Olympics

During this Olympics for the first time Brazil has won medals on individual female numbers:
judo, distance jumping (gold) and taekwando. Such a big country a so little attention for sports except soccer, volleyball and grand prix racing. Surely every Dutch knows Fanny Blankers-Koen who won a gold medal in 1948. Not sure if she was the first Dutch woman winning in such a sport.

BTW, I have seen nothing of the Games

strange things

• The secretary has no decent paper to print.
• There is no xerox machine at the secretary.
• We are not allowed to make outside phone calls.
• It seems that there exists some house for professors to stay overnight, but two clever engineers have taken over the place, making it impossible for others to sleep there. In typical Brazilian style nothing happens: no one likes to take the fight.
• I already had a small fight. Students do pranks on the newbies (freshmen, is that what they are called), which sometimes lasts for months and can be rather humiliating. I wrote an email to my colleagues saying I would not tolerate such things, like a male student dressed as a woman, in my class. But apparently it is an old tradition and one colleague did not agree, telling me it was my duty to ....zzzzzz (teach?). This was were I stopped reading. I was once involved in another fight with a known nut. He told me also about duty, and I was not even an official professor. Anyway, as soon as people begin to tell me what my duties are I lose concentration.
• They still use Pascal to teach programming. Actually this is how I learned programming, 32 years ago. Pascal, user manual and report, by Niklaus Wirth. Silver and red -- thank to Gijs Tuynman. I must have it somewhere with my books still in Holland.
  
• The corridor and lecture rooms are old and depressing. Though I must say that there is a lot of new construction going on, which gives an air of action, excitement, ...
• Two computers where bought a year ago to be installed in the lecture rooms, but the Director of the institute claims that the technician responsible for installing them with the projectors has has more important things to do OVER THE LAST YEAR. Can you believe it? And the dept head swallowed it, in Brazilian style.
• I asked and got an email account but wanted IMAP access, besides webmail. The guy who helped me gave me the wrong server. I complained, IMAP became POP, and still it is not working.
  

My first day at UFOP

So last Monday was my first day at the Federal University of Ouro Preto. Let me describe:

Though the result of the selection procedure was confirmed already early july, the government waited till the last moment to nominate me. This happened on August 14th. UFOP called me the day before so that I could go to the university to have a medical test, and sign my contract.

With my nomination I could finally solve our problem of the health insurance, so that morning I spent almost two hours filling in forms etc solving this. The I went to OP. The medica test was a joke: they asked about 50 questions about my health, but the doctor only listened to my lungs and measured my blood pressure (75/125). And there were about 20 people ahead of me. Maybe not all were new professors, but many yes.

Monday the 18th was my first day. I had refused to prepare anything before my contract was formal, but I had gone to the library to get some books and browsed the web. I have to teach a Discrete Math 2 class for Production Engineering, but I had a hard time figuring out the exact contents. on the night before I saw on their website that they don't have DM1. This puzzled me and was confirmed when I spoke to the students. So I said I would teach DM1.

I also had a technical problem: the first projector I took had no power cable with it, so I had to get back to fetch another one. Then when I connected this projector to my notebook, the projector would not recognize it. When I switched on the computer already connected, it would use a lower resolution making my notebook essentially useless. After some ten minutes I could finally start using Vista. By then I had already lost some 50 minutes.

But then things went smooth. I have very good transparencies from Loureiro do DCC/UFMG so in that respect I have very little to prepare.

But I still have a problem: I have no good text book. Rosen is too expensive, has too much material and is in English. The book of Scheinerman has two chapters I don't need and one important chapter, on recurrence relations, missing. I think I will do the following: force them to xerox the overheads. ANd work together on detailed exercises, just like in Schaum's book.

I was also quite nervous about another class I am teaching: the evolution of ideas in computer science. But I found the coordenator of the course disposed to talk about the course in general. All in all it went well.

This is Brazil

It has been over ten years I live in Brazil now, and I have never really written about the country. Moreover, I have a permanent position as a professor now, so I can give my opinion without much risk of being deported :-).

The title of the blog is inspired on the acronym TIA = This Is Africa, which appears in the film Blood Diamonds. I forgot he exact context, but many times I had and still have this TIB experience. And this can be both positive and negative.

Brazilians are rather fatalistic about their country. There famous phrase is "Só no Brasil" -- Only in Brazil [such things happens]. Even though at least half of the time such things also happen in other countries.

I have decided to write this blog in English for at least three reasons:

1. I type faster.
2. Like this my family and friends can read it too, whereas all my Brazilian friends can read English
   
3. Thinking in English it will be easier to maintain a distance, using Dutch or Canadian reasoning. In fact, I live her now for ten years and in many respects I have changed, have become a Brazilian too. But now, this change of jobs will help me to see things with new, critical eyes again.