L’étranger

I never get tired of those, never seems to get old for me

I am about to rewrite a scuba-diving center’s website for a friend of mine and it’s about time I Web2.0-ize it. I’m not sure whether to go with script.aculo.us or jQuery. Once I find a bit of time to explore both, I’ll share my findings here but if you’ve already done so, please let me know!

I’m in San Francisco for the next 3 days for our National Sales Conference. Lots of fun and work to come…

As a note, I spoke about Google Gadgets and AdWords API on Witamine, a French webradio. I hope the talk was interesting, I pretty much condensed in 10 minutes what I said at the GDD for those who unfortunately could not attend that event.

I also received an invitation to Wallop from Régis Gaidot (thanks Régis!). That is pretty cool, I didn’t even know about this. I played a little bit with it but plan on spending more time on it once I get back to NYC. This is a very rich community site with all of the features one could expect, but presented in a very high-tech, Flash-required fashion.

On May 31, I attended the Google Developer Day in Paris where I introduced Google Gadgets and the AdWords API to a technical and passionate crowd.

Technorati Tags: gdd07, gdd07fr

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Excellent article from the Sunday Times about Turkmenistan, hopefully one of my next trips to the former Soviet Union.
The Sunday Times December 17, 2006
He reinvented the calendar and ordered his people to gnaw bones. He is gilding the desert in gold and marble, and the driving test is a questionnaire on his philosophy of life. Waldemar Januszczak infiltrates the world according to the leader of Turkmenistan
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For those who started playing with computers with the rise of the internet, this probably won’t ring a bell but in the late 80s and early 90s, the name of the game was demomaking. I loved and used to spend a lot of time watching these great productions who pushed the computers to the limit. I did myself my share of Z80 assembly programming on the Amstrad CPC.

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This morning I went to Best Buy to try out the new Nintendo gamebox, but no luck
Apparently, Virgin has loads of them so I guess I’ll pay them a visit this afternoon! If you don’t know what the Wii is, you should definitely check the video below, and you’ll have no doubts left about whether you should get a PS3 or a Wii.

Last night, some friends and I went to Payard to have dinner with the chef himself (who’s from my hometown, Nice) and the worldwide famous Nicolas Boussin (MOF 2000 and silver medal at the World Pastry Championship 2002 where he represented France, US won but check the names of the “American” chefs :)).

The dinner was excellent but as expected the conversation was almost better. It always seemed like they were chemistry majors as molecular biology is so important in pastry. François Payard has been running Payard for about 10 years in New York now while Nicolas Boussin works for Grand-Marnier (yes, with Elise) where he is Gastronomy Ambassador and is the brain behind the drinkable desserts trend.

Every two or three years, The Economist releases a survey of France and I always found them spot on. This year’s includes:

• The art of the impossible
• Insider and outsiders
• Lessons from the campus
• Reforming the unreformable
• Minority report
• Beyond these shores
• Where there’s a will
• Audio interview

Wired article about computer nerds turned into rappers, great lyrics:

Cuz I can kick it in Algol
Roll it up in a Snobol
Anything from Ruby
All the way back to Cobol