Monthly Archive for October, 2007

In which I face another problem with my car…

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Some people have it, some people don’t… but one thing is sure… I am not a car genius… And so far, I have been plagued by tiny annoying problems.

So the last installment of  the “Cyril’s not a car’s best friend” started over a month ago, when coming back from Amsterdam, I tried to start my car and faced an empty battery issue… So the first step was to try to find jump start cables. Once this was done, I started to look into the process… very scary at first… “Attach the red wire to the + bolt of the dead battery, then the red wire (the other end obviously) to the + bolt of the active battery. Then the black to the - bolt on the active battery and the black onto the… oh, no… not the the - bolt on my car’s battery… “Please find a piece of metal that is grounded, as every battery made after 1991 are meant to be grounded, etc… “… But where? Block Engine? Ah… What is the block Engine? I guess, the big thing in the middle… “Avoid connecting the remaining wire to the pipe leading to the carburetor”… Well, so on the block engine, but not on a pipe? Oh and not on the side of the car either…

So after 20 minutes of shaking hands trying to connect all these things, Sarah found where to connect and off we went, my car did start. We then went for a little ride for approximately an hour, trying to recharge the dead battery.

A couple of weeks go by and boom… again… Getting good at it, it only takes few minutes to jump start the car and off I go, another hour spent on the road… 

Then 2 weeks ago, I drive to the office (planning to buy an anniversary present for Sarah during my lunch break) and park on the roof of the building. I then go back around noon, cars on the left, cars on the right and A DEAD ENGINE! Arrrggggg…

After 4 days (it took that long to find a time when no one was parked on either side of my car), a colleague of mine, Miles, kindly helps me to jump start the bloody car and I can go home. No time for driving around.

And then last week, still having to buy a present for Sarah and having meetings in various locations that day, I decide to take my car, but this time… I am clever, I park at a corner, making sure that any car could park next to me and jump start me… Which didn’t fail… Car dead… Sarah had to come to the rescue…

I then finally decided to admit that my battery might have an issue and that it was time to seek help from a specialist! So I ask around and Yoshi points me to some garage. Went there and 30 minutes later, my car had a new battery and engine was starting perfectly all the time…

It only took me a month to reach that point!

Does anyone want to be what the next problem might be? (so far we had a large scratch on the right side of the car (still to be fixed), a failing sun roof, a defective passenger seat and a dead battery…) 

In which we go for lunch to Bubba Gump

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Yesterday, having taken my third official day off since we moved to California 9 months ago, the family (including Mum visiting from France) decided to spend part of the day at the beach. Weather was good (~ 30ºC), sky was blue, wind was OK in Santa Monica…

Lunch time arrived rapidly and I suggested we go to a place called Bubba Gump. Not the best restaurant in the world, but easy going, on the pier and serving some fab chicken tenders coated in some hot sauce…

I had already been in one of these restaurant once but I couldn’t help but being amused by the way things work there. The place is themed after the movie Forrest Gump. We are talking the full shebang here, including ping pong racket for dessert menu, plastic plates, memorabilia on the walls and as a result, one of the most famous sentence of the movie is constantly present…. “Run Forrest Run”…

So, imagine you are at your table and you would like to order a new beer… Instead of having to find a waiter, wave, wait, wave more, wait more and get annoyed (or on the other end of the spectrum, have a waiter at your table every 2 minutes asking if things are OK so far (mainly US way of doing things) ), you simply replace the “Run Forrest Run” sign by the underlying one showing “Stop Forrest Stop” and within a very short time, a waiter stops at the table, shouts “Stop Forrest Stop” and starts taking orders…

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Definitely another  way of doing things on this side of the pond… but this time I must admit I found it pretty useful. 

The next thing was that I couldn’t help but thinking how such a concept would work, back in France… Creating a French Movie themed restaurant, maybe not based on one film but on several classical comedies… And here we could have the Martini or shots from “Les Tontons Flingeurs”, the “Doubitchou” and “Kloug” from “Le père Noël est une ordure” and the cheese fondue and crepes from “Les Bronzés font du Ski”… All we would need is someone else who knows more about French cinema than me, a couple of nice investors and we would be done, retiring in 10 years. 

Tryphoon.com is iPhone ready!

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 A simple post (while several others are in the pipe, I just need to find some time to write them). Being one of the Apple fan boys, I absolutely had to make sure that my site was compatible with the shiniest gadget of all: the iPhone… Thanks to the modular approach of Word-press, we are now officially iPhone compatible…

Boss’s Day

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 Another new side of the working conditions in America…

I knew about Grandmother’s day, Fathers and Mothers’ days but I never heard so far of Boss’s day which happen to be TODAY…

So to my surprise this morning, I found a lovely note from our Admin Renee as well as a balloon floating in my office when I walked in.

Puzzled at first. Then smiling!

Made my day!Â