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Adios, Foz do Iguacu

We’re back in Sao Paulo now. The final day in Foz do Iguacu, yesterday, was a mix of tourist events and travelling. In the morning, we went on a boat ride to see the falls. We got all wet and took pictures. Then we went to a bird park to see all kinds of crazy birds. I took all the pictures in my camera there. I’m debating whether to buy another for the rest of the trip, since everyone else has a digital camera.

Anyway, after that, we checked out, and flew out of Foz do Iguacu and arrived in Sao Paulo around 6pm at a different airport right in the middle of town. On the bus ride to the hotel, we saw planes taxiing on the runway above us. The bus ride was kinda scary. There are some really poor parts of town that we saw on the way here. Houses with walls made up of several boards, for instance. We even saw a man with a cart being pulled by a mule. To contrast with that, we arrived at the hotel and checked in. This is the best hotel I have ever been in. It’s about $600 Cdn to stay for a night.

No rest for the wicked

After we had checked in, we all met in the lobby and finally got to see some true Brazillian stuff, that’s not touristy. We went to a neighbourhood called Itaim and ate at a restaurant called Corleonne (it was based on The Godfather). Very different, not knowing the language and talking to the waiter thru signs and our terrible Portugeuse. The food was really good. Then we went to a bar/club across the street and drank some more. We got in around 1am.

And the winner is…

Today, the MS conference started. We sat in on the keynote talk where they announced the winners. The final competition announced was the Software Design. As soon as we found out that we weren’t going to enter the finals, I started rooting for the French. They were all very friendly and great guys as well. And they won! Congratulations to France for your great idea and great application. Their idea was a home management system that works thru the electrical system, not wireless. Pretty neat idea.

Now, we have to present our applications to the people at the conference and each other. I’m not all that motivated to do that, but it might be fun.

This might be the last entry, or the second-to-last. After tomorrow, we’ll be going dark and paying our own way in Rio de Janeiro.

They announced the finalists. We weren´t one of them. When I realized that we weren´t going to be in the finals, I was disappointed; but by the time I left the room where we heard the announcements, I didn´t really care. Winning would have been nice. But that´s not the real prize. The real prize is getting to meet people from all over the world, and partying with them. I no longer have to look at them as competitors, but as colleagues and friends. I´ve met far more people since the announcement than before it. There might have been a bit more bitterness in my teammates, but I think since we´ve had time to reflect, we´re all OK. We took some time to vent with Ben and each other. So I wish the finalist teams good luck in the competition.

Did the exception that I had prevent us from moving on? I´m not sure I want to know. I don´t think it did. Our problem, I think, was that we didn´t relate the problem well enough to the judges. They were from all over the world: amateur sports could be very different where they come from, so they may not be able to see the importance of our app to the market. We´ll present to the Canadian judge in Sao Paulo and see what he thinks. I´ll also see what feedback I can get on our app from the judges that saw us.

Day 3 started early. Most of the Canadians were up bright and early after our late night, including me, of course 🙂 All the teams went on a tour of Foz do Iguacu (the falls). These were really impressive. Bigger, by far, than Niagara. Very beautiful, and well preserved: there are very few buildings around unlike Niagara. Our tour guide, Luciano, was very entertaining, great sense of humour. We see him tomorrow, Day 5, for a boat tour as well.

It Starts…

When we got back from the falls, we had a giant Kool-Aid binge session from the organizers at Microsoft. They said we were all family and we´re all winners; eye-rolling stuff, but necessary. Then we had lunch and a quick briefing on the format for the competition. After that we all had naps or something. It seems so far away but it was only a day ago. After a break, we got down to practicing our Lightning Round presentation, a 10-minute presentation that describes the application at a high level. We had our MS ADE (not sure what that stands for), Ben Watson, help us with some pointers. Mike, our presenter, did a few practice rounds, and we were ready to go. We presented twice to two different sets of judges, because of the format for the competition. The first time we presented, one of the judges slept through the whole thing. We asked around afterwards, and it turns out he was sleeping for a lot of them. Other than that the judges looked totally bored with the presentations; I don´t think it was because we gave a boring presentation either. Mike delivered the presentation very well. My guess is jet lag and seeing so many of them without relent.

