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...)