Hello everyone,
The end of the holidays was very good. I found my supervisor (absolutely NO problem to do it) and we managed to organize a Coding Dojo in Grenoble with some researchers and some industry workers. We worked with ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org) and rspec (http://rspec.info/) on the block problem (http://acm.uva.es/p/v1/101.html). It was very interesting and I felt they liked the idea. Even promissed me that they would start their own dojo.
The last week was in Paris where I joined the Paris Coding Dojo (http://xp-france.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DojoDeveloppement - in French) where I met Emmanuel Gaillot (http://emmanuelgaillot.blogspot.com/) and a few other regular Paris Dojo attendees. It was an amazing experience and will probably have future great consequences regarding collaboration between the group in Sao Paulo and the one in Paris.
Finally, I should leave France on Saturday morning. Obvisouly, as always near holidays, my flight was overbooked. So I was offered some money and a full paied day to stay one more day in Paris. I accepted it so it would pay off my accomodation expenses in Toronto. Therefore, I arrived in Toronto on Sunday afternoon. Found out that the student accomodations at the University of Toronto is pretty amazing! The room is quite big and nice in a very nice campus and pretty well geared and very well located.
I then went the Agile 2008 volunteers meeting in the Sheraton Hotel Center. It was a pretty good overview of the size of the conference: 1600 attendees. 400 speakers and around 100 staff (70 volunteers, 20 stage directors and about 10 major organizers). Sunday was really smooth since the conference only sort of started in Monday. Monday only had registration and bag deliveries as well as the research talks. The lines were little, everything was flowing pretty smoothly and people were talking quite a lot. Loads of famous agilists were walking around, meeting each other and talking to other people. It ended up with the Ice breaker evening which was a huge meeting with all attendees with 4 food spots that were representing Toronto's main social origins. There were also several weird pass times you could go into: massage, hand reading, handwrite analysis, henna tatoos, taro players and other stuff.
It was on from 7 pm to 10 pm when those services as well as food and drinking stopped sending people out ot bars or the Musik Maztik which is a special stage in the conference for attendees to play music instruments. Since the timezone difference is about 6 hours between Paris and Toronto, 10 pm was 4 am for me so I went to bed.
Today (Tuesday) is the official sessions start of the conference. Things are going very well so far, the breakfast was amazing and everyone is watching a very good talk from James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds (http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/). He is talking about how wisdom can come out of the crowds and why in some cases, it just gets people dumbers. After this, the first sessions will come up and people should spread over. I will try to keep this blog updated about the conference but I am not sure I will manage it.
That's all for now people. Bye bye!
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Holidays!
Well,
I have been pretty away lately but it is just that I am enjoying my holidays here in Europe.
From the 1st of July to the 4th, I spend a few days in Paris enjoying the food and the summer. Then I spend a nice weekend in London where I visited the Thoughtworks office and met a few very nice people thanks to Danilo.
I could finally offer Mariana her Asus eee Pc 900 which is a fine little piece of computer. The pre packaged Xandros distribution is quite weird and she is anxious to install Ubuntu on it but I still have not managed to create a bootable USB.
We visited a few places and museums as well as a pub (could not miss that, right?) and went to a magic show. Covent Garden and the London Transport Museum were some of the highlights. The London's eye tour was quite deceiving on the other hand.
The 7th we got back to Paris and, tired as we were, lost our first opportunity to join the Paris Coding Dojo which made me quite sad. On the rest I had a nice week walking around Paris without any specific destination. Highlights to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It is cheaper and MUCH more interesting than London's eye. No time restriction, more infos and space. A nicer view of the whole city as well as a first and second floor trip that can last long. I had the pleasure to have lunch at the second floor (home made sandwiches and water) and it was very pleasant.
The 14th we finally went to the parc in front of the Eiffel Tower to wait for the fireworks. It was a very nice evening. Laying down on the grass, having a nice picnic with wine and then listening to classic music while watching an amazing firework show. Only sad part was that people were not polite enough to stay sit so everyone could enjoy it. We had to stand up and the shorter people suffered a bit. Sad to see that civilization is not what it used to be.
I am currently to the south of France, near Bordeaux, at my grand parents' place. It is a very nice and calm spot although tourists are becoming more and more invasive. Tomorrow I leave to the mountains at a friend's place were I should have 3 days of calm and then we head for Nice to see Julian and then Grenoble to see Alfredo, my advisor (let's hope I don't run into the same troubles as the PHD comics).
I have been pretty away lately but it is just that I am enjoying my holidays here in Europe.
From the 1st of July to the 4th, I spend a few days in Paris enjoying the food and the summer. Then I spend a nice weekend in London where I visited the Thoughtworks office and met a few very nice people thanks to Danilo.
I could finally offer Mariana her Asus eee Pc 900 which is a fine little piece of computer. The pre packaged Xandros distribution is quite weird and she is anxious to install Ubuntu on it but I still have not managed to create a bootable USB.
We visited a few places and museums as well as a pub (could not miss that, right?) and went to a magic show. Covent Garden and the London Transport Museum were some of the highlights. The London's eye tour was quite deceiving on the other hand.
The 7th we got back to Paris and, tired as we were, lost our first opportunity to join the Paris Coding Dojo which made me quite sad. On the rest I had a nice week walking around Paris without any specific destination. Highlights to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It is cheaper and MUCH more interesting than London's eye. No time restriction, more infos and space. A nicer view of the whole city as well as a first and second floor trip that can last long. I had the pleasure to have lunch at the second floor (home made sandwiches and water) and it was very pleasant.
The 14th we finally went to the parc in front of the Eiffel Tower to wait for the fireworks. It was a very nice evening. Laying down on the grass, having a nice picnic with wine and then listening to classic music while watching an amazing firework show. Only sad part was that people were not polite enough to stay sit so everyone could enjoy it. We had to stand up and the shorter people suffered a bit. Sad to see that civilization is not what it used to be.
I am currently to the south of France, near Bordeaux, at my grand parents' place. It is a very nice and calm spot although tourists are becoming more and more invasive. Tomorrow I leave to the mountains at a friend's place were I should have 3 days of calm and then we head for Nice to see Julian and then Grenoble to see Alfredo, my advisor (let's hope I don't run into the same troubles as the PHD comics).
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