Alex de Carvalho


Blogged down / introspection

by Alex de Carvalho. Average Reading Time: almost 2 minutes.

Wow … it’s been a long four months since I last posted here! My move from Paris to Miami ear­lier this year so occu­pied my mind that I refrained from blog­ging. Although some may post more in peri­ods of change, the tran­si­tion from one coun­try to another, the admin­istrivia involved, recon­nect­ing with old friends and meet­ing new peo­ple had me more involved in meat­space than before.

Paris rocked, espe­cially the first five years, but some­how with time, the city felt less and less like home. After watch­ing some of my Parisian friends move out of the city, and most of my expat friends move out of the coun­try, my turn came up. This car­toon from Hugh pretty much sums it up: just sub­sti­tute “Paris” for “New York”. Like frogs that won’t jump out of water that’s being heated to a boil, Parisians live in pretty stress­ful con­di­tions, includ­ing noise and air pol­lu­tion, poor ser­vice, high prices, cramped quar­ters, traf­fic, clouds and driz­zle,
mul­ti­ple taxes, polit­i­cal grid­lock and an under­per­form­ing econ­omy. Don’t get me wrong, Paris is cer­tainly not the worst place to live in and i’ll miss the city of lights for my friends, for its cul­ture and for the great con­ver­sa­tions. And Paris is a move­able feast.

Despite my four month hia­tus, I haven’t been com­pletely idle  and  RSS sub­scribers have received my daily del.icio.us links all along, which are spliced into the feed­burner feed and which get auto­mat­i­cally posted to Stone­soup. I’ve also posted pho­tos to Flickr and have evan­ge­lized, setup and con­tributed to inter­nal com­pany blogs. Read.io took some time, and now AgeStage. But hardly a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of post­ing here and to France­Brazil. And there’s really no excuse, is there, with the excel­lent, free tools that make blog­ging easy and quick, like Qumana, Per­for­manc­ing and Portable Fire­fox ;)

The South Florida blog­ging scene seems very laid back, as you might expect with the mix of great weather, beach­ing and boat­ing … and per­haps a more con­ser­v­a­tive, “South­ern” lifestyle. Rel­a­tive to Paris, there seem to be fewer local blogs and no events to speak of, other than the first dork­bot — palm beach gath­er­ing on May 13th.


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  • http://www.zenfulcreations.com Lori

    Hi Alex :)

    I know of lots of local ‘events’ you can get into, so con­tact me if you are inter­ested. Check out Refresh Miami (http://www.refreshmiami.org). It’s a great place to start con­nect­ing with other design­ers and devel­op­ers that have the same inter­ests as you (blog­ging, web2.0 etc. )

    :)

  • http://www.tapio.com alex

    Thanks Lori, I appre­ci­ate that and I’ll check it out. It seems like just what I was look­ing for.

    Con­grats for your work on iKarma, by the way ;)

  • http://www.le-manchot.blogspot.com Jus­sara

    Hi there!
    Keep on blog­ging as much as you can! There’s a whole world out there to be spo­ken / writ­ten about! See you!

  • http://www.boinblog.com Fab­rice

    Hi there !

    We sure miss you in Paris, even if we’re also plan­ning on mov­ing in Bel­gium ;-)
    Your descrip­tion of Paris is unfor­tu­natly very true, it seems that noth­ing is really hap­pen­ing here in the IT sec­tor unless you move in a for­e­ing coun­try (Netvibes is in Eng­land now, Zlio is in Israel…).

    I’m prob­a­bly going to be in Miami soon (whe’re prob­a­bly going to have an office over there), post me your mobile phone num­ber, I’ll get 2 you when I visit Florida :-)

    Cheers

  • http://tvnomics.typepad.com TVnomics

    happy to see you back in the blogosphere

    a very good opin­ion of Paris, the euro­pean NY

    a bet­ter qual­ity of life may be find elsewe­here like in Lis­boa or in Berlin (just examples)

  • http://cognections.typepad.com char­lie

    good to hear from you!

  • http://blog.delaranja.com Andre Ribeir­inho

    Olá Alex,
    keep on bring­ing some news once in a while.

    BTW, are you com­ing to Reboot? It’s been almost a year now!

    Abraço,
    André

  • http://www.tapio.com alex

    Thanks for the comments!

    @Jussara: valeu ;)

    @Fabrice: je t’enverrai mon tel par mail

    @Jerome: thanks et a btt j’espere

    @Charlie: kiitok­sia! good to hear from you

    @André: ainda nao tenho certeza mais é claro que espero poder ir

  • http://gimps.de Marina loves pictures

    Good to have a sign of life.
    I am already cou­ri­ous how the new loca­tion will change this blog.

  • gilles

    hi alex,
    Nice to read you!
    Paris is so far for me too…
    Shang­hai is crazy…
    Hope to see you here! wait wait and wait!!
    come on!
    gilles

  • Cesar

    Dude, you should have left Paris a loooong time ago. Of course you’ll miss the food and the archite­cure, but you can always fly there when­ever you want to kill the saudade. Good luck in Miami, try to get into kitesurf­ing you won’t regret it.

  • http://alexdc.org/2009/07/retrospective-of-south-floridas-startup-community.html Ret­ro­spec­tive of South Florida’s startup community

    […] Forster — a web designer I have not met and who has sub­se­quently moved to Geor­gia — com­mented on my post and intro­duced me vir­tu­ally to Brian Bres­lin, with whom I co-organize Refresh­Mi­ami. I […]