Taiwan here I come…

I left France on Sunday 5pm and arrived around 3pm French time in hotel in Tapei. The hotel and the room both looks fantastics. I flied from Lyon to London, London to HongKong and HongKong to Tapei.

After filling up the forms I passed the border control. Why the guy had to stick the entrance form on my indian visa, I will never know. Like I will never know why with all the free pages available in my passport, he had to stamp next to the Bangalore one… Why should I mind? Well I am guessing next time I will be in India, I will get complains…

Anyway, once this done… I have to get my suitaces… Easy? Well do not forget you flight number.You can this on the pic that everything is in quite confusing… no latin characters for sure… Will I feel like Bill Murray in the famous "Lost in Translation" who knows!

Anyway time for bed… a hard day of work is ahead and I have to quickly adjust with the timezone.

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Last Thursday…the end of an era…

That’s it. Thursday 7/08 was our last day in the office we rented in Bull’s center. From monday our new offices will be up and running. We finished packing the so called "architecture office" on the 1st floor.

The end of an era as I have spent 2 and a half years in it sharing it with Rémy and Eric at first, until Eric moved to SNV and Laurent took over. From this room I will take with me  many memories. It was a famous one as people could hear both laughs and screams out of it on every day basis. We also used there an insane amont of markers on both blackboards and had fun in many occasions.

End of an era also, as Rémy that you can see on the pic will be leaving the company while I am abroad. It was the last day, at least for now (you never know) we shared office…

You know what you have, you do not know what you will get. I know the new buildings are much better but I will anyhow miss also a bit that one.

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Almost time to go…

I came back from Bangalore on July 27th…been over a week already and I did not post any feedback. The week over there was really busy. I had a great time with all the guys down there. They are really dedicated to what they do and fun to be around. Every night someone was available and willing to go out. I have been travelling for many years and to many places around the world and it is not like this everywhere I can tell you.

The offices are great and extremenly busy, always something is happening. One of the things that shocks you is the mix between poor and rich people. This is a pick taken from my hotel, on the left side (not available on the pic) I had a fantastic golf course and on the right people living in small wooden house with no electricity / water.

This being said I will definitly go back to India in a couple of months as I have more and more people to visit. Thank you guys for the fantastic time I had.

I left on saturday and the day before 7 bombs exploded in the city, hopefully the number of victims was not too high… I was not aware of terrorist activities in India….

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News from Bangalore…

Yes! I am in India. After leaving home on Saturday 9am, I landed in Bangalore at 5:00am local time, meaning 0:30 french’ one. What to say? Well, my suitase was still in London, I was afraid to face the same situation then last April in California where I received it 5 days later. Anyhow, you pass the passport control, you pass the customs and you are out.
First thing interesting, you have hundred of people outside the airport waiting but between the gate and the exit only few people are allowed. They are working for the main hotels in the neighborhood arranging transportation for the customers.
Mine was not planned, so the guy called one of his buddies cab driver to take me to my hotel. I had to get some cash before hand… but what was the change? I took out 10.000 Indian Rupees and hope for the best. The 30 min drive cost me 1100 INR, around 16 euros. Finally, in my room at 6:30am, I went to bed and woke up at 3pm. Couple of emails later, I went for lunch in my hotel, they have great pub and back to bed by 10pm to try to adjust with the TZ.
First day at work, I went from 1 office to the other taking the company shuttle… I was scared all the way. Indian driving is rather particular, they need the horn. I felt we would have killed hunder of people on the way. We took unsane u-turns on busy roads, fighting with cows to cross. So the myth about cows in the street… so TRUE. I have seen it.
Up to now, I am having a great time, even with spicy food for breakfast at 9am.

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Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Back in Marseille for the week end, we are partying another time for my mam birthday. She was 60 this year and this is the 3rd party we do. First one, small on the day, then 2 weeks ago with neighbours (difficult one ending up wasted) and tomorrow with familly… That is the plan. Today I spend it with the Fack and his kids. We spent hours in the 31°C swimming pool… Other than that, I had booked weeks ago Super Smash Bros. Brawl so I spend a couple of hours on my WII fighting like hell. They are many moves to learn, it is not like Tekken or traditionnal fighting game…

I find it awesome! From IGN: "Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a brawling, battling, action-packed video game that features a varied roster of characters for four-player simultaneous melees! Use your Wii Remote and Nunchuck controls to deal serious damage to your opponents and win the game! This Wii entry in the popular series features a number of new additions, including an Adventure Mode (with co-op play), a wealth of new characters and stages, and online combat for multiple players to face off against each other from anywhere!"

Last week end I was Mario Kart Wii with Binome…(sorry Bi!)… Nintendo rocks.

Even so, I will like to make a note here.. RESIDENT EVIL is MY GAME!

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What was the fun?

Not a lot of time to catch up with the blog, so before going to bed… I promise myself to write something. So here it comes… sorry Alex, it might be short once again.

Here we go with the fun:

• paintball

I had played paintball once, I thing I remember driving my ford fiesta, so it was 13 years ago. 6 friends renting all the needed gear going at night in a hill and roll! It was fun, just between friend. We end up with 2 injuries, lots of bruises and cover by paint. My friend Ced just had learnt on that night never to remove your face protection when playing paintball. His lips trippled the size for over a week as I can recall. I remember that we did not want to go to a special place…afraid to be bored by the rules. So that time in Paris, I had my first experience in a real park with everything needed for the fun. And it really was. Once again, I was amoung friends, which is the key element for me. I enjoyed it because I was a game, not war. Just about the fun until my so called friend shoot me down in the back, 2 min after giving him some extra shells!

• indoor skydiving

Back in July 14th 199X, the JFnR team went to the Alps for a crazy week end. I was the summer, we went skying, then cycling, then back to Tallard to sky dive. I was my first time (and only time) and it was great. Not that I will do it again. Jumping from the plane at 4000m, opening the parachute at 1000m and starting breathing again. How could I forget. Anyway the 3000m drop at full spead (250km/h) last for a bit more than 1minute.

The landing was not that great, I had some scars…  so it was like, I did it, ok what is next. This time I went for an indoor jump. The 2:30 minutes of happyness equal more or less to 2 jumps from a plane without the stress.

Humm not really as you can see on the pics. We are quite concentrated on what is going on.

It was real good, but enough I let you watch my video!

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A Weekend in Paris

A great title for a great week end… I am late in my S.M.A.R.T. objectives plan… but as they say in Greece, "ti na kanoume?". So I am late on my "1 post a week" plan but I will certainly catch up on that.

What is new? Plenty new softwares I have been using,  plenty new pictures I need to upload and a video. I will write a different post on each but here is the plan:

• Software
  • Inquisitor
  • Qumana
  • schemaspy
• Fun
  • Paintball
  • Indoor sky diving

I just want to thanks Mr and Mrs Binome for this great week end

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Facebook or the art of the spam?

I was reading an article on “Why facebook is just a game” and start wandering about facebook itself. My first contact with the platform was last year, during Hack Day , I made an application for it and therefor had to create an account. I was impressed on how easy it was to integrate it. I had the APIs, I had the open platform. It took me half day to have something running. Now this being said, let see some statistics:

• More than 80 million active users
• Facebook is the 6th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is the 2nd most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)
• More than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs
• Over 24,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platfor

I am not here to verify the figures, but they are quite impressive. 80 millions users… Nice! I had the privilege to follow the keynote made by Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook, during the MySQL conf 2008, and it was focus on scalability and performance. Scalability is an issue for facebook but also for all developers willing to launch their application. Your traffic can drastically increase for 0 to millions of users, making your whole system go down…but that is another issue. Now, after why I created an account, the question is, do I use it? The answer is no or almost never.  After creating my account, I started receiving “friendship” requests, over 100 friends now. When I say “friends”, it is a bit quick. Is a friend not someone you are doing stuff with, going out, having drinks,…?   I started playing a bit with different quizz and stuffs but got easily bored. I do not like the idea of installing all the time applications and I am really bored by the SPAMMING “go and try this…”, “click there and see what happen…”. Is that called spam when it sent by your friends? How to spam people without them getting mad? Have the SPAM sent by their friends This being said, I do enjoy getting update of people I know and do not see anymore. Life is made that way, sometimes you are taking different paths.     

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back on…

I started this blog back in Feb 2006 and after a couple of months and a server crash, I had given up on posting news. So why starting again after a bit less than 2 years of silence. Hum, silence, not really I was and still am involved with other projects. Let say, I have still things to say, I rather enjoy writing and love using wordpress. Will the tool explain the work? Not really, I do travel a lot and want to share my thoughts on actuality, places I visit, mood swings, discoveries and many more.

I do expect to have the time or the material to post on every day basis but it will take a S.M.A.R.T. objective.

I will post -Specific- at least 1 post -Measurable- every week -Achievable-, not matter where I go and this until June 2009 -Timed-.  As for -Realistic-,  I really believe it is.

As you can see, I kept the first standard post “Hello Word!”. I was just impressed by how my friend Nicolas was reactive. I did not tell him anything about this blog being live again but about 1h after installing wordpress, I already had my first comment. Crazy, is not it? 

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Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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