The second one went even better. Mike was excellent, and the judges were awake, but still looked bored. The Lightning Round wasn´t scored, and only served as an intro to the application. In between the two presentations, we worked on our main demo, the scored demo on Day 4, with Ben and worked out the main format. Then we had a late dinner, and a showing of the movies for the Rendering and Short Film competitions. They were a lot of fun, and very good. Canada has an entry in the Short Film competition as well. After that was over, we went to our room to practice the demo and finalize the format. We were getting snappy at each other because of the stress. We really had to work hard to get it into the time we were given, 15 minutes. We finally got there around one in the morning and quickly went to sleep 

Day 4 – The main competition

Another early start; this time, because we were presenting at 830. We got all setup at our booth around 7am and waited. Then 830 rolled around we presented to our judges. This went really smoothly. We answered the questions they gave us really well. The demos all worked. I thought we did a great job.

After that, we all went to have some much-needed naps 🙂 After lunch we presented again to the other judges for a wildcard spot (explaining the format of the competition is too much typing 🙂 I´m sure you can find it on the web.) This one didn´t go very good. And I´m the grade-A moron that was responsible. We had a prepared tournament to present with and so I had to open it to show scheduling. But then I got an unexpected error. Uh oh. So I closed down and tried again. Error. Gasp. Read the error this time. For the first part of the demo, I created a tournament with a name that I had already used. The Open Tournament dialog couldn´t handle it. Shit. I couldn´t show the scheduler this way. Tyler was pretty sharp and started talking about some more features for the web, while Mike and I tried to fix it. What a dummy, I was thinking to myself. We couldn´t delete the tournament from the database (it´s really constrained). Damn. How do I get it to work? Aha. I can rename it in the database and it´ll be fine. The rest of the presentation went on while I did the fix. So the order got screwed up and we lost about 45 seconds while I tried to fix it, but the judges all had poker faces, so I don´t know how much it cost us. We fielded the questions really well, though. I still feel really stupid, but things happen. Everyone else said it wasn´t a big deal, but I still hate screwing up like that. I hope it doesn´t jeopardize us going onward, if we would have been chosen otherwise.

After that, we got to go shopping at some tourist shop. Lots of hand-crafted things that were a lot of money. I managed to find some cool things for the family, though. Our team was the only one allowed to do this, too. It was kind of a covert thing. The organizers are really worried about us getting stabbed or something. They sent along one of the logistics people to translate for us and advise us. He was grateful too, since he didn´t have to deal with the hassles of the tournament for an hour and a half.

Now, I´m waiting for them to announce the finalists. They announce the twelve finalists in about an hour from now. If we are chosen, we present once more after dinner to yet more judges that we have not seen before. The winner is announced on the 6th of July in Sao Paulo. So after tonight, there is no more competition. Wish us luck.

…at drinking.

Day 1 ended with a murmur, since we all went to bed early after being up for 40 hrs travelling, more or less. Day 2 started bright and early with a breakfast buffet and a bus trip to the airport to fly to Foz do Iguacu on a charter flight. We flew TAM airlines, a
Brazilian airline. They served champagne while we waited to take off. Other than that, it was standard flight; nothing out of
the ordinary. The airport in Foz do Iguacu is out of the ordinary(at least for me): during our descent we saw nothing but trees and rivers the entire time. The airport in Foz do Iguacu is very small; there are no ramps, only those staircase vehicles that drive up to the planes. There is only one runway; once we had landed, we pulled U-turn to go to the airport. We were bussed to the Hotel Bourbon in Foz do Iguacu, a five-star hotel near the Argentinian border. Foz do Iguacu is like Niagara Falls on steroids: three times as wide and shared by three countries: Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. The weather here is very muggy and damp. I don’t think the temperature is much above 20 degrees, but the humidity makes it seem hotter.

