Tip the world over on it’s side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles
Did any of you ever heard about Saint Clare? I didn’t! Well, until last weekend…
My neighbors hosted a yard sale and I inevitably had to pay a little visit there (mainly due to my young little monster asking for it)…
And there she was, in front of my eyes, our Patron Saint! Only in America!
I sadly didn’t have any cash on me and didn’t buy it but I thought I’d share the news…
Sadly, we haven’t yet found the Patron Saint of File-Based Workflows!!
Chatting with Miles yesterday, we found this excellent video of what might probably have been the highlight of a prime time show on French television. I have actually no doubt that such a show did beat any other show been aired that evening in terms of ratings.
Now, to give you, readers, a bit of background, you might all know about Celine Dion but few of you might know about Johnny Halliday.
Johnny has (per wikipedia) “had a 45-year career in music and is one of France’s biggest stars. He has completed 400 tours, had 18 platinum albums, performed in front of 15 million people, and sold 100 million records. Today Hallyday is still seen as a top stage performer, giving first class shows in crowded stadiums. Hallyday announced his retirement from performing on 3 December 2007 at the age of 64“. Almost 3 generations of French citizens know more about Johnny than about their president or their local mayor! He is simply our national hero, far ahead of Marianne or Napoleon (for my British fellows).
Once you’ll have suffered through the video (make sure you pass the 4:10 mark, it even gets better at that point), you’ll have pretty strong idea of what prime time TV is in France and what “real” music is about…
So now, forget about the constant striking, the grumpy cab drivers, the dirty restrooms (or just the hole in the floor a.k.a. Turkish WC), the arrogance of the Parisians (I once was one of them) or the fact that French people are mainly “monoglot” and “polygamist” and imagine yourself coming home from a long day at work, switching on your TV and suffering through this! No freaking way!
This is enough for me to delay (indefinitely) my return to France! Unless Miley Cyrus sings a duet with our national Johnny! ;-P
My little bro Jef is coming to town and as usual with any adventure related to him, things had to go wrong!
So a couple of nights, willing to make sure that Jef had boarded his plane or at least had checked in, I decided to stay up until 8:00AM London time and call him around that time… As I feared, things got awfully wrong. Flight was cancelled, all United Airlines 777 planes were grounded, the earliest available flight would have got Jef in LA 2 days late… Not good…
To add to the nightmare, Thia decided to wake up and start screaming, willing to get a hug from her Daddy.
Many phone calls and some drama later, around 2AM, Jef is on a plane and on his way to LA. Not the original plane, obviously, but A plane, flying towards the US west coast! I can finally go to bed.
The result of this: a very tired Tryphoo sitting at his desk, feeling rough and unhappy…
Here enters a recent office chat during which I was introduced to a new concept called the Hammerhead or better described the ultimate “wake up” drink. Always willing to volunteer myself to try new crazy stupid great things and feeling the way I felt, I had to drink this thing!
So what is it?
As easy as 1-2-3
1/ Acquire an empty cup, a can of Coke and a double expresso (thanks to Starbucks, this is now a very easy thing to achieve)
2/ Pour Coke in Cup, add the Double expresso and get prepared for the foam
The result: Within less than an hours, both caffeine and sugar kicked in. I felt absolutely fine again, but according to some of my coworkers, this is not a thing I should do too often to them…
So not only have we found out that Microsoft might be hiding the truth with regards to Internet Explorer 8 and the Acid 2 test, it seems that the Redmond empire is not keen on eating their own dog food!
I happen to have tried this morning to perform a Software Update (sorry, Windows Update) on my Windows XP build using Internet Explorer 8 in native mode, and what did I get?!?!
I got “Please upgrade to Internet Explorer 5 or later”!!!
Last time I checked my maths book, it still mentioned something about 8 > 5 (note, strictly greater than… not greater or equal… not lesser)!
Come on Microsoft, can’t you guys talk together?!
Last Thursday, working on our monthly Lunch 2.0 session, we were looking for a way to open the session with a bang…
Idea soon came that we should declare officialy the death of HD-DVD as all studios have now switched sides (even Dreamworks, yes even Dreamworks!) and Toshiba have officially given up on the format (in exchange of some chips manufacturing plant though).
Then came the BANG concept!
“Let’s SMASH some HD-DVD stuff!”
My first reaction was
“Let’s destroy our HD-DVD player, drop it from the top of the building, drive to the desert with it, shot at it or use black powder and detonate it!!!!”
It didn’t fly, seems that destroying hardware in a violent way for public consumption is not in our work ethos.
So we decided to simply hammer some of the HD-DVD discs we had at work! And yes, I did it!!!
BANG, BANG, BANG: “I declare HD-DVD definitely dead!”
The caveat in this process: I live in corporate America where more law suits are filed every minute than I have days off per year. As a result of this, Mike kindly wrapped the discs cases in a plastic bag to avoid any small piece of disc or case to fly off as a result my smashing and accidentally land in someone’s eye, inevitably resulting in another long and complicated law suit!
