Brazil Trip - Rio de Janeiro with a tour group

I just returned from a 10 day trip to Brazil.  We went to Rio de Janeiro, Iguazu Falls, and the Amazon Rainforest via the city of Manaus.

In this post, I've noted my experience with a tour group in Rio.

We started our trip in Rio.  The day we landed, we took a tour with Brazil Expedition.  We also used this tour company to pick us up from the airport.  The tour started by picking us up from the hotel and taking us to a beach where hang gliders were landing.  We had about 20 minutes to watch hang gliders and sign up for a ride later on.  This part of the tour was rather useless and I felt like it was only there to get us to sign up for something after.

We were then taken to Tijuca National Park.  After a long flight and car ride, it was nice to walk around the park and breathe in the fresh air.  In total, we walked in the park, took pictures of trees and waterfalls, and returned back to the tour van in about 45 minutes.

The next visit was the Christ the Redeemer Statue.  At this time of the year there were very few people and there were virtually no lines to see the site.  We were told that the lines could be very long in peak season.  The tour guide brought us to the ticket entrance area but did not actually enter.  I think she did not enter because she would have had to pay the entrance fee.  While it was nice to walk around at our own pace, it would have been good to have the guide around to give us details and so that we could ask questions.

After we returned to the van, the tour guide gave us a little overview of how and why the statue was made.  I think it would have been better if they gave us this information before we visited the statue.  Perhaps they usually do it while the group is waiting on the line to enter.  I actually learned a bit more overhearing another private tour guide who was walking near us as we entered the site.

We then went to the secret Lapa steps.  We were dropped off at the top of the steps and walked down.  About half a block away from the block of the steps, we had a traditional brazilian lunch.  We paid for our own lunch, which was pretty good.

Overall, the tour provides an easy way to see a few of the major sites in Brazil.  They could improve in time management and I would have enjoyed a bit more information about all of the sites we visited.

Better Android logging

Programming is a humbling experience.  It seems like everything I code has room for improvement.

Today, I found out about android.util.log.  This class gives you a better way to print out logging statements.  So, instead of doing,

System.out.println("Look! Code finished, the value is:"+value);

which would print data to the LogCat window in Eclipse with a logging level of INFO, you can do something like,

Log.w("MyTag","Look! Code finished, the value is:"+value);

which prints data to the same LogCat window in Eclipse with a logging level of WARN with a tag of "MyTag".  You can adjust the logging level by using Log.v, Log.d, Log.i, Log,e, Log.a which are verbose, debug, info, error, and assert respectively.  

The best part of this logging is the tag.  With the tag, in Eclipse you can create a filter in the LogCat window, and just see your tagged logging messages.  This is very nice if you are testing on a real phone or tablet which may have a lot of other logging messages unrelated to the app you are testing.

This is much better than just using a System.out.println, because the system messages are sometimes very hard to find among the clutter of other logging output.

I think small changes like this reduces developer frustration and friction, which ultimately leads to improvements in developer productivity.