One of the things that amazes me about blogging is just how much time it requires. I've finally managed to get enough time to write another entry, thanks to the fact that I arrived in Sao Paulo today and it's raining. I just don't understand how some people find the time to blog daily or even multiple times in a day. If I did that I'd be blogging and nothing else.

As you'll see from my last entry I was in Mexico for the TechDays at that time, roughly a month ago. Since then I had some meetings in the Bay area which included some obligatory "team building" exercises. Team building is a weird thing for me, whenever someone announces this my heart always sinks in anticipation. However, once I get into it I always find I enjoy it. From my point of view, even though I'm remote from the rest of my team (by an entire ocean and continent) I do feel that we have a great team and work well together. The team exercises were fun and we were particularly happy that we solved the maze in record time. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say some teams (who shall remain nameless) failed to complete the maze in the alloted time.

After that it was back across the Atlantic (upper class on Virgin is extremely civilised, to then turn around and fly back again the next day to the Caribbean (again on Virgin, sadly this time in economy). A weeks vacation in St Lucia was a great way to re-charge the batteries. It was also fun to go scuba diving again which was something I haven't done for four years. The funniest part of this was the American chap who turned up, having done a trial dive and firmly believing that this meant he was a qualified diver. The dive company were somewhat more relaxed about this than they should have been (and more than I'm sure PADI would expect them to be), so they let him dive! The divemaster helped him assemble his BC, regulator, etc and then off the boat he went. We watched him jump, and we watched him sink - his "qualifications" didn't extend to knowing that he had to inflate his BC before getting in the water. Thankfully he survived, as did we.

After my return I went to the City of London to do a presentation on the new Metadata feature in J2SE 5. When they first asked me to talk about this I thought it would only take about fifteen minutes to cover this. However, once you dig into the details, especially in areas such as creating processors for the apt tool there's certainly enough material for nearly an hour.

Last week I was in Brussels to present to EMC on new features in J2SE 5. Three hours to cover the main features including details of how JSR-133 which defines a new, tighter memory model for Java works. This required a bit of research on my part and I know know a lot more about the issues of volatile variables, final fields that change value and compiler instruction reordering.

Which pretty much brings me up to the present here in Sao Paulo for this years Brazilian TechDays. I'm sure this is going to be just as much fun as previous events here; the Brazilians are always so full of enthusiasm. Of course, being in Brazil means a week spent experimenting with how much beef can be consumed by one person. Tonight, once we've finished setting up for tomorrow I plan to head off to the Jardineira grill, my favorite restaurant in all of South America. More as the TechDays unfold.