World CEOs unite against poverty, illiteracy, and more

April 1st, 2009

Two days ago, a most famous French newspaper called for the readers to submit articles that would be published in the April 1st issue. The only rule was to abide to a 1500 characters limit. I did a rough translation of my entry below. I don’t know if it made it to the print edition, they didn’t have anything funny in the online version yesterday.

It’s an act of generosity that has no precedent in recent History. This Wednesday, a group of executives from the top 50 banks in the world, and others from multinational companies like Total and Monsanto, announced they would donate the full extent of their compensation for the coming decade to the “World Treasury Fund” (WTF), a newly created NGO.

“We think it’s time to put that money to good use and help others” declared Sir Fred Goodwin, former CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, recently retired with an estimated pension of $1.5M/year. “We’ve been thinking about it for months - actually since our countries have bravely supported us since the beginning of this crisis” said Edward Libby from AIG.

According to our sources, the WTF is a charity that intends to bring education to the masses, health care and long-term green initiatives. “We intend to first act in the places where the needs are the most pressing, such as Darfur and Iraq” said Daniel Bouton from the Societe Generale. Monsanto announced it would realign its activities to focus on organic products and the needs of small farmers around the globe.

It’s not saying much that this initiative raised a sentiment of incredulity among the attendants to the press conference. Execs ask for the public’s patience and indulgence: “We intend to be judged on our actions. We will meet again in one year -to date- and present a report of our action at that time.”

Spring is here!

March 30th, 2009

At long last!

Last week was the first time of the year where the weather was consistently good for 7 days in a row. That was enough to convince a few friends into repeating the bike ride from the ferry building in San Francisco to Sausalito, in the North bay. But we went a lot more prepared than I was the last time. Rather than leaving at 1pm and taking the Bart, we left at 10am and took two of our bikes on the rack up to Pier 40. The bike hut rented us the two remaining bikes and we were go. Rather than arriving in Sausalito 5 minutes before the ferry left, we took care of checking the schedule and packing up our lunch in advance. We took our time for the ride and we crossed the bridge around 12:45, when the midday fog was wrapping most of it. That left us with two full hours to have lunch and dessert in a public park and then just sitting in the sun discussing miscellaneous topics, including the absolutely fantastic french accent and incredible story telling abilities of our table neighbors (“So, I ask im, if he smokes, like, joints, and he sez ‘No’, but zen, I ask im layter and he sez ‘Yes’.”). Sausalito was so full of French folks it felt like London for a bit.

A message to Alex Proyas

March 25th, 2009

Dude, seriously… Can you direct another movie that doesn’t talk about menacing, odd looking aliens in trench coats that secretly take control of the planet? Pretty please? I watched Dark City yesterday and we went to see Knowing tonight.

Story: they find a paper with a list of numbers, which really are a code for all past tragical events, such as earthquakes and (gosh!) terrorist attacks. The list also predicts future events and it is true, that shit on the paper really happens. But there’s an end to the list, and yes, it’s really going to be the end of the world. But since aliens have known about it for 50 years or so, they’ve already chosen a bunch of kids to be taken to another planet (really, a new garden of Eden). Everyone else dies. The end.

I will not apologize for the spoiler. How on Earth could someone have thought it would be a good idea to mix Final Destination, Armageddon and Noe’s ark in the same story is beyond my understanding. Ah, there’s also a more than noticeable inspiration from Signs: a) the aliens and b) the fact that Nicolas Cage’s wife died a few months before and he no longer believes in God, until the very last minute when he calls back his father (a priest, no less) and they all burn to death giving a big hug to each other.

The only good bits of the movie are what’s in the trailer: plane crash, derailing subway, exploding Earth. The rest is just crippled with low quality suspense, moronic screenplay, poor symbolism and Cage’s terrible acting.

Dilemma

March 23rd, 2009

I’m far from being the same fan of Dragon Ball as I was when I was, say, 11, but I have to say that having seen the trailer for it, the upcoming Dragon Ball movie is an insult to the story told in the comic, and the movie is on the right track to be an insult to cinematography in general. However, Jamie Chung is just too lovely for me to be completely mad.

Aren’t they the cutest?

March 22nd, 2009

The t-shirts only took one week to arrive.

image

From left to right: Gregoire, Fanny and Emile.

25 km/h

March 21st, 2009

Start: 11:00:00AM – Finish: 12:00:43PM


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We then went to have a well deserved lunch at the Palo Alto Creamery, Fountain and Grill.

