Linux World Tour

13&14-Apr-00, Lima, Peru

We got into Peru very late at night, and check in to Le Delfines hotel around 3 am. I had wondered why the hotel was called "The Dolphins," and I was pleasantly surprised the next morning to find myself having breakfast on the other side of a floor-to-ceiling glass panel from two very playful and friendly dolphins. Claudio deserves a very nice dinner for finding this hotel for us to use. Next time I come back to Lima, I want to stay here again.

The presentation

Fortunately, our talk was scheduled for later that evening, so we had some time to rest and make sure the room was ready. According to PLUG (the Peru Linux User Group), who did an excellent job promoting our visit, about 1000 people were going to attend. This audience would be slightly different than our previous audiences. The majority of the people in the audience had no experience using our software development tools, so we planned to give a little bit more thorough treatment of the features of all three of our IDEs to show them what they have been missing all this time.

Except for their impatient whistles when the displays took a while to refresh switching back and forth between my Windows notebook and my Linux notebook, it appears that all 900 people in the Peruvian audience really enjoyed the presentation. They even paid attention when Claudio was talking about the market research we had done for developing software on Linux.

The left section of the audience. Sorry the pictures are a little dark. It was a big room and the flash didn't go that far.

The center

The right

Some new demonstrations

In addition to spending a bit more time on our IDEs with an audience unfamiliar with them, I did the same demonstrations I outlined in my notes on Brasil. Claudio did a little bit extra this time. I think he enjoys big audiences.

At every show, we give away a copy JBuilder 3.5 Pro, C++ Builder 5 Pro, Delphi 5 Pro, and bumper stickers. For this give-away, Claudio decided the time had come for him to show his engineering roots, and he spent about two minutes writing an "incredibly complex" program that used a random-number generator to pick the winner of the product given away. You can see Claudio's program in the background of this picture, where I'm giving the Delphi 5 Pro CD to the lucky winner.

Ylonda took this shot of me answering questions, while Claudio was hard at work preparing his demo of his random-number generator program. Or was he? Does that look like Delphi running on his notebook to you? Caught you, Claudio! I guess he trusted me to answer the questions correctly so he could catch up on other work. It is incredible how much time is spent travelling, packing and unpacking, checking in and out of hotels, taking taxis, and so on. We caught up on email whenever we could.

Pictures, pictures, and more pictures

I remembered to tell this group about the Stick It! campaign, and they immediately wanted to help get some pictures taken for it. They are incredibly enthusiastic, and extremely friendly. We spent at least a half hour talking with small groups after the presentation was completed; in the following pictures, you can even see the hotel staff taking the room down. One person even asked me for my autograph. After I recovered from the shock, I signed my name, then said "Only one!" As the picture taking went on, everyone started relaxing more.

Television Interview

The next day, we had an interview with a local TV station for one of their weekly shows. In English, the show's name means "Shortcut." Claudio was drafted as my translator, and we talked about the history of Borland, software development, and our development solutions for Linux. I hope to get a copy of the program when it airs.

Here we are preparing for the show. I didn't actually use my computer during the interview, but we wanted it ready in case we needed to demonstrate anything.

Burger Town?

I did see a McDonald's in Lima, but we didn't stop to eat at it, and I couldn't take a picture because we went past it too fast. Another one for David or me to test later on.

We did have some native Peruvian food at a restaurant down by the water, including servici (I'm probably not spelling it correctly -- it's pronounced serv-eetch-ee). The food had a wide variety of flavors, and I'd tell you which foods I liked if I could remember the names.