One week left, to the day, before we move into our first house. Andrée and I just spend the week-end packing and making boxes. We’re both very excited with the thought of moving soon. The appartment has just gotten too small over time, especially after Évelyne’s arrival. I probably won’t be able to post much in the next week or two.

At the request of a user, I have added three new pieces of functionality to my Wordpress plugin called link-library. These are:

• Ability to only display links belonging to selected categories
• Ability to display notes in addition to descriptions as opposed to instead of them
• Ability to display link name at the same time as link images

Version 0.2 is now available to download from the Wordpress Plugin Repository or can be downloaded directly here.

To help people get started with this plugin, I have added an extra file to download called links.zip. Simply unzip its contents to the directory of your Wordpress theme. Once in place, you can create a new Page in the Wordpress admin Manage section that uses the Links page template. Once you have your new page, you can just link to it from other parts of your blog or perhaps from the sidebar.

UPDATE: I have just updated the link-library plugin to work with Wordpress 2.1. I also had to add a few parameters to the function to show all the links since they removed these parameters from the Wordpress admin interface. I have only done basic testing on the plugin at this time and will test more when I upgrade my blog to version 2.1. For those who want to try using it right away, you can download the newest version of the plugin here. I also updated the usage example to show these new parameters.

The grill was anything but boring. It is a type of special Brazilian restaurant called a Churrascaria. It’s sort of a buffet, except that the food comes to you instead of you walking around filling your place. Waiters walk around with a metal spike on which a piece of meat is presented. At your table, you have a little indicator that you can set to determine if you want the waiter to offer you some meat or if you already have enough. If you want to try the meat out, the waiter will slice off a piece right there on the spot. Many of the meats are various parts of the beef, but they also had porc, lamb and chicken among others.

The rest of the week was very relaxed. I found a souvenir store in a nearby shopping mall tuesday night where I was able to find souvenir to fulfill most of the requests that I had. I also found a nice dress for Évelyne at a decent price (most shops with baby clothes that I first saw had horribly high prices. I can’t wait to fly back home friday night.

Stupid alarm clock… I use a small travel alarm clock on my trips. I made sure that it was working last night since there was no alarm clock supplied with the room. However, this morning, it decided not to ring at the designated time. I woke up about half-an-hour late realising that time had passed by and had to get ready very quickly to meet my colleague for breakfast. I guess this will be a good excuse to replace it when I get back home and to get a wake-up call from reception tomorrow.

Today was the first day of class. When we got to Embraer this morning, we ran into a bunch of guys from Air Canada. What are the odds of meeting a bunch of fellow canadians down here? I chatted with them a little while waiting for security to get cleared out for us to go in.

The class was quite full with twelve student, myself and my colleague for a total of fourteen people and eight computers in a room no larger than my hotel room. The student were quick and understood all of the topics covered very quickly. I was expecting to have to repeat myself more than I did.

I got a bit of a visit of the hangers at lunch time. It was very impressive to see all of the aircrafts that Embraer can be working on at one point in time. I could see them from the beginning of the assembly to the finished product. Some of the airlines that could be seen were American Airlines, Air Canada (of course), United Airlines, Continental Airlines and a few others. Apparently, about 90% of Embraer’s business is with North American airlines.

besides their efficient methods to build planes, it was interesting to see the soap dispensers in the men’s room. Instead of having individual dispensers at each sink, they had a central reservoir that was linked to all of the dispensers, ensuring a large supply of soap is always available. Why don’t they do this back home?

Tonight will be another quiet evening. We don’t have a car and there is not much in terms of restaurants or things to do around the hotel. We’ll try the grill located near the shopping mall. If that does not pan out, we’ll probably just end up at the food court.

I am currently sitting in a hotel in Brazil as I am writing these lines. I’ve been wanting to document some of my travel thoughts for a while and decided that using my blog could be a good way to do it.

I am here to give a class to engineers at Embraer, the aircraft manufacturer that often competes with Quebec-based Bombardier on many contracts with major airlines. I will be showing them how to use VAPS, our software to create cockpit displays.

The trip went well but was very long. I first had an hour and a half flight from Montreal to New York (ironically on an Embraer jet!) and then a nine-hour flight from New York to Sao Paulo. The flight from New York left at the end of the evening so the bulk of the flight was overnight. I got to sleep pretty early on. However, we hit a lot of turbulence around the Dominican Republic that lasted for more than an hour. The plane had to alter its course to try to find calmer skies. I slept a bit after that but did not clock in more than three hours of sleep.

I was a bit of a mess when we landed, quite tired. The customs was a big ordeal, having to wait about an hour to go through. Once that was done, I was greeted by two employees from our Brazilian distributor who drove me to Sao José dos Campos, a large city between Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. It was quite a long drive from the airport, with most of the view being of green hills and small houses in which very poor people seemed to live. Now, I’m starting to understand why I was discouraged from travelling alone.

We passed a few people wandering on the side of the highway. Turns out that buses pick up people directly on the side of the road. Different. We stopped for juice and snacks at a small roadside restaurant/grocery store. To keep track of purchases, they give you a card with a barcode on entry. They then use this number to enter anything you order. Once done, you go to the cash where they scan the number to tell you how much you owe.

We arrived at our destination shortly after, only to find a large Wal-Mart Superstore and a McDonald’s across the street. I was not quite expecting to see them here. After a small nap, I went to take a look inside. Overall, it’s pretty similar to the ones we have in Canada. However, I was a bit surprised to see a beer and wine section in the back of the store. The way they handle cues for the cash registers is also quite nice. They just have one waiting line with a number display that indicates when a cashier is free. This way, if there is a snag at one of them, people don’t get stuck having to wait. Very efficient. They also have clerks on roller-skates with helmets to run errands around the store for the cashiers, checking prices and things like that.

I’ll take it easy tonight, just having dinner at the hotel restaurant with Alexandre, one of the employees from our distributor who is staying with me at the hotel and will be attending my class. I hope that the students will have a good understanding of english at the class tomorrow. Otherwise, it will be a long week. I’ll try to add more posts regularly through the week.

The computer-animated science-fiction series Tripping the Rift is coming back for a second season on July 27th. Given everything that they did in the first season, I don’t know what they will do for the second one, but it should be fun to watch.

Two great science-fiction series, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis are going to start airing on July 15th on the Sci-Fi channel. SG-1 will be starting its ninth season while Atlantis is going to be on its second. I like SG-1 but have not seen all episodes so I’m not completely into it. Atlantis on the other hand I’ve seen from the beginning last year and is quite an enjoyable show.

Coinciding with the release of the movie, the fourth and fifth chapters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is coming to BBC radio starting today. The first two phases dated from the 70’s. Phase 3 was then produced last fall and was quite funny to hear. Phases 4 and 5 should be just as good. If you don’t live in the UK, just look around the net. There are a few places where these episodes can be downloaded from.

I know, I know, I have not posted in a while. Life is quite busy these days. Évelyne is now 6 1/2 months old. She started crawling this week-end and is saying her first syllables. We are slowly packing up everything for the move that will happen in early June. For updated pictures of Évelyne, check out our photo album.

On the work front, the office almost seems like a combat zone with all of the construction work currently happening to move all employees together on one part of the floor. I am also going to be travelling to Brazil in the next few weeks.

I’m still writing regularly for uneporte.net. My latest published review was for the cartoon Tintin. Next up will be Apollo 13 in the next few days.

In short, everything is doing well, things are just very busy on all sides.