TITLE: August 9 -- My First talk in Brazil
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 17, 2004  1:25 PM
DESC: arriving in Brazil and speaking immediately
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BODY:
Well, I made it to Brazil.  Yesterday was a day that came and went
with no end.  I ran 18 miles in Bradenton before the sun rose, visited
with parents until after lunch, and then went to the airport for an
overnight flight that brought me to Recife at lunch time Monday.

The change from English to Portugese on theb plane from Miami to
Sao Paulo made the newness of my surroundings obvious.  In Sao
Paulo, I went through the dreaded American immigration line.
The Brazilian government strives to treat each nation's citizens
as that nation treats Brazilian citizens and, with the procedures
in place here since 9/11, that means long lines, fewer handling
stations, photographs, and fingerprints for Americans entering
Brazil.  I spent over two and half hours of a three-hour layover
in Sao Paulo going through the immigration line.  And by I use
the word "line" with some hesitation.  The South Americans and
Europeans in the crowd certainly didn't feel limited by any idea
of the linear.

My first stop was the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE),
in Recife.  My
<A HREF="http://sugarloafplop2004.ufc.br/">SugarLoafPLoP</A>
co-program chair, Paulo Borba, teaches there, and he asked me
to give a talk to his department.  I debuted the
<A HREF="">test-driven development talk</A>
that I planned to give at the conference.  It went well, despite
my not having slept more than an hour since 34 hours earlier and
our running so late after lunch that on arrival I walked straight
into the classroom and gave my talk.  The audience was mostly
graduate students, many of whom write software in industry.  I'd
forgotten what it felt like to be in a room with a bunch of grad
students trying fit whatever talk they here into the context of
their own research.  I spent considerable time discussing the
relation of TDD and refactoring to aspect-oriented programming,
<A HREF="http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~leavens/JML/">JML</A>,
and code coverage tools such as
<A HREF="http://www.cenqua.com/clover/">Clover</A>.
This dry run led me to make a couple of improvements to the talk
before delivering it on Friday to the conference audience.

I was energized by the foment!  But then I was ready to crash.
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