The NetBeans South American Tour Wraps Up

After 11 cities in three weeks, we finished up the NetBeans/OpenSolaris South American University Tour last week in Natal, Brazil.

On Saturday, after our five hours of NetBeans talks, I was scheduled to do a talk at Natal Java Day, at 9:40AM. I awoke to blazing sunlight coming through the window of my hotel room. My mental clock that judges such things told me it looked like 9 or 10AM. Oh, crap, I thought - I slept through my talk! So I power up the laptop. It says it is 5:45AM. So I call the reception desk. Yes, it really is 5:45AM. Natal is in the tropics - quite close to the equator. Sunrise happens very fast, and it is full light very early.

We spent Sunday cruising around the dunes of Natal in a dune buggy, with a driver who offered us the options of a tour with emotion, or a tour without emotion. We realized what with emotion means the first time we went down a near-vertical grade. There were various stops to zip down ropes at high speed into a lake and other such madness. Actually, I'd recommend this sort of tour (maybe with slightly less emotion when it comes to the driving) to anyone with kids - it's very kid-friendly.

I'm taking some vacation now, which has given me time to work on one of my Friday-afternoon-projects, a persistence framework for Wicket that makes writing database-aware applications really trivial. I'll be contributing it to Wicket Stuff sometime in the next week or two - so a blog containing some actual Java code is coming, I promise :-)

Meanwhile, some photos from our travels...

Cows on the beach - who knew?

A fisherman in Natal, Brazil

Street vendor in Natal, Brazil

Can you find the computer programmers in this picture?

Florianopolis, Brazil - one of my favorite places on earth!