A week in Portland, Oregon

written on Tuesday, February 16, 2010

I spent the first week of February in Portland, where I attended Canonical Platform Sprint for Ubuntu Lucid. We got some good work done on the DBusMenu front. You can read about it on Jono and Jorge blog posts.

I was pleasantly surprised by this town and really enjoyed it. It is very different from Dallas where I went for Ubuntu Developer Summit: Buildings are not too tall, they have very good public transportation ($2.30 for a two hour tramway ticket!) and they are quite active at recycling.

What pleased me even more is that the town has a strong Japanese influence. I should have expected this, with it being on the west coast and one of her sister cities being Sapporo, the 5th largest city of Japan. Almost every restaurant we went to had Nigiri, Maki, or Sashimi in their menu. I especially enjoyed the restaurant of the Paramount Hotel, which featured creative rolls with funny names like the Evil Thaï Roll or even the Ninja Turtle Roll! I ended up with a Catterpillar Roll, which was really good.

We also went to Ground Kontrol, a cool bar featuring classic arcade cabinets and chip tune music... It was nice to play Raiden 2, 720°, Marvel vs Capcom 2, 1943, House of the Dead or being lectured on Championship Sprint by my manager :). I heartily recommend this place!

I took a few pictures, you can find the semi decent ones on Flickr. I only carried a small Sanyo Xacti CA6: its compact size makes it quite handy (I like to travel with only a single carry-on bag whenever possible), but it is not a very good still camera, especially with its hard-to-press shoot button, which makes it difficult to keep the orientation correct. I have an old Nikon Z3 at home, which is nicer but a bit bulkier, so I may buy a small camera for my next trip. Any model you would recommend?