a geek trapped in a cool guy’s body

…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…

Well, I wanted to post an entry before I left that was well thought out, articulate and humourous, but you’ll just have to settle for this. I spent the better part of the evening working out the kinks on our demo machines, and “strategizing” about our presentation. I think we have a unique entry that should turn some heads and raise some eyebrows; we should have a strong showing.

Stay tuned here for more of my trip to Brazil and the Imagine Cup competition.

P.S. Ok, I was going to list off all the things I had done to prepare like what I packed and then write “Check” after each one. I’ll just give you a sampling of what I brought:

Headband to pretend I’m a tennis player? Check
Explosive Diarrhea Medicine? Check.

If only I had more time…

Microsoft posted a press release about Imagine Cup and we’re one of the featured teams! There’s even a picture of us.

Click here for the article [via Elisa]

If you’re a blogger and a .NET developer and you’re reading this: spread the word.

I find myself compulsively checking the TechEd worldwide website to see when the list of speakers are going to show up. With two weeks away, I don’t hold very much hope for it being updated. Anybody know or heard anything or know who the speakers are? Please leave a comment.