Well, I safely got to Russia and back. The journey was considerably simpler than previous dealings with immigration in Russia (notably last year's stop in Moscow on our way to Mongolia). In fact it actually took longer to check in to the hotel than it did to clear customs and immigration at St. Petersburg airport. The JUG visit was great fun and if you want to see some pictures the official Russian JUG web site report is here, and there's some more photos from one of the attendees, here. Despite not having translation available (and my Russian being limited to privet, dosvadanya and spasiba) the audience were obviously able to understand what I was saying judging by the questions I got afterwards, many of which were very in depth and technical. As you will see from the photos we also enjoyed a beer afterwards, which to me is the best part of any presentation.

Fortunately, I also got enough time to do some site seeing while I was there which was very rewarding as St Petersburg is a place I've wanted to go to for quite a while now. On Sunday I managed an epic five hours in the Hermitage museum, and I probably only got to see about half of what's there. The collection is bigger than that at the Louvre in Paris. It's always feels a little weird to be in places where significant historical things have happened. Part of the museum is the Winter Palace which was the residence of the Tsar until 1917. In a small dining room there is a clock that is stopped at ten past two; this was the time early in the morning on 26 October 1917 when the ministers of the Provisional Government were arrested in this room. I also went to the cathedral in Peter Paul fortress which is the final resting place of the Romanov dynasty from Peter the Great to the last Russian Tsar, Alexander II.

Here's an image of Palace Square, taken from inside the Hermitage museum (I was probably standing inside the Winter Palace at the time which, whilst not the Hermitage itself, is part of the museum). As you can see the weather was decidedly snowy, but compared to Canada the temperature was a balmy -1C.

I discovered when creating this blog entry that there's no easy way to include a picture. Yes, you can put in a link, but if you don't have some publicly accessible site on which to put the picture you're a bit stuffed. For the above photo I rather cheekily borrowed a few bytes on my girlfriend's business website, travelaine.com. Since it's an on-line travel agency and I did a lot of the web design I figure she won't mind.

I'm in the City (of London) tomorrow to present to another JUG and then talk to some people about Java performance on big Sun hardware. Should be interesting. I don't have any events planned for next week which means I'll get some quality time to sit down and do some real coding type work. There's certainly no shortage of things I want to do.

I've set myself the goal of one blog entry per week so that I can keep my New Years's resolution (I might post more often assuming life is that interesting).

Part of the reason for my blogging hiatus last year (aside from being lazy) was the travel schedule I had. One of these trips was to South America, my second favorite continent (Africa is still first, but it's a close run thing). This was one continent, three countries, five cities, twelve days and a lot of time in airports and on planes (the flight from London to Buenos Aires is a brutal 17 hours). As usual this was a series of events to spread the word to developers about Java and as usual for South America the reception was warm, friendly and full of enthusiasm. The second part of the trip was in Brazil where our group have been a number of times and is a place I know we all really like (what's not to like about restaurants like Marius in Rio De Janeiro, Jardineira in Sao Paulo, and Porcau's in Brasilia, or the beach in Rio?) I was there on my own to present to two of the top 25 Java User Groups (JUGs) in the world: DFJUG in Brasilia and SouJava in Sao Paulo.

I've presented to the DFJUG group in Brasilia each time I've been there, which means four times now. Daniel, the organiser, is always full of energy and passion for the events; not only did he collect me from the airport this time, but took me to meet his family and his wife, Lu, cooked me dinner. Such hospitality! The event was held at one of the universities and the room was packed. As usual we had simultaneous translation from English into Portugese, which in turn was simultaneously translated into sign language for the members of the audience who were deaf or had impaired hearing. I am full of admiration for the people who do this at these events; spending almost two and a half hours signing a technical Java presentation is a pretty epic undertaking!

The DFJUG group are very active in the area of using Java technology to help deaf people and have a project called Rybena. This provides graphical sign language on a J2ME enabled mobile phone so that deaf people can communicate using the mobile phone and not be restricted to the use of SMS messaging which can be prone to delayed delivery or even non-delivery. I've seen demonstrations of this and it just blows me away; another example of innovation coming from Brazil.

For pictures of the JUG meeting (which was as much fun as it looks), check out the web page, here, and an earlier event, here

I'm off to Russia tomorrow to present to the Java User Group in St Petersburg. The organiser says we'll have a drink afterwards. Hopefully this will be a little less hard on the liver than previous trips I've made to Russia (national vodka day in Siberia springs to mind...)

OK, new year, new start. One of my first resolutions is to get back to my blog and make this a regular thing.

Of course, the observant amongst you will notice that the new year is already two weeks old. I got back yesterday from a vacation in Canada, spending Christmas with my girlfriend's family and the rest of the time ski-ing in the Rockies. One word to describe this trip: COLD. Almost all the time we were in the west the temperature was below -20C. The first day we went ski-ing at Banff the external thermometer in the car read -27C (and we did go ski-ing, albeit well wrapped up). Canada is a really beatiful country, especially the Rockies; hopefully sometime I'll actually get to see it in summer (I've been there three times, all in the winter).

One thing about my three week vacation was the total lack of internet access, which was a choice rather than a necessity. It was actually really nice to be offline for so long and have a chance to do some reading and thinking. I also went to possibly the best exhibition I've ever been to, which was at the art museum in Vancouver. Check out the website at Massive Change.

Let's see how long the resolution lasts.