Paco's Blog

When Projectors Attack

I went to Puerto Rico to give two presentations, one for the Puerto Rico Open Source Congress on the 20th and one for the Services Network Application Platform (SNAP) at the Interamerican University's Bayamon Campus on the 21st.

P-Day

The one for the PROS Congress went fairly bad. I had been going over my presentation for two days and felt very confortable with what I was going to deliver. Two little things broke me down.

The first and most crippling was the fact that my new super fancy Compaq presario R3000 refused to hug the only LCD projector that was available to all presenters. Not to say that all the other presenters that where using Windows and PowerPoint to present had the same problems. I resorted to reading of a printed version of the presentation -- ouch!

For the most part, as it happened in many of the IT events that I attended in Puerto Rico up to my departure in 1999, the majority of the speakers had English speaking presentations. Yet I was encouraged by the organizers to do mine in Spanish. I remember commenting to the organizers that it would have been nice to have prepared for that with a little more notice. So I decided to do some "Spanglish" which works out pretty good with Puertorican IT audiences.

There was also a little moderated panel discussion that took place between PJ Cabrera, Carlos Casaldeiro and my self about application development in Linux. That was decent.

The Next Day...

The following day I went to the Bayamon Campus of the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico to do a more extended and technical presentation to an audience of software developers and program managers members of the SNAP. In this instance, the facilities where un-par and the audience kept it interesting and lively. This intervention permitted me to even show a little bit of Red-carpet as means to install Mono and we even demo some of Monodoc and MonoDevelop. I was so happy.

Aftermath

Ironically one very nice and somewhat related development that is taken place is that I have established contact with my long time friend and disciple Angel Rios in the days leading to my trip to Puerto Rico. Angelito is one "Bad Ass" .NET developer that has been in the IT consulting trenches of Puerto Rico for many years now. He was not able to attend the event, but he has begun exploring the use of Linux/Mono as means of .NET application development!

I want to thank Laura Gorbea and James O'Malley of Altamente who I believe organized the PROS Congress event. I made great friends like Stormy Peters from HP, PJ Cabrera from SNAP, Carlos Casaldeiro from Centrix and Mr. Peter Quinn from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Of course, there has to be a special mention to the man that always make things happen, my friend and mentor Kevin Shockey.

My Son is Headed to Iraq

Well, it is official. I just hung up the phone. It was Paquito, or rather SPC Martinez. As a member of the 2nd Infantry Division currently stationed in South Korea, he has been identified and given roll out orders to go to Iraq in August. More than likely, he will not be allowed to take leave. God Bless him, his Band of Brothers, and the People of Iraq.

Techno Abuela

So my mother who is in her 60s "I won't say how far into the 60's" was chatting with me on MSN Messenger when she complaint that I has not made any new blog entries. I don't know about the flying cars that I was sure I would have bee driving by now, but I believe we are now on the 21st century. Finally!!!

Mono Beta 1 and MonoDevelop 0.3 have been released! I can only take such a miniscule credit for such a fantastic milestone. My pride will always be that I have been tagging along no matter in what seat in the Mono bus during such a wonderful road trip. The only burden in my heart is that I cannot send all of the teams to a full expenses paid to the Greatest Resort on Earth (Puerto Rico of course!).

Yesterday, Dan Garvin one of my best friends at HEALTHvision, helped me test Beta 1 on some SuSE 90 boxes. Dan is a strong Windows .NET developer that has now fallen somewhat under the spell of Linux/Mono. He came up with some very creative ways to use Red-Carpet and create a user defined channel for the installation of the Beta 1 RPMs. Thanks to that we did a Red-carpet installation that beat most of the community by about 6 hours. If that is not a record of monumental proportions that will never be broken you tell me what is! -- one would have to seen Enter the Dragon to relate to the "A tournament of Epic proportions!" quotes.

WARNING: Only Mono and Red-carpet users could appreciate that cheesy humor.

There has also been some running around to adjust the content, context and the time slot for my modest intervention in the Puerto Rico Open Source Congress. I now appears that I will take part of a "panel" discussion. The other good news is that there will likely be another more technical presentation on the following day (Friday, May 22st) where I will be able to do what I really want to do which is showing Mono/MonoDevelop live!

A fellow Monoer and North Texas neighbor Joseph Hill, is trying to coordinate with Matt and me to participate on a Mono presentation at the Netware Users Group on May 27th.

My friend Erik Dasque got a hold of some Eidth Nylon (1979 circa French punk music). When I played it my dad Roger Martinez jumped in my thoughts. In what should be a related event, I rented and watched Big Fish. I didn't think it was as extraordinary as other things I have seen, but it was good nonetheless. However, what did happen was, as I am coming to the last 30 minutes of the film I began crying almost uncontrollably out of grief and the only thought in my mind was my father.

Mi Mama y mi Papa son dos santos. Gracias a Dios por ellos!