We got most of the day to ourselves. We had some time to set up our booth where we will present our software to the judges. That was entirely uneventful and not worth speaking about. After that, we got ready for the dinner. Canada is well represented with two teams from the Software Design (us) and Short Film (from Western). Sasha, our MS rep/chaperone sent us T-shirts from Roots that are for the official Olympic team. We all wore them for the dinner tonight that introduced all the competitors for Imagine Cup. We made quite the impression with the shirts and the beer drinking. No other country lasted as long as we did. Everyone went to bed early, probably because they arrived in Sao Paulo a lot later than we did. Hopefully, we’ll get to see more of the countries out there partying. So far, only the French have been the only ones to keep up, as a country. The entertainment put on for us was awesome. They sure don’t wear much down here 😉

Our host, Rogerio, from MS Brazil, was generous with his praise for our app; and apparently we are to appear on Brazilian TV because our app is “visually stunning.” Sweet, eh?

Good news on the reverse swirl: the Hotel Bourbon has real toilets, so I got to see the reverse direction flush. I’ve satisfied my curiousity, so no more toilet commentary.

Next up: day 3, when the competition gets going…

The time I write about in these posts may not be near the time I post them, because the Internet is scarce for us right now. (I’m starting to Jones, but that’s another story). Our flight out here was pretty uneventful, very routine. A couple of firsts though: first time on a US airline; first time in US airports, first time across the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, first time in Brazil, of course, and all that comes with that.

US Airports
I noticed a few things that are different from Cdn airports that are worth mentioning. Airplanes speed into the terminal once the land. They move a lot faster that Cdn planes. And the urinals are made for midgets. Seriously, the urinals in Seattle and Houston airports are about mid-thigh level on me, perhaps lower. All Canadian urinals come to my waist! It’s like the average age of US citizens is 10, or the average height of American males is much less than Canada. I stopped doing this probably about ten years ago, but when I really had to go back then, and the only urinal available was the short one for boys, I’d half-squat down to use it. A tinkle in the US brought me back to those times.

Houston to Sao Paulo
This is probably the longest flight I’ve ever taken: 9h 55m. Took a while to take off, due to some “minor” technical difficulties. The idiotic pilot would come on every five minutes to update us on the “minor” problems. Reminded me of George Carlin’s routine on Jammin’ in New York about airports. Once we got underway, things went smoothly though. We flew Continental for this flight; they have the coolest thing I’ve seen on an airplane: a computer program that updates the progress of the flight on a map. The map will zoom in to view more detail, and change from a top-down view to an ass-end view to see what’s ahead of us in a 3-D map. They’d also show the time difference between origin and destination, flight speed, temperature outside. Really cool, every airline should adopt this.

Sao Paulo
This town is freakin’ huge! Once it came into view, that’s all we could see: no fields, no outskirts, just city as far as the eye could travel. Sometimes we couldn’t even see that much, because of smog. There’s palm trees (a first); they are a pure metric country, no pounds, inches or fahrenheit; and Brazilian money has pictures of birds on it, and uses Monopoly money colours just like Cdn currency. We just hung around the hotel(fenced, with barb wire) most of the day. Check-in was super easy and everyone has, so far, been very welcoming. We haven’t seen that many of the teams. We met the Vietnamese team, but they had flown for 30+hrs, so they didn’t stay around long.

One thing that occurred to me on the flight, was the Simpsons episode in which Bart calls someone in Australia to see if the water flushes in the other direction. Well, since I’m in the Southern Hemisphere, I figured I might as well investigate. But, alas, a minor setback: the toilet bowls in the hotel are a different shape and they have more jets of water, so the water “falls in” the bowl rather than swirl around. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed. We move on to Foz de Igacu tomorrow, so there’s hope, I’ll keep you posted…