l'étranger

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

That is not big news, I know. But there are 3 positions that are in my team so let me advertise them here:

• Sales Engineer in New York
• Sales Engineer in Chicago
• Web Application Engineer in New York or Moutain View

Contact me quickly if you are interested!

Technorati Tags: google, jobs

Kamini, the one-horse town rapper, breaks from the stereotypes and raps about Marly-Gomont.

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The most amazing model airplane pilot I’ve ever seen. It’s actually hard to believe it’s true.

Technorati Tags: model airplane

France’s crisis du jour. Magistrates are shocked because their efforts were questioned by the Minister of the Interior, God forbid!

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