June 2010
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Orange crush
I have an Android phone: a Nexus One, straight from Google. It arrived independent of any phone company deals, which I thought would make it easy to use with whatever carrier I engaged when I got to France, where I would be spending the next five weeks. We arrived in Paris on Sunday the 13th… Continue reading
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Flying wide
I’m at CDG in Paris, about to depart for LHR in London, and the AirFrance plane I’ll be flying in is one of the new Airbus A380s. The plane was over-sold, so there are no windows — a low-percentage shot anyway with a plane that flies 550 or so people at a time. Got a… Continue reading
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Reliable old blogging
So here I am on a street in Saverne, France, getting on the Net over a rare open wi-fi hot spot. I was going to tweet something about it, but Twitter is down. So here we are. There’s one Net, one Web and one Twitter. Many paths through the formers and but one through the… Continue reading
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Enough with the branding BS
The backlash against “personal branding” has begun. I saw it first in this post by Yvonne in BlogHer. Now you can feel the line begin to whip with Manifesto: I am Not a Brand, by Maureen Johnson, also in BlogHer. Bravo. The pull quote: “We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags… Continue reading
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Top speed, 3km/h
That headline is the posted speed limit where we are at the moment: relaxing on a canal in rural France. I bought two hours of slow Internet over wi-fi at a marina, and that will be about it for connectivity until next time, if there is one, on this trip, which we are enjoying totally. Continue reading
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Out and Over
Hitting the road, or actually the canal. Or a canal, somewhere east of Paris, in France. For a week. The plan was to have some kind of data connectivity either through our new Android Nexus One or our new iPad 3G. Alas, five days of trying have failed to get the Android to work as… Continue reading
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The TV in the Snake of Time
There’s only one way to justify Internet data speeds as lopsided as the one to the left. Television. It’s an easy conclusion to draw here at our borrowed Parisian apartment, where the Ethernet cable serving the laptop comes from a TV set top box. As you see, the supplier is FreeSAS, or just http://free.fr. I… Continue reading
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Love the knuckles but hold the bear
Typo du jour: I think what I ordered was the souris d’agneau à l’estragon (lamb testicles with estrogen). Continue reading
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How about making better coffee?
Starbucks Announces Free Wi-Fi, Proprietