fplanque: off topic

So... this is like my first post in my brand new b2evolution 2.0 English only blog.

One of the nice things when you start a new blog is that you can write sentences like the above. Sentences that are almost impossible to read. Worse: sentences no one cares about!

Who cares? No one is reading this yet! And I bet my first reader will be the Google bot...

Of course my plan is to move all my previous English posts from my French site over to this one.

I gotta do this carefully though...

• First, I wouldn't want the Google bot to see any duplicate content.
• Second, I need to redirect from the old location to the new one.
• Third, I'd like to take that redirect opportunity to clean up the URLs a little bit.

One thing I'm having a hard time deciding on is wether or not to keep the /2007/03/11/ parts inside of my URLs. The alternative is to use category names...

"Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth."
-Vernor Vinge

Note: I like it even better without a coma after "humans"

At Apple's last special event, after introducing the new iPods, Steve Jobs added this:

"We've got some new packagings for the new nano as well. And it's 52% less volume. This turns out to be an environmentally great thing. Because it dramatically reduces the amount of fossile fuels we have to spend to move these things around the planet."

Isn't that odd?

I mean, I have been religiously watching Uncle Steve's speeches for at least two years now, and I believe this is the first time he's been mentioning the environment in one of his one man shows. More than that, he actually seemed pretty proud about Apple's contribution to the environment.

Well... yeah... I could be almost happy about it... If only Apple was really concerned about the environment! But so far, all I heard is "look we're saving a lot of money on shipping costs and that will help us be cheaper than the Zune".

But there's another reason for Jobs showing his environment friendly side. (Check out their updated environment page on Apple's site).

The real reason is Greenpeace! They came out with a report on how environment friendly consumer electronics manufacturers actually are. And guess what? Apple is close to the last!

Full story »

Okay, this time there's no turning back! I have booked my Flight! I'm off to San Francisco on October 4th!

Wow! It's actually been 12 years since I left Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. And I've not been to the US once ever since. Despite my constant and renewed interest for the American culture. How could I let it slip away for so long?

This time it will be California for 3 weeks.

It's been pretty hard to decide for how long I would stay. I originally wanted to get an open ticket and stay until it got bored (or my VISA ended, or I ran out of cash, or I got homesick...) but it turns out that any open ticket costs 5 to 10 times the price of a fixed date round trip.

I settled for Air France which would conveniently fly me non stop from Paris to SF and back from Los Angeles to Paris, non stop again. 699 €, pretty hard to beat. (and yes, I chose to come back through LA on purpose! )

Now, of course I'm very busy evaluating the housing situation! A hotel inside the city costs somwehere between $70 and way too much. Of course, when reading the online reviews for the $70 hotels, I rapidly began to think that the $200/night offers were worth the price.

I also checked Craig's list but I got bored really fast. Looks like there is no way to do any flavor of advanced search on this site! And if I have to browse through all the offers one by one, I'll never find until too late. That site may be extremely popular, I don't get it...

One of the most useful resources I have found is Orbitz. It is incredibly useful for targetting a specific area of the city. It also allows to narrow down on hotels with WiFi access.

Ironically, $70 hotels near the airport tend to get better reviews than $150 hotels downtown!

So I figured it would be cheaper to get a hotel out of town and rent a car than to try to get accomodation inside of the city. Actually I think, I'll stay downtown for a few days, and then get a car to explore the rest of the Bay Area. At that time, lodging off town might be more convenient anyway.

Haven't decided yet when and how I would get down to L.A. though...

Seth Stevenson tells you more than you ever wanted to know about the word "suck" in Slate (via Anil Dash).

"We could argue all day about whether sucks is an obscenity or not. [...] What's far more interesting to me is the word's utility.

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy."

Read it though and you'll admit that it would suck not to have the word suck available in daily conversations.

Now, I can't help but remember Adam Curry citing his daughter pushing it to the next level:

"It sucks so bad (that) it swallows!"

Ouch!