Growing up my dad used to tell me that there are three important milestones on a man’s life (though I feel that the same could be said about any gender): Plant a tree Have a child Write a book Through my life, I have planted quite a few trees, including a lemon and papaya tree I used to treat as my imaginary friends :) I have also had the highest honor to be the father to three amazing girls!

First of all, I have to say that I absolutely love being a Quality Engineer, something that I have been doing for a living for the last 11 years of my life! During these 11 years, I have had the pleasure (yes, pleasure!) of being tossed around, torn to pieces and thrown at a lot of scary and difficult situations in the world of software testing! Armed only with a strong desire to learn and excel at my profession, I have seen, heard and gone through a multitude of experiences, challenges, and opportunities.

It was June 8th,1974 and on a warm evening in the territory of Amapá, now a state in the northern part of Brazil, a baby boy was born. Other than being a couple of months premature, the one thing that made this birth a bit more interesting than any premature birth was the fact that this baby had its hands and feet completely bent inwards, almost fused into his arms and legs.

Woke up this morning and, as usual, sat down to read the Books section of The New York Times while drinking my coffee. This has become sort of a 'tradition' for me and because of it I have been able to learn about many interesting books, some of which I would not have found out on my own. I also 'blame' this activity to turning my nightstand into a mini-library on its own.

Background It was around 2005 when I started doing translations for Free and Open-Source Software. Back then I was warmly welcomed to the Ubuntu family and quickly learned all there was to know about using their Rosetta online tool to translate and/or review existing translations for the Brazilian Portuguese language. I spent so much time doing it, even during working hours, that eventually I sort of "made a name for myself" and made my way up to the upper layers of the Ubuntu Community echelon.

My parents were eagerly awaiting our arrival on an early Spring morning, and when our plane finally landed after the almost 10 1/2 hours flight and we made our way to the luggage claim area, the reunion was filled with a lot of hugging, laughter and a huge sigh of relief. For someone who had spent most of their entire lives in a small and sleepy town in the East coast of Brazil, waking up and finding yourself at JFK Airport was nothing short of a major event!

This post has been sitting in my Drafts folder for a while now, as I wasn’t sure when the right time would be to publish it. It is basically my personal reflection on the last 5 years I have worked doing translations for free and open source software (FOSS) and a few lessons I learned along the way. It is also a rant against those who took my labor for granted.

Earlier this year OSNews published my article titled "Installing Debian Linux For The Faint Of Heart." Today I came across another article dealing with the same subject. Now, I know people have hammered these types of articles to death in the net but this one sounded worth the risk of mentioning. For one thing, it covers hardening your bare-bones Debian server which, IMHO should be worth looking at no matter what.

Having read this yesterday on how Google has become such a major presence in our life style, today’s article in the NY Times showed me yet another facet to living in the 21st century. I can only imagine future archeologists performing “cyber-digs” in order to study civilizations from our time. Why travel to Egypt if you can uncover everything there is to know about the pyramids from the confort of your house using Google search and maps?

I needed to do some image editing the other day and didn’t feel like installing anything “big and complicated” like Photoshop or PSP. Google’s Picasa software came to mind and I quickly downloaded it on my laptop. I misy tell you that I’m very impressed with user interface. Not as much with the features (which by the way are just enough for your daily crop-resize-remove red eye needs) but the looks of it!