m actually proud of the way the passengers acted. Maybe that’s a bit of being Canadian, after all.

My first trip abroad, 16 years ago

In early February, I was back to Washington, DC, after 16+ years. Washington was the first city I’ve been to outside Brazil. I was just starting my working career, and was sent to King of Prussia in Pennsylvania for a course on hierarchical databases, taking a Pan Am (!) flight from São Paulo to New York’s JFK and then a regional flight to Philadelphia. Pan Am actually closed operations a few months after I came back from that trip (yeah, writing the last couple of sentences just made me feel like three hundred years old). The place I was staying at does not count exactly as an urban centre, as it can be seen here; that’s why Washington takes the dubious honour of being my first.

I still wonder how I managed to end up in the right place. Back then, my proficiency in the English language was somewhere between Tarzan’s and Cheeta’s.

I remember that I had to take a bus to get to the American Airlines terminal at JFK and couldn’t understand a word of what the bus driver was saying. Luckily, I saw a guy in the bus with a boarding pass for the same flight as mine and just followed him.

When I landed in Philly, I called the shuttle that was supposed to take me to the hotel. The conversation went more or less like this:

Me: “Hello? I need a shuttle to take me to the Holiday Inn in King of Prussia.”
The guy on the other side: “whrs thywsf shwptn pclng ywksh knrtspntgh.”
Me: “Errr. Sorry, what did you say?”
The guy on the other side: “whrs thywsf shwptn pclng ywksh knrtspntgh.”
Me: “Can you please repeat that once more?”
The guy on the other side: “whrs thywsf shwptn pclng ywksh knrtspntgh.” (well, at least he did repeat himself)

[uncomfortable silence on both sides]

The guy on the other side (speaking very slowly): “L-I-S-T-E-N!… W-H-A-T… C-O-L-O-R… I-S… Y-O-U-R… S-H-I-R-T?”
Me (relieved for finally understanding something): “My shirt? Err… Dark blue. Why?”
The guy on the other side: “D-O-N’-T… M-O-V-E!… I’-L-L… F-I-N-D… Y-O-U!”

And so he did! He found me and took me safely to the hotel!

Once in the hotel, I could barely go through the check-in routine, to the point a Korean person was brought in to help with the translation – which didn’t help at all, since the only word I know in Korean is “kimchi”. Things started working when they finally found somebody who could speak Spanish and understand my Portuñol.

There was not a lot to do in King of Prussia. I tried to walk to the mall nearby and was lucky to not have been hit by a car. Definitely not a place for pedestrians. So, when the course was over, boredom trumped fear and I decided to take a train to DC.

Spending three days in Washington was the best decision I made in that trip. Great city, excellent museums, good transportation system, a fantastic zoo, landmarks made familiar by tens of TV shows and movies. That’s when I started thinking seriously about spending a few years abroad.

Being back to the city in February made me feel good. This time around, I did not have much time to enjoy the city. With just a few hours to spare, I just walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and visited the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. Here are some pics:

Capitol, FBI and Canadian Embassy

Somewhere along Penn Ave NW and National Gallery of Art (East Building)

Calder @ NGA and Old Post Office

Busy times

I haven’t blogged here for a month and a half now, so it’s time to catch up. Nothing better to kill a readership (even if that means 2 or 3 people) than abandoning your own blog for such a long time. I’ve been traveling for most of my time since January, and decided that it’s better to “write less, blog more”, but have not been very successful following my own mantra so far. This is the first of these short posts, and I’ll be writing quite a few of them in the next little while, covering some of the things I’ve been doing and thinking over the last month and a half. Stay tuned, both of you reading this blog.

Of moths and ferns: the Internet as a window to the past

I’m home sick for 3 days now, and have been doing nothing but sleeping, coughing, surfing the net and thinking. Maybe thinking too much, as you can see below.

The Internet is typically regarded as a window to the future, a glimpse of things yet to come, showing what can be possible in the future. Recently though, there seems to be more and more evidence that it works in both directions. Things that were long forgotten come back to your attention, the Internet equivalent of finding the Death Sea Scrolls. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But when you browse YouTube and see Brazilian ads from the 70’s, find old soccer collectible cards, and get LinkedIn invites from folks you haven’t seen since the 8th grade, you can’t help but wonder if your whole life will be digitalized one day.

A few weeks ago, I googled my own name and found evidence of my previous life as a biologist: a paper I had co-written back in the early 90’s about the interactions between an epiphytic Brazilian fern and a moth:

At the time, I used to think that my research was pointless and boring, but now I miss those days. Research work is tough, under-appreciated and sometimes lonely, but once you start getting results, it feels good to know you are contributing to the overall body of knowledge of humanity. One of my mentors used to say that science is all about creating little bricks that one day will be used to build walls and buildings. Cheesy but true. It’s also likely that some bricks will never be used, but you won’t know that up front. The fabulous pea plant experiments by Mendel were not recognized until way after this death.

All that led me to think about how our lives are shaped by decisions made every day, some small, some large. What if I had stayed in University as a researcher? Would I be bored now? Would I be famous (in the Academia world at least)? Both my sister and my brother-in-law are biologists and they seem to be very happy with the path they chose. In an ideal world, I’d like to be able to use my background as a researcher and a biologist in my IT endeavours. That would be really cool. Or maybe it’s time to cut on this NeoCitron tea.

Update: fixed the image link.