Buenos Aires
I arrived to Buenos Aires from Santiago de Chile early in the morning with very little sleep. But turns out that even if American Airlines and Lan Chile are partners of the One World alliance, American Airlines forces you to go through immigration and customs even if you are a passenger in transit.
Forms had to be filled, immigration cleared, and customs cleared. Only to find out that I lost my airplane by five minutes. Thank you American Airlines.
Loosing this plane was particularly annoying, because there are no more flights from the Buenos Aires international airport to Montevideo that day. I had to go to the Aeroparque airport (40 minutes away) to catch a different airplane.
Cultural note: when you make changes to your airline tickets, airlines feel the need to charge you a hundred dollars for the change. This is a pressing need that they can not avoid, but when it is the airlines fault (like, say, this time), they do not reimburse you anything, or give you a hundred dollars.
Of course the employees that you deal with are not the ones to blame for the company policies, but I wish I was not completely at mercy of the airlines will. Worth reading: `Plane Insanity'.
If I had known that I would be for so long in Buenos Aires, I would have set something up with the local users group.
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The one good thing about missing the airplane was a small
restaurant in the airport that was cooking `Lomitos' in
the airport. I ordered a `Lomito Completo' which is a
sandwitch with two steaks of Lomito, ham, cheese, and a
egg on top with french fries on the side.
It is not only the best food I ever had in an airport, but one of the most delicious sandwitches ever. |
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I could not believe an airport could have such delicious food. The restaurant also had wine, which I did not want to have to avoid further dehydration.
Uruguay
Rodolfo and Haroldo picked me up at the Carrasco airport
in Montevideo, Uruguay. I was at this point completely
exhausted by the lack of sleep from the trip from Lima.
I had a meeting with the founders of a company called Genexus and I got to see their product.
They produce software to ease the development of database applications. A developer only defines the schema of the database, and hooks up the rules, the user interface and the reports they want. What is particularly interesting about this tool, its that it provides an evolution path to evolve the databases: as you make changes and introduce new relationships the software moves the information from the existing tables to new tables and creates and populates them for you.
The software is a multi-plaform software, it is not free software, but it is genuinely interesting.
Talk
I did a presentation of GNOME 2 in the University in Uruguay shortly after the previous meeting, this was in what used to be an old church inside a convent. The talk was well attended and we discussed issues of free software, Gnome, and Mono. If people are interested in my OpenOffice slides, I can mail those.
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I got to meet my friend Pablo that I have met a few times at previous Usenix events. |
| After the talk, a group of people went for dinner to a vegetarian restaurant. But being in Uruguay and eating vegetarian food was not ideal, so we split off and went to eat some traditional food from Uruguay. This picture was taken late that night. |
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Posted on 25 Jun 2002
Congress
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In the morning I met with Federico Heinz (from Via Libre) and Enrique Chaparro, both representing the FSF and the GNU project. We had breakfast (and I spilled coffee all over my brand new IBM Thinkpad) and headed over to the Peruvian Congress. |
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Federico and Enrique are part of the group in Argentina that drafted the law that is being discussed in Argentina, and is the foundation for the law that was submitted by Edgar Villanueva and is being discussed by the Peruvian Congress. |
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Here I am with Congressman Edgar Villanueva in the Congress meeting, he has introduced the free software project of law. He became internationally famous after his reply to Microsoft's comments on the law (the text is available in Spanish and English). |
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In the afternoon I participated in the `Linux and Free Software in the State' conference. There were six hundred registered people for the conference. It was inaugurated by Edgar Villanueva. |
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A group of Ximian users greeted me at the entrance of the conference. |
Lima-Montevideo
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The next step in the Gnome en el Sur was Montevideo. To go
from Lima to Montevideo I had to take a number of planes: Lima
to Santiago de Chile (2am); Santiago de Chile to Buenos Aires
(5am) and then Buenos Aires to Montevideo.
I did not get a lot of sleep that night, but being very tired from the activities in Lima helped me get to sleep for a few hours. |
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I traveled with
Enrique's wife which happened to be heading to Buenos Aires on
the first two airplanes. She researches Asian cultures. Since
I had been reading Saramago's Gospel
according to Jesus Christ and pondering who exactly are the
Palestinians in Israel, I had developed a theory of mine: the
Palestinians are the same people that populated the area two
thousand years ago, but have switched religions as invasions
came and went.
She confirmed my theory: both palestinians and israeli decendants are semites (surprise!) and gave me some details on the origins of words that both populations use. Very interesting. |
Posted on 24 Jun 2002
trip intro
Today I start my trip to South America to promote free software, GNOME and Mono. Three cities, five days, nine airplanes.
Of special importance is the meeting with the Congressman Edgar Villanueva and the team creating the law for the use of free software in the state. The Congressman became famous for his reply to the objections that Microsoft sent about the proposed law.
Coverage on Slashdot took a few weeks after the actual reply; The Associated Press is running a story with an update as well.
Boston-Lima
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The trip begun at 12:30 Boston time, I was as usual
late for the airplane, I only had time to get a bottle
of water and get into my emergency exit row on time.
Eating before going into an American Airlines flight has become rather important. You would think that when American Airlines acquired TWA, they will bring the good features of AA to TWA. For instance, that you would finally get decent food in TWA. Instead the opposite happened: Now American Airlines gives either terrible food, or none at all. |
Ecuador
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Over the Ecuador. |
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I was received by some members of the Lima Linux Users Group at the airport. We went for a tour of the city. |
| While looking for a place to have dinner, we did a stop and found some ponchos. I took this opportunity to purchase a few souvenirs. I will be using them on the next winter in Boston. |
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