Sangita Pastel wrote a very good blog post about one of the best nights in Belo Horizonte… about the “garage-bar”, Samba on the street, a unique smell and a lot of fun!

• Samba Till the Sun Rises

The whole party was truly one of the highlights in the month!

Check this out, people on the street do a review of the new iPhone 5:

Last weekend we did not have any trips planned so we spent the time in Belo Horizonte. On Saturday we went to the central market buying food and souvenirs. We also had lunch there and finally relaxed at the park.

On Sunday we got up early and went to the Hippie Fair, a crowded market basically selling shoes, bags and jewelry at very low prices. Mainly for the girls – some bought 7 pairs of shoes. Afterwards we started having a late lunch, which directly faded into a fun night with a Beatles Cover Band at the Lord of Pub….

Overall the perfect Sunday and a very very enjoyable weekend with the #ibmcsc brazil team!

There are 15 people on the #ibmcsc brazil 13 team and lots of them are blogging. Do they blog the same as I do? Yeah, but different:

• Sangita writes about the announcement article in the press and issues with translating it – In the news
• Nada covers the group orientation in much more detail than I did – Live from Belo Horizonte
• Nada talks about the first day with our clients – Day 1: It’s getting serious
• Jared has pictures from the first weekend trips – Weekend photos
• Paddy writes about team building – and we all made the same experience – Forming, Storming, Storming, Storming … Norming, Performing!
• Sangita perfectly summarizes her love for Pastels – Queen of Pastels
• Carolyn talks about the 2nd weekend trip to Inhotim – Inhotim – Modern Art in Style

Have fun discovering!

Last weekend we went to two beautiful places around the area of Belo Horizonte.

On Saturday we had a very long and bumpy bus ride to Serra do Cipó, which is a park located in the north of the city. We did not hike a lot but instead enjoyed the wonderful waterfall and the sun and the nature… Just a great place to be, hang out and have some “me-time”.
On the way back we stopped at a supermarket for some drinks… and came out with a total of 24 pairs of Havaianas, which makes 2.4 on average. Not that bad.

Sunday we went to Inhotim (also a long and bumpy ride), which is a museum and contemporary art museum. Outdoor. So all art is distributed within the park (which is huge!). And while I am not really into art our private guide was able to show us some amazing sculptures, I liked the one from Lygia Pape most. But sorry, no pictures allowed.

Interestingly Bernardo Paz (the founder of Inhotim) says “I don’t consider myself passionate for art. But gardens, that’s what I like.” (the whole article is very interesting to read!). As I agree with him  I opted out from the tour pretty fast (my time-limit for art is around one hour) and started enjoying the beautiful garden… It was great to have some me-time, doing nothing except watching the squirrel eating nuts in the tree above, and enjoying the sun….

#ibmcsc brazil

As Caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail let me share the recipe:

• Lime – squeezed
• Raw sugar – 1-2 teaspoons (sometimes none )
• Cachaça - 4cl (or more)
• Ice or crushed ice

The trick is to make sure that you do not use one of the exported Cachaça’s (namely Pitu or 51), but a high quality one. Don’t know yet where to get them back in Austria,  but we shall see.

The second important item to consider is to make sure there is a bit of Brazilian flair while enjoying the drink, I recommend playing the official #ibmcsc brazil 13 team song:

I can’t wait to have the iPhone 5 in my hands! Apple definitely does it again, simplifying our lifes!

Now that I am in Brazil for some time I really regret that I did not have the time to learn more Portuguese upfront. I should have invested the 30 minutes a day to do the Pimsleur courses to learn at least the basics – it would have helped me a lot.

Because now that I am here I learn the hard way that my brain simply seems to miss the “learn-languages” part. While I speak many programming languages those do not help ordering food or understanding what the cashier tries to tell me. At work we luckily have Guilherme doing the translation for us. However, this not only slows things down, as everything has to be said twice, but it also removes a lot of information. Sometimes there are 2-3 minute discussions going on that are summarized in 1 sentence for us. Don’t get me wrong, Guilherme does a great job and it always worked out to understand the content, but the language barrier is really a huge barrier.

Let me give you an example of where I missed basic language skills.
Imagine a fun night with almost all of the #ibmcsc brazil team, having great food, some “water”, and intense discussions. Some time later the evening I had the need to get up and run to the bathroom of this beautiful restaurant. And then I am stuck, right in front of the two bathrooms. Reason being there are two door plates as shown in the images to the right. Which one to choose – left or right door? Which is the right one? No hints in blue or pink. No man/woman image on the doors. No clue in terms of basic language skills. No WiFi to check online. Guilherme not around. Doomed!

Let me tell you that it worked out well, but this is one of the samples why I should have learned Portuguese upfront. Same happens to me when buying groceries or ordering at the restaurant, with basic language skills it is just much easier.

But I guess now it’s too late to complain…

Recently, on top of a file:

Somehow it reminded me of this Dilbert… fixing 12 year old code is not really fun, especially if basically everything changed since then (Operating system version, Perl version, Oracle version etc. etc.). But anyhow, it worked…. 1 line of code fixed the issue, took 2 days to figure it out….

Comic (c) dilbert.com.

I love those error codes and will certainly start using them, especially:

• 724 – This line should be unreachable
• 725 – It works on my machine
• 732 – Fucking Unic¶de
• 735 – Fucking IE
• 745 – I don’t always test my code, but when I do I do it in production
• 776 – Error on the Exception
• 783 – It was a customer request, honestly
• 784 – Management, obviously