It’s been a while since I actually blogged or wrote much that wasn’t work related… so here’s a list, in no particular order, of what I have been doing these days for those who were wondering what had happened to me:

I have been asked to step into a new role at work, and for the last 2-3 months I have been acting as the team lead (no job title change yet). As such, my day to day routine has changed dramatically, and I now spend most of my time planning, organizing and building up our team.

Part of building our team involves spending some time getting to know my teammates who are spread across 3 different countries and timezones. We have been using Google Hangout for our weekly status meetings and the ability to not only hear but see one another has definitely changed for the better how we interact with each other. Every and single one of my teammates are awesome and bring something unique and special to the team!

I also started working full time from home and no longer have to do the 50 miles/day commute to the office. I’ve had the opportunity to work remotely before (twice a week) and I’m very comfortable with the idea. As a matter of fact, I feel that I work harder and longer hours when I’m home, as there are no cues to tell me to take breaks or that I have to go home. Since Red Hat seems to have been designed with a distributed/spread work force, there are quite a lot of people who work remotely and all interaction is done via irc/email.

My project is actually a community driven, open project: Katello. Being able to tell people what I work on and show them the source code is something I find priceless! For the first time in my life I work for a company where “upstream” belongs to the community. 

I have also started learning both Clojure and Emacs for work. Having spent the last 5-6 years as a “Python guy” and Vim user, this has been by far the most radical change I’ve had to do so far. After going as far as creating an alias that will start emacs -nw whenever I type vim in a console, I am starting to really enjoy the emacs + clojure experience. I still press ESC a lot (old habits are hard to change) though :)

Been reading a lot! When I’m not reading a book, I’m catching up with articles and news from several different sources. I use a combination of Zite, Flipboard and a few digital magazines Wired, Smithsonian, The Week) for my daily news dose and Instapaper for those articles I want to read at a later time. My iPad has become a constant and reliable companion. Some of the books I’ve read:

• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
• Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
• Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody

I also listen to a lot of music now that I can crank music really loud without annoying a co-worker, so Pandora, Grooveshark and Radio Paradise have been a constant presence.

I switched distros!!! There, I said it! After 6 years running Foresight Linux exclusively, I have now been running Fedora 17 on all of my systems. The choice was completely work related and had nothing to do with the current state of Foresight, its community or future (which I can say is in very good hands by the way). Does that mean that my involvement with Foresight will be affected? The answer, sadly, is yes. My focus right now is fully concentrated on work and family and I don’t think I will have the time or stamina to dedicate the amount of time that running a GNU/Linux distribution requires.

Due to work and commitments to my family, my involvement with my pet projects, translations and the GNOME Membership Committee has reached a stagnant point. Don’t be surprised if I “retire” from some of my activities and start watching from the sidelines.

Speaking of projects, I am still running my Brazilian Portuguese-only podcast, publishing a new episode every other week (40 episodes and counting)! This is something I’m totally committed to and even with my busy schedule I still find time to enjoy doing the podcast.

I’m also contemplating writing one or two books in collaboration with a good friend, but more on that later.

Well, this is it for now! 2012 has proven to be a very busy yet fulfilling year for my entire family so far and several new and exciting changes are coming down the pipe.