Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Sarah meets with the force (and they’re not as nice as on TV)

Published
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Tryphoon
on June 12, 2007
in Californication
. 0 Comments

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I received a call from Sarah a couple of hours ago as well as a text message, telling me that she had met with the local force and got a ticket! Once briefly explained what happened (as I am away from home - see previous post), it seems that Ponch and Jon are not as nice in the real life as they were in the TV show…

Basically, in this country, you can be on the phone while driving on the freeway (and cause crashes),you can eat in your car and drive with your feet (and cause crashes),  you can drive with one hand while sending emails from your laptop on the passenger seat (and crash and burn), you can not indicate and  cut in front of anybody without even looking around (and cause crashes) and you can cross the road without warning (and possibly crash with an incoming car) and in none of these cases, get a ticket… But if by any chance, you decide to honk at some dude that crosses the street (out of the blue), well, if you’re unlucky enough to be close to a couple of police officer, you will get a ticket! 

So that’s the score! Sarah got a ticket for honking… The court will decide what the sentence is!! 

So the moral of the story, don’t honk but drive like a living danger and you’ll be fine! Next thing, people will be able to break their parole on several offenses and not go to jail or get a get out of jail free card after a couple of days… Hold on…. Isn’t it what really happened (but at least, Paris is back behind the bars!) 

PS: BTW, we have seen every bad behaviors example given here while driving in LA, except the guy with his laptop, who actually really crashed and ended up in the news, slightly dead!

Apple WWDC 07

Published
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Tryphoon
on June 11, 2007
in Tryphoon
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For the first time ever and after many years of following the event in either real time or time delayed through the Apple site, I dragged my bum to San Francisco, to attend the Apple Word Wide Developer Conference.

First thing first, I arrived last night and was lucky enough to discover that my hotel is only a couple of minutes away from the conference. I then decided to walk there and try to get my ID for the week… When I arrived there, at 8PM sharp, I was politely told that they just closed the admissions but that I could come back today, from 7AM… Got then explained that there were way more people registered than people who could attend the keynote (almost 3 to 2) and that early arrival would be more than wise! So the evening ended up in a couple of drinks, a meal in my room and an early night!

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6:00AM, I am up and getting ready and I am in the line at 6:40AM and it already goes around the building!!! At 7:00AM sharp, it starts to move, we start walking around the building. Reaching the last corner before entering the building, I bumped into a former colleague of mine from London, saving him a good half hour of queue and granting him a seat inside as well as finding me a buddy for the wait! :)

We finally arrive inside the building to another set of queues, from the ground floor to the first floor, around the first floor and finally at 9:30, we start moving… to reach an escalator to go to the second floor (3rd floor for my American friends). A mechanical breakdown in one of the 2 escalators gives us a little advantage and we finally make it to the keynote room, reaching the 3rd row (well, behind medias and VIPs obviously).

At 10:00 sharp, the light goes down and… there it goes. WiFi goes down (or is simply over crowded) and phones are switched off.

So what was it all about?

Well, here is the list of announcements from this year’s WWDC keynote:

  • First, a stab at Microsoft using the I’m a Mac, I’m a PC guys where PC impersonates Steve Jobs and announces his resignation and the end of Apple.
  • Games: EA and Id are back on board and are bringing their games to the Mac platform, without delays compared to the PC versions
  • Mac OS X 10.5 preview, the 10 new major features out of 300:
  1. New Desktop with translucent dock, menu bars and a new feature called stacks, that lets you pile your documents the same way I pile them on my desk.
  2. New Finder, finally unified, including Coverflow browsing for files and a new remote access for file, using .Mac, called Back to my Mac
  3. Quick Look: Automatic preview of any document from within the finder (any document, even video in full screen)
  4. Leopard 64 bits top to bottom
  5. Core animation: Oh my god… Demo of that stuff got me! Imagine the Apple TV opening sequence, except that every screen in that TV wall is lilve, active and can be flipped back and forth…
  6. Boot Camp: What a shock! :) One thing though, Boot Camp supports Parallels and VMWare. Nothing close to what the rumour was about the Wintel platform being natively accessible from Mac OS
  7. Spaces: Same as the last time it was displayed. A Unix like desktop manager. Nothing new here!
  8. Dashboard: New ability to add my own widgets by simply selecting parts of web pages. That looks pretty cool.
  9. iChat: New ability to share applications display or video display over iChat. Pretty interesting on the business side. Sadly, AFAIK, only with 3 users.
  10. Time Machine: Automatic backup of your machine… Well, I already do this on a weekly basis but apparently, I am one of a very few people
    • One more thing: Safari 3 Beta… ON WINDOWS! Hell froze over again!
    • One last thing: The iPhone: No SDK for third part developers, but “you guys can build Web 2.0 apps and use Safari (3) to display them with hooks to the phone’s system… To me, this sounds more like a slap in the face of the developers… and a great way to get these phishing guys to install little pieces of codes thatphone back home using premium numbers…

