fplanque: glob

Ok, so I'm back to France... and guess what: I'm actually seeing the light of day!! :)

When I flew back from California last October I had the hardest time ever to sync back to European time. This time... it might be smoother...

There is a 9 hour time difference between California and France. That means that when you normally wake up at 10 am California time, it is already 7 pm France time. So when you fly over this way, you tend to wake up in the evening... stay up all night... and finally feel sleepy in the morning. Do that in the winter when the days are shorter and the nights longer... and you literally won't get to see the light of day for weeks! Guaranteed ending up somehow depressed...

This time I tried to prepare real hard for the trip back home. I would go to sleep really early for the last few days in California, then get up every morning around 5 am (2 pm French timezone).

So I planned I would keep that rhythm when coming back: wake up at 2pm and manage it from there...

Of course it didn't go as planned! Does it ever anyway?

I couldn't sleep for the whole overnight flight. T'was actually the most turbulent flight I think I ever experienced. We landed at sth like 11 am yesterday and I got home at something like 1pm. Had to stack up the fridge first ad basically got to sleep around 6 pm, just when daylight would start to fade a little...

I woke up several times during the night but fell asleep again shortly thereafter, until 6am when I just couldn't sleep any longer. Luckily the day would dawn around 6:30 and I'm now feeling almost okay.

Of course I always talk about jet lag on planes and nobody seems to have ever cracked it really... However, I just felt so bad last time that I keep thinking there's room for improvement, at least for myself.

So far, this time seems to good to be true. But on the other hand there's one thing that makes it a lot easier: summer time! Days are long enough to make it easy to wake up at some point when it's *not* dark outside. And daylight helps, really, a lot!

Anyway, we'll see how it goes in the next few days...

Let's get to work!!

Allright I’m not dead yet. I’m actually back in San Francisco after a 5 week trip through Chicago IL, Kansas City MO, Flagstaff AZ, the Grand Canyon AZ, Monument Valley UT, Las Vegas NV and San José CA…

I just did the SF Friday Night Skate again ;) Gotta put up some videos for that!

In the meantime, if you’re interested, I’ve got a small boatload of pictures from the trip online. [site down]

So far:

• Most amazing natural site: Grand Canyon
• Most amazing artificial site: Las Vegas – The Strip
• Most beautiful site: Monument Valley
• Worst food: Amtrak
• Best food: Chicago (still deciding between Gibson’s and The Chop House)

TL;DR: when you travel from Europe to the US for several weeks, sign up foT AT&T’s prepaid phone plans and T-Mobile’s monthly WiFi plan. Then, pray for coverage!

Ok, I’m sitting in the train right now. Going from Chicago to Kansas City where I’m gonna meet Danny from the evoTeam. I’m actually writing this offline since there is no WiFi on the train. I’d almost say “of course”, but hey, this is the US! You would expect WiFi just about everywhere, wouldn’t you?

I’ve been disappointed by the internet connectivity last year in California. I am again this year in Chicago :P I mean, I stayed at the Sheraton twice, which was the official hotel for internet related conventions, and both times the connection was about the speed of ISDN. As if they had the whole hotel (‘bout 1600 rooms!!) hooked up on a single DSL connection. And you wanna know how much they charge for that? $11.95 per day!

Actually the best connection I got in Chicago was at the Red Roof Inn, which errs on the shady side of how Chicago hotels go, but it has just enough class to provide a T-Mobile hotspot. That costs $39.95 / mo and the catch is you have to call in when you want to cancel. Other than that, the speed was great and you can also use it at any other T-Mobile hotspot, including Starbucks.

Mind you, you can’t use it at Mc Donald’s which has AT&T hotspots and apparently AT&T and T-Mobile weren’t smart enough to come up with a roaming agreement. (Ok, let’s consider it to be just another good reason to stay away from Mc Donald’s :P)

Ironically, I am now a customer of AT&T too... for my mobile phone. I figured their pre-paid offer was a better deal for my 6 weeks in the US than T-Mobile’s... but wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if either of these companies offered a complete all-in-1 package to the international traveler? Pre-paid cell-phone + WiFi... how hard can that be?

Anyway, the cool thing about AT&T’s « Go Phone » offer is that if you recharge it with $100, you get to keep your number for 1 year even if you don’t use it. Very convenient when you come to the US once or twice a year and don’t want to get a new SIM card & number everytime you arrive.

Other than that, I pay $1 per day I use the phone and then 10 cents a minute. If I was roaming from my French provider I would be paying 2.50 € aminute... that’s... errr... at least 3.something dollars a minute.

Text messages (SMS) are 5 cents a piece. Even to international numbers.

The shady side of the story, of course, is coverage. I don’t know if any mobile phone carrier actually covers or roams all of the US, but I do know that this girl from Kansas, sitting next to me on the train, has had far less dropped calls than me since we left Chicago. She’s on Verizon.

The problem with Verizon though, is that it’s not GSM. So you don’t use SIM cards. You can’t use your European phone and worse... once you’re back home, you can’t check your voice mail anymore...

So there you have it: AT&T for cell, T-Mobile for Wi-Fi... Let’s see if they keep it happy all the way over to San Francisco.

Can I really end this post without a note on the iPhone? Yeah well... if I buy one here I have to sign a 24 month contract and won’t be able to use it back in France. Figured I’d just wait for the Euro version. But of course, I do hope that it will accept my AT&T SIM card when I come back! ;)

I want to recommend this post by Joel Spolski about differences in font rendering philosophy between Mac OS & Windows.

I never really understood why Apple failed to render sharp fonts on screen. Now I understand the purpose. I'm still not sure which is best though... ;)

Everybody's talking about Apple's release of their Safari web browser for Windows.

And everybody's speculating about how Apple needs to convince Windows developers to make their sites iPhone compatible (the iPhone includes Safari) or how Apple wants to extend towards the PC users...

Oh please!

Come on! There is one single reason above any other for Apple to release Safari on Windows: Google gives them a commission each time they send someone to Google through the embedded search box!

Firefox is making millions by sending eyeballs to Google (and their ads). Why wouldn't Apple? Especially since it can't hurt them...

Or... can it hurt them? Hackers suddenly finding vulnerabilities in Safari...