Miscellaneous

March 20th, 2009

Last week-end, I went to bike outside in preparation for the 2009 Tour de Cure. I did the 25 km loop by myself and it went well, except for a small part where I fumbled on the itinerary and wandered around for a few minutes trying to find Arastradero. The run is pretty flat in general, and covers areas that I have mostly already biked in, so it’s pretty nice and easy. I’m hoping to get to 50 km sometimes soon, but tomorrow morning I’m doing the 25 again – this time with Nico and I’ll try to time us and see how long it can take.

OKR: improve time by XX%.

To compensate for all these efforts, I bought a Mac Mini. Yes, I know it has nothing to do with fatigue, but I was just looking for an excuse. Anyway, I had been on the verge of buying a new computer for a while, in order to replace the MacPro that died on me last fall. I originally wanted to get a MacBook but they are really too expensive and I figured my employer updated my laptop recently (though with a previous generation MPB rather than a glossy shiny Unibody), so I didn’t need the mobility. And I love the Mac Mini. It’s the third time I buy one, and loading it with 2GB of RAM and having a decent GPU makes the world of a difference. I can finally watch DVDs comfortably in the bedroom again and I also intend to use my mad dev skillz on a couple of ideas I’ve had lately. Having to step away from the TV to use it is a good thing I guess.

I you want to keep count, I now have 7 computers at home, but 2 are borked and 2 are obsolete. 3 computers per geek is just a good average.

On Tuesday, we went to celebrate St-Patrick’s day at one of the two Irish bars of Mountain View: the St Stephen’s. It was pretty packed and we arrived right around the time they started to move tables out of the way. We were pretty hungry (unlike most Americans, we do not eat at 5:30pm) and so we had to step out to have dinner at a nearby restaurant. When we came back, the party had really started in the pub and it was absolutely packed. Even though we had kept our $10 bracelets, we didn’t really feel like yelling and standing up for another hour. Nico then invited us to finish the evening at his place where we had one more beer and played the Wii. It was a nice evening overall, filled with laughs and continued heated debates about ‘Les Nuls’ vs. ‘Les Inconnus’. No binge drinking or deafness in the end, which is nice.

No Guinness was harmed in the writing of this post.

Alain Bashung dies

March 14th, 2009

Alain Bashung died today. The last of the giants goes away.

He was holding a special position in the world of French singers. An inspirer. A grandfather to a whole generation of singers who emerged in the late 90’s. I own none of his records, yet feel like his tunes have infused my life, a few years at a time. Not a superstar, but a truly popular singer. He played live at a festival I attended in 2004. I remember his performance vividly. As do the 40000 persons standing in front of the stage that day.

So long, Sir.

Resolutions

March 9th, 2009

Rather than trying to set goals at the beginning of the year, I have tried to extract trends from my activities up to this date and make them this year’s resolutions:

Watchmen

March 8th, 2009

So, we went to see Watchmen on Saturday night in the city. After a long and sunny afternoon spent walking down Telegraph avenue in Berkeley, we headed to the Metreon, a quite modern movie theater which features an IMAX room. I had never seen an IMAX movie until this one and I have to say the screen is very impressive. Bigger than what I thought. Unfortunately, traffic jams on the Bay Bridge (surprise!) made us take longer than expected to reach San Fran, and we ended up having to see on the right end of the second row. It wasn’t too bad, but I definitely want to get to sit more in the middle the next time.

As for the movie, it was quite good. I have not read the comic, because I was actually waiting until I saw the movie. I have been too many times disappointed by screenplay adapted from books (American psycho anyone?) that I preferred to wait this time. The soundtrack is one very noticeable piece of the movie. The trailers were already using tunes from The Smashing Pumpkins and Muse. The movie opens with Bob Dylan, continues with Simon and Garfunkel, and also features Jimi Hendrix’s ‘All along the watchtower’ as well as a cover from Hallelujah from Jeff Buckley. I don’t know if the point was to try bringing the audience back to the mood of the 60’s (where the first half of the film takes us regularly), but it was nice to be able to hear it

The movie is pretty violent too, in a way that reminds me of the Saw series. There isn’t enough blood to be in the same vein as the comical kindof gory scenes from ‘From dusk til dawn’, but yet it’s not realistic enough to make the movie really horrific. Violence, including severed limbs and overturned articulations, seems just to be part of the daily life in the world of Watchmen. A world in which Nixon gets reelected for 4 terms and which is a heartbeat away from nuclear armageddon. The movie is pretty long –2:45–, and there are times where it’s getting pretty hard to keep paying attention. The story seems like a jigsaw puzzle where you should have a ‘haha’ moment in the end where it all just fits. It just takes long to show us all the pieces before they come an fit together (mostly in the last 25 minutes). The book (which I bought today) looks pretty dense, so I’ll reserve my judgment on whether it was possible to do better for later.

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