My trip to Brazil by the numbers:
Number of times I packed my suitcase 2:
Number of times I went to airport: 1
Number of visas obtained from the Brazilian consulate in Miami: 0
Ultimately, even though I tried to reschedule my trip to fly through Miami, I didn’t make it out of Puerto Rico. What a huge disappointment. We really felt that we were going to take off with our SNAPPIX product.
Never in my career have I seen things come together so well, but still get ruined in the end. Those who knew about the visa requirement for Brazil are all like, well of course. While most everyone else thought, as I did, that a passport was sufficient. According to a friend of SNAP, the requirement is because the United States requires visas for the citizens of Brazil, they require visas for U.S. citizens.
We are still fighting the good fight and will attempt to be there as much as possible in spirit, commentary, and whatever else we can dream up, but in the end it just wasn’t meant to be.
What a shame. Its too bad (and sadly, too frequent) when goverment and regulations disable instead of enable its citizens. Having had the not so pleasant experience of going to Brazil with a drained battery on my laptop, I was looking forward to stories of how you where going to get all your stuff past their … interesting… customs system.
Perhaps you can use this as an opportunity to do your presentetion as a web event?
Heya Kevin, sad that you couldn’t be with us at fisl. Mark Wielaard and me were looking forward to meet the energetic snap devs, and see what you guys are up to in the future. We stood in for your presentation together with bruno, and provided a general overview from what we knew about snappix in general, imporvising a talk about snappix, sablevm, and all that cool stuff happening in GNU Classpath world. The connections in the hotel we were staying at were not adequate to fetch a snappix over the net overnight so no demos.
I hope that you’ll have more fun at JavaOne, and I’m looking forward to meet you guys, eventually. We talked about having a live CD showing off the GNU Classpath goodies last year during FOSDEM, it’s great to see a project do that and run with it.
best of luck for the future,
dalibor topic