Art and Life

Just a quick note about amazing things I’ve seen in the last few days…

Last saturday, September 22, Carol and I went to this freakingly extraordinary show of Cirque du Soleil called “Delirium“.

Today, I watched this documentary called “Before the Music Dies” (I bought the DVD through their online store). If you’re a music geek or just fan, you must watch this movie! One cool sidenote is that they (B-Side, the independent distributor behing this movie) have this interesting business model which allows you to pay a very low price to download a DRM-free video file from their website. One of my favorite quotes from this movie:

“Today, Ray Charles would not get a shot. Today, Stevie Wonder would not get a shot. They are blind.” (Branford Marsalis, about the music business)

I don’t know how my life would be without music… without art…

GNOME Brasil News

GNOME Brasil Website

GNOME Brasil, the brazilian GNOME users and developers group, now has a brand new and sexy collaborative website. It’s hosted on SoftwareLivre.org‘s TWiki server which bring us closer to the wider free software brazilian community.

Big thanks to:

  • Vicente for bringing this idea, producing part of the initial content and coordinating most of the process
  • Vinicius for the great design work
  • Aurium for the CSS and TWiki black magic
  • Olav and Terceiro for setting up the domains and servers in GNOME and SoftwareLivre.Org respectively

And that’s not all! The 4th edition of our Fórum GNOME, the main GNOME event in Brazil, will take place in Aracaju/SE inside the 2nd Northeastern Free Software Conference from September 28th to 30th. Our website will be officialy released there! Special thanks to Izabel for organizing  Fórum GNOME this year! Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the Fórum this year… I’m sure it will be a nice conference!

For all brazilian GNOMErs out there: go to Aracaju, have fun, and spread the word about our beloved desktop!

GNOME Annual Report Kickoff

It’s time to start working on our 2007 annual report! Last year we had a very nice report. So, let’s make it even better this year! I’ve created a wiki page to organize the work.

Any kind of contribution is welcome! There are several ways to help:

  • Assign yourself to write one of the sections
  • Add links, references and other information sources to help writers to produce the content
  • Add new ideas, suggest, review the content
  • Anything else! :-)

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Annual Report Team (Silvia, Sayamindu and me).

The Eye in 2.20

Eye of GNOME 2.20.0

This is the first stable release of Eye of GNOME (EOG) as part of the GNOME 2.20 major release. The 2.20 release is very special for EOG as it’s the first one with a complete rewrite/refactoring of its core. This means that GNOME now has a much improved image viewer. There lots of cool new features, we really hope you all enjoy! Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, specially to EOG’s team members, Claudio and Felix.

So, what’s new?

  • Complete rewrite of application core which means more stable, maintanable, faster image viewer for GNOME
  • New plugin system which allows developers to extend EOG’s UI and behavior. Python support is available.
  • Editable application toolbar
  • New image collection pane with on-demand thumbnail loading, polished look, and continuous scrolling side buttons.
  • Side Pane to be extended by plugins
  • New image properties dialog which replaces the image info sidepane
  • Single instance D-Bus-based activation support
  • Revamped error/warning UI
  • “Open with” support to quickly open images on other applications
  • Mouse scrollwheel improvements: HIG compliancy and zoom factor setting
  • General UI polishing
  • Command line options for fullscreen, slideshow and image collection disabling
  • Display EXIF MakerNotes
  • XMP Support

Musical Snapshot

I really miss the musician life I used to have in Brazil. In order to compensate that, I started a musical research some time ago. Actually, this is making a huge difference for me. I never thought I would miss music so much… So, here are the highlights of the tons of things I’ve been listening to:

Jazz

I found a very nice old CDs store in Helsinki (I’ve heard from a friend that there are others). I’ve found many interesting albums there. For now, my main focus is on the work of John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Miles David and Charlie Parker but I’m listening to lots of other things as well. I really enjoyed albums of the drummers Max Roach and Roy Haynes. Next: continue the infinite and pleasant jazz research. :-)

  • A Love Supreme (John Coltrane)
  • Afro Blue Impressions (John Coltrane)
  • Money Jungle (Duke Ellington, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus)
  • Afro Cuban Jazz Moods (Dizzy Gillespie)
  • Shack Man (Medeski, Martin & Wood)
  • Out of the Afternoon (Roy Haynes Quartet)

Acid Jazz

I’m a big fan of acid jazz movement in general. I already have Jamiroquai’s discography but I wanted to have deeper view of the “big picture”. I’ve listened to The Brand New Heavies, Incognito, James Taylot Quartet, Jaga Jazzist, Jazzanova, Corduroy, and others. Looking forward to listen to Azymuth, Roy Ayers (one of the fathers of Acid Jazz!) and other cool stuff in the “acid” area.

  • Room at the Top (James Taylor Quartet)
  • Positivity (Incognito)

R&B and Neo Soul

I never really understood what soul and R&B were in practice. It always sounded to be too generic and umbrella-ish. So, I went through the discographies of some good modern artists in this field. Now I got a more clear idea of this whole R&B/soul thing. Special mention goes to Mama’s Gun (Erykah Badu): it’s one of the most “musical” (in the artistic sense) albums I’ve ever listened to.

  • Mama’s Gun (Erykah Badu)
  • Voodoo (D’Angelo)
  • Introducing Joss Stone (Joss Stone)
  • Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1 (Jill Scott)
  • Like a Star (Corinne Bailey Rae)

Funk and P-Funk

I’ve been going through Earth Wind & Fire’s (EWF) and Funkadelic/Parliament’s discographies. It’s just amazing to listen to the roots of most of things we see today in the funky field. Interestingly, I watched documentaries about both groups and they don’t mention each other. It seems there are (kind of) three different “branches” in the funk history: James Brown’s, Funkadelic/Parliament’s and EWF’s.

  • All ‘n All (Earth Wind & Fire)
  • Maggot Brain (Funkadelic)
  • Mothership Connection (Parliament)
  • Live on Planet Groove (Maceo Parker)
  • Good Old Funky Music (The Meters)

Sertaneja and Caipira

I always try to keep prejudice away when the subject is music. In Brazil, the sertaneja music has become too superficial, crappy and commercial in most of the cases. The fact is that the first albums of those famous sertanejo artists are quite nice. They still have some kind of connection with their roots. This is definitely the case of the first album of Zezé di Camargo & Luciano. It’s simple and “truthful” in a very interesting way. On the caipira music area, it’s always an intense experience to listen to artists such as Renato Teixeira and Almir Sater. Next: Pena Branca & Xavantinho, Tião Carreiro, and others.

  • No Auditório Ibirapuera (Renato Teixeira)
  • Zezé di Camargo & Luciano (Zezé di Camargo & Luciano)
  • Sete Sinais (Almir Sater)

That’s all for now! I hope to come with new stuff very soon. :-)

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