Weblog + Tumbleblog + Microblog = Communication Clog

The Lair

The Lair

I have been trying for a while to reinvent my blog or at least to have a way to share thoughts, comments and pictures with friends and family who are often far out of reach or in a different time zone.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to microblog about things I see or do during the day, while being able to post pictures every now and then, covering topics ranging from family to nature, beautiful to weird. I’d like as well to be able to add some modules and be able to post longer notes.

What? This exists already? All my friends are using it? It’s called Facebook?  Naaaah! I am an alpha geek, a trend setter, not a follower!

Plus this is all about me! I want to flatter my ego, I want to know how many people check my page, I want to know when they come, what they look at! I can’t do that on Facebook!

So I have a personal blog, after many tests and hesitations, I now have a tumbleblog, I am microblogging on Twitter and  Yammer and a professional blog. I have as 6 IM accounts (From ICQ to Live Messenger)  and obviously a My Space and a Facebook profile!

Tumblr

Tumblr

So how do I pick and chose where I want to direct my (5) readers (thanks again Mum for you support)? Well, I don’t and this is where things got complicated over the last couple of months and got me to almost give up on any form of blogging!

I want to microblog in one place but to publish everywhere. So I use Ping.fm, posting from there to both Twitter and Yammer.

Next, I have a Tumblr tumbleblog which surfaces my Twitter posts as well as anything “on the spot”. Picture I take, quote I hear, thought I have. This site surfaces excerpts of the various pieces I write on this site.

Then I run this weblog which now surfaces my tumbleblog as an aside. Wordpress defines an aside as

When you lean towards someone and tell them a little bit of information, you are making an “aside” comment. In blogs, you can do that on your blog by passing on small bits of information to your readers called Asides.

And all of this is surfaced via various extremely complicated means of communication, mainly  based on beta software!

But finally, it is working and I guess I can resume blogging activities, until I get bored again and decide to change everything again. Quoting a friend and colleague, Mister P:

It will never be the way you want. You enjoy the battle, not the victory.

So what should be the next social platform for me to test? Do you have any idea on how I could aggregate all of this in one simple centralized place? If only there was such a thing as a word-twi-blr-book!

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Tryphoon 4.0

4.0b1

4.0b1

It is early in the morning, the night has been short and I already feel the lack of sleep.My oldest daughter is running around, feeling the house with songs and fantasy world stories while the youngest one is playing on her play mat, chirping from time to time.

What is different today? Why am I so tired?

Is it the fact that I now have two children and that for some weird reason, sleep and chilling time have disappeared of my day to day schedule? No! Thia usually sleeps 12 hours a night and Sophia just completed her second week of sleeping through the night!

Is it that I am unfit and that my arteries are getting old? Hopefully not! I don’t think I have been that fit in decades! I have quit smoking for a while now, I exercise frequently, I run in the morning and I even have started doing push-ups!

Oh! I know! I KNOW!!! It is the countdown to turning 40! By the end of this week (Sunday), I’ll be 40 and this milestone has been haunting me for over a year now!

Turning 40! How will it feel? Will my teeth rot and fall next week? Will I suddenly get bald and carry a nice beer gut with me wherever I go? Well, I am trying my best to  avoid it! Training regularly, applying anti-age cream around the eyes, shaving my head short enough for the white in my hair to look like it is just the pale color of my skin, the same applying to my beard!

And I guess, I’ll try to revive this little blog of mine this week by sharing with my (5) readers (thank you Mum) what it on the mind of a 39 years, 11 months, 3 weeks and a couple of day old man and the path to the 4.0 version of me! This was hence the 4.0 beta 1 release of me!

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It’s been 10 years!

I woke up a couple of weeks ago and I realised I was celebrating 10 years since I left France, on a gloomy early morning, leaving Paris, my close friends and my immediate family, following some unexpected development in my then life.

My last ever "Carte Orange" (Monthly Underground Ticket in Paris)

My last ever "Carte Orange" (Monthly Underground Ticket in Paris)

I was leaving the country I grew up in, knew inside out and was moving to a place I had only visited once and did not particularly like then. But for better for worse, I cut the cord, burned some bridges, packed my bag and left.

My luck at that time, the girlfriend of one of my best friends and former associate in a media agency, was a Disney Online executive. I will never know if it was pure luck or a little help from them, but the day I needed it the most, I received an offer to move to London. I didn’t think twice; I accepted it. I packed a bag and 3 days later, I was moving into my temporary apartment, in the middle of Chelsea, on the borders of Sloane Square.

Things at first were not really shinny. I didn’t speak the language well. I wasn’t realy keen on the local culture based on pubs and football and not fine wines and dining and would anyone ask me how I felt, my answer was: I’m 30, single and broke! Not the best of me!

As a result, my plan then was to stay in London for a year maximum, learn to speak English and then move to New York, surfing the wave of the DotCom bubble. This was 1999 and sky was the limit. We techno geeks were unstoppable.

2000: the bubble burst, I saw numerous of my friends lose their job in London, New York and San Francisco as well as the beginning of the dark years of the online industry. I then decided to stay put and wait for better days to come.

Larger than life lifestyle

Larger than life lifestyle

In the meantime, I spent most of my free times enjoying a pure batchelor lifestyle, re-inventing myself every 3 months, split between 2 worlds: a motley crew of expats from around the world (Canadians, Germans, Austrians, Brazillians, Greeks, Americans but no Brit (except one)) and a group of French expats with a larger than life lifestyle. We had fun. We had great fun! We had major fun! It felt like finally going through my 20’s, college years, except that I was in my 30s with a more than decent income and no dependents. Basically, living my life in the fast lane big time. The friends I met back then are still to this day, some of my closest friends, solely distant these days due to the gap between their current location, where ever in the world they are, and California.

On the work front, the better days didn’t really come. Rather the contrary… 2001 saw 2 large towers collapsing in Manhattan and the stock market plunging. Once again, this wasn’t the time to try to change role, company or city. These were times to stay put!

2001 was as well the year I met Sarah. To be precise, on that very precise “Sep 11″ day. As no one knew what wold be the next target and our office being under the Heatrow flight path and between one of the largest tube station in London and the A40-M4 motorway, we were asked to evacuate. Still under the shock of the images of the collapsing towers we just saw on CNN, we all converged to our usual waterhole at the bottom of the office’s building, the Smollensky’s bar and made sure we would not die of thirst that day.

Friends at first, more came almost a year later and life changed again. We soon bought an appartment and moved in together. Sarah introduced me to a very good friends of hers and I soon joined his team on the TV side of the business and began my insane years of jet set traveller, enjoying on average a long haul flight and a couple of short European trips a month. I then discovered the West Coast of the US.

Traveling the world

Traveling the world

Definitely not my cup of tea at first. I used to think that Los Angeles was the ugliest place on Earth and that life here was impossible. A kind of purgatory on Earth.

A couple of years go by, Sarah and I are married, our first child is born and through major reshuffles within our business segment, we ended up a couple of years ago (see previous post) on a sunny February day, Sarah, Thia, myself and a large amount of bags, at the arrival zone of LAX, having (once again) said goodbye to friends, packed a couple of bags and left. The sole difference that time is that I don’t think we burnt any bridges and it was a conscious choice.

Ten years… Feels like yesterday and feels like multiple lifetimes. At least, 6 or 7 me! If anyone would have told me back then that 10 years and bit down the line I would be married, with 2 lovely kids, living in California, driving and working for a large US corporation, I would have laughed and suggested stopping doing drugs. But here I am, here we are.

Next big milestone: the Four-Oh thing, happening next month!

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Lakers vs. Heat

Lakers vs. Heat at the Staples Center

Lakers vs. Heat at the Staples Center

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China is a democracy

In my hand!!! It is in my hand!!!

The wait is finally over! 16 years after I bought Use Your Illusion I & II (actually, bought off friends of mine at a discount, who had “borrowed” it from the supermarket he used to work at)… Sunday, 10:00am, I was at my local Best Buy (the sole US distributor) and bought the long awaited come back of this “band” (brand more than band?).

Enough has been said over the years about this album and the drama around it. The entire old band sacked and resulted in the creation of Velvet Revolver, the revolving door effect around the” Slash’s replacement” (Brian May, Robin Finck, Buckethead, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal) and the many false starts and cancelled concerts…

I now have listenend to the album a couple of times and I have to admit that parts of it were totally worth the wait. It is a complicated album, reflecting the persona of Axl Rose, mixing strong riffs and ballads as “Use Your Illusion I & II” did…

Was it worth the wait? Probably not!

Will it be a large hit? Probably!

One thing: I will not get my can of Dr Pepper as I am not the owner of a US passport! Should I call this discrimination?

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