The Place

At the end of a work day very few things are better than the wonderful Casanova Restaurant in Lisbon. With such good food and wonderful view of the serene river Tagus the experience couldn’t be better. Everything in this place is rough enough and that’s just one the reasons so many people go there.

There’s the Café de Paris chairs, the stone tables, the open space, the table share and the open kitchen.

And I love the fact that we can switch on a light bulb to call the employee. It’s so simple yet so effective. Why aren’t there more restaurants like these? What’s the secret for having such a cult feeling?

April 30, 2005 | Tags: | 4 Comments 

Packaging Heaven

At Deli Delux in Lisbon. It’s a gourmet Grocery, Delicatessen and Café in a very industrial style. On the ceiling you have the air pipes, a lot of big fans rotating and some big round lights suspended.

The shelves are packed with gourmet products and every aisle is a design exhibition. You can see all sorts of really well designed packages. From rice to wine, from chocolat cookies to organic pasta.

I coudn’t resist and bought 2 products that have for some time attracted me for it’s timeless packaging design. Bovril and Marmite are 2 long time icons in packaging design.

©2004

Deli Delux is really worth a visit if either you want to buy some wine or past or if you just want to admire good packaging design at its best. A great experience because of attention detail. Will come back.

April 29, 2005 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Riverside from Expo to Chiado

Taking advantage of the small holiday, we went for a 10-km walk near the port of Lisbon. It’s a beautiful industrial area. Some parts semi-abandoned, other still in use but with very old material.

©2004

It was a nice opportunity for the debut of Holga and also to take some outdoor digital photos since the light was so good.

April 26, 2005 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Jackpot.

©2004

April 25, 2005 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Mourir demain

Si on devait mourir demain
Qu’est-ce qu’on ferait de plus,
Qu’est-ce qu’on ferait de moins
Si on devait mourir demain
Moi, je t‘aimerai… moi, je t‘aimerai

(Mourir demain, Natasha St Pier)

April 22, 2005 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

24 - end of Series 2

Finally finished viewing Series 2 of 24. It’s been a while since we started seeing it a couple of months ago. We spent the last 3 days watching one-DVD-a-night and finally ended it. Can’t wait for Series 3.

April 22, 2005 | Tags: | 3 Comments 

Reboot 7

What if you could spend at least 2 days in an event in Denmark talking about such things has CSS, Web Applications, Opensource, Wikipedia, Ruby On Rails, Umbraco, Creative Commons, Friendster, Skype, Basecamp, interfaces and micro business models? All of this in two days of inspiration, perspective and good conversations.

And if to all this you could add the possibility of attending a Building of Basecamp 1-day Workshop around the Reboot days (rumors for now)?

Irrecusable, hein? Reboot 7 is taking place on 10-11 June 2005 in Copenhagen and after seing / reading it through the Web 2 years ago this year I’m planning to attend personnaly.

Logo Reboot 7

So what is Reboot?
Read more

April 20, 2005 | | 7 Comments 

Our New Sofa (from Habitat’s bargain basements)

We had already decided which sofa to buy for our new home. It was orange and it was from Habitat. They said we would have to wait 1 month and to order we would have to pay half price (375 € - total is 750 €) in advance so we investigated other ways of getting a sofa we liked faster and without all the hassles. So yesterday we visited Habitat’s bargain basements where Habitat sells products that have some sort of problem. And we found a sofa.

New Habitat Sofa

Same size, same fabric, only the color was different. This one is white and we like it. The problem? A small spot (almost invible) on one of the sides. The product was still in original packaging which means it probably got dirty during transportation and was never even on display. And the best part? 450 €. That’s right. I paid almost half price for the same product.

Getting the sofa into the kangoo was the hard part. But, in end, we did it and we now think that we could never imagine that by the end of the day we would have bought a new sofa and we would be seating on it at home.

April 20, 2005 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

LinEx - Linux Extremadura

Having registered only the night before, I should have guessed that the event was going to be a really disappointing experience. Linux 2005 was organized by Sybase and it was a kind of Tupperware (read Sybase) marketing session. And it would have been worse if it wasn’t for the LinEx presentation (pdf). This one really surprised me.

logo LinEx

Estremadura is a spanish region with a very special socio-economic context. Besides having one of the lowest indexes of population density (25.7 inhabitants/km2 - European average density in Europe, 116.8 inhabitants/km2) it also has an unemployment rate of nearly 30.0%.

With such a low population density, deploying telecommunications infrastructures to the small villages in which most of Extremadura inhabitants live just wouldn’t be profitable.
Read more

April 18, 2005 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Possibly In love with Holga, the Lomo Camera

It was my birthday yesterday. Lots of calls (and a couple of posts), lots of family and friends, and all that I could wish for a very good birthday.

Oh … and the presents! An adorable book on third-world store signs, a portuguese novel, three special birthday cards (thank you!) and a lomo camera!

She got me a wonderful Holga Lomographic Camera. I already spent some time with it and found out only a small bit of the whole lomographic world out there. The camera is a Medium-format and the almost built-to-me-modified-with-tape feeling is simply wonderful.
I just can’t wait to start using it!

Lomo Holga

While I don’t post a few photos, take a look at flickrs photos tagged with Holga for an idea on what comes out of the camera.

April 5, 2005 | Tags: | 2 Comments 

  • about

    andre_ribeirinho_t.jpg My name is André Ribeirinho, I'm an entrepreneur who lives in Portugal
    More about me. Contact me.

  • my startup

    Adegga - Social Wine Discovery


    Adegga is a social wine discovery service. The idea is to take the complexity out of wine and allow people to discover wines based other people's choices.