Solipsism Gradient

We’re back from São Paulo. Catching up. Must run. More later.

…because tomorrow we’ll be off on a 4-day trip to São Paulo, for some personal visits, a wedding, and business contacts. Friday I’ll probably be at the Macmania magazine offices.

In the aftermath of the major data loss I had a few days ago, I plan to buy a new external FireWire drive. Today I found an offer of the Iomega HDD250 at a relatively low price – R$1500, slightly more than US$500. Unless I find something better in São Paulo I will buy this when I come back…

In the meantime, expect light blogging until Sunday.

The Presurfer (hey, no permalinks!) steered me to Robert Delaney’s Cross-cultural comparisons, by way of Mark Rosenfelder‘s American Culture page. There are links to dozens of other culture descriptions. Here’s a sample from the description for Brazil:

• You drive on the right side of the road. You stop at red lights if someone is around; otherwise you slow down. If you’re a pedestrian and cars are anywhere around, you better watch out carefully before crossing the street.
• You think of Argentina as a pleasant country with two cities: charming, cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, and beautiful Bariloche (where the Brazilian ski championship takes place). You think Argentinians as a people are arrogant and conceited, but you often like individual Argentinians.
• When you were younger, you considered the Volkswagen Beetle a dream car.
• The police are armed, sometimes with submachine guns. You are afraid all police are violent and crooked, but at the same time you would rather have them around.

If you’re interested in cultural differences, this is fascinating reading. If I find the time, I may write some comments for the Brazil page.

Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost state in Brazil. It was settled in the 1800s by Italian and German immigrants, and the effects of that are still very much in evidence today. Gramado, where we’ve stayed over the Carnaval weekend, is a small town with 28,000 people that now lives mostly from tourism and hosts a famous South American film festival.

In most other parts of Brazil you can expect a town this size to barely have paved streets. In contrast, Gramado has dozens of first-class hotels, broadband Internet everywhere, upscale boutiques and many well-kept tourist attractions. It feels much like a prosperous tourist town in, say, Southern Germany.

Except for the sun and the tropical plants, this photo of an apartment building looks very European. Here’s a shot of the downtown shopping district:

The tree on the left is a “Paraná Pine” (Araucaria Angustifolia), the local variety of pine. I’ve seen much larger ones in the nearby parks. The fellow walking towards me is clad in the common clothes of the rural gaúcho (pronounced gah-OOsho or, by the locals, gah-OOtsho).

A well-known gaúcho specialty is the chimarrão, the local variety of mate tea. It’s traditionally drunk in a special cup made from a gourd and with a metal straw that has a disk-shaped strainer at the end. Here’s the chimarrão set our bus driver carried around with him:

Once the gourd is properly set up and packed, it’s replenished periodically with hot water from the thermos bottle. It’s very tasty and invigorating. Since it has high caffeine content it ought to be useful for programming…

OK, we’re back from Gramado. Photos came out quite well, I’ll post a few during the week. Nearly 1000 e-mails had piled up, over half of which seem to be spam. Surprise! 😆

While I work my way through urgent items, learn all about Fainting Goats. Really.

…With a Fainting goat in the herd if coyotes or dogs

threatened the sheep, the sheep could run away while the Fainting goat fell over, providing the predator with an easy meal while the sheep escaped.

…The name “Fainting” goat is a bit misleading because they do not actually faint. They have a genetic problem with relaxing

muscles. When they are startled or surprised their muscles lock up and the goat then sometimes falls over.

Update: Oops. Forgot to thank Ben Hammersley for the link.

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m posting this from Gramado… they have broadband here at the hotel, but it’s not yet normally available to guests. We’ll be back Sunday evening, so stay tuned…

Tomorrow morning the vacation’s over. Whew. It’s been marvelous: no interruptions, good food, beach runs after sundown, lots of coconuts and peace to work on my software; and terrible: heat, unrelenting sun, mosquitoes, constant Axé music thumpa-thumping along somewhere in the background, spotty Internet access and the general discomfort of being away from home.

The good news is that, as seems to become traditional over the Christmas holidays, I found time to do a new version of Zingg!, with lots of new goodies. Expect it in a couple of days; I just need to do some more testing and of course, constant Internet access to do all the publishing, notifications and hands-on support for early adopters.