    And that is it…

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    I now left the WWDC for a quick break and am installing the preview of Leopard on my old PowerBook (hopefully, it is G4 compatible) and Safari 3 Beta on my MacBook Pro…
    Next session in a couple of hours!

    Disney’s annual Picnic!

    Published
    by
    Tryphoon
    on June 9, 2007
    in Californication
    . 0 Comments

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    Barely recovered from our “break” on Sunset, Sarah, Thia and I attended the annual summer picnic from Disney. Great afternoon of fun in a superb location (a park in the mountains at the back of Malibu) with as per usual now, our friends Arnaud & Steph and their 2 monsters, Naomi and Evan.

     

     

    The afternoon was filled with games, slides, water games, foam games, bouncing games and more games!

    Highlight for the daddies: The BBQ (I think that Arnaud had at least 5 huge beef ribs and 3 hot dogs).

    Highlight for Thia: Definitely meeting IN PERSON Mickey, Minnie, Donal, Daisy and Pluto!

     

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    After all this, I now deserve a long night of rest before taking off to San Francisco tomorrow afternoon, for the Apple WWDC (stay tuned on Monday, I am hopping to post in real time the announcements made by Mr Steve Jobs himself).

    Week End on Sunset

    Published
    by
    Tryphoon
    on June 9, 2007
    in Californication
    . 1 Comment

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    Enjoying the fact that Sarah’s parents are in town and can look after Thia, we have decided to spend Friday evening on the Sunset Strip and have some time on our own (first time since we moved here in Feb).

    So as per the now tested and approved scenario, Sarah and I spent the night at the Grafton Hotel (where I stayed sometimes, during my numerous visits to the city of Angels), perfectly located opposite to Katana, one of my favourite Japanese restaurant of all times and next to the Sky bar!

    So diner at Katana, drinks at the hotel and around 10PM, well, we were so tired that we simply decided to stop there and go straight to our room… No visit to the Sky bar, no concert at the Viper room or the House of Blues!!! TV for 10 minutes and we both collapsed, hoping for a long night of sleep and a possible late start!

    This was obviously without counting with the classic group of winos coming back around 2AM, bouncing from wall to wall and the mades starting their shift around 4 or 5AM!

    All in all, a short night and we both felt exhausted at breakfast time! :)

    Breakfast at Mel’s Dinner, just before rushing back home to take Thia to Disney’s annual picnic!

    A great short break, only tainted by a total lack of descent sleep! :)

    First scratch!

    Published
    by
    Tryphoon
    on June 7, 2007
    in Tryphoon
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    Well, it had to happen at one point or another, but here it is! I have got the first scratch on my car! I know I am not yet a great driver but I wish I could have managed to get a little scratch… Not the ENTIRE rear panel as it is now!

    So how did this happen? Well, simply. Am in a rush, have to be in the office within 10 minutes for a call… and my car is stuck in the car park between a huge pickup (Yukon) and a a big pillar… I did really well avoiding to scratch the Yukon and I don’t know how I did it but I managed to get my car simply totally stuck between the pillar on the right and the wall at the front… And suddenly, the deafening noise and the realisation that I must have damanged my little pimp mobile… Another 10 minutes and I am finally out of this bloody parking space and I can asses the damages… :(

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    So any help about getting this fixed will be really appreciated as I have absolutely no clue where I shall go from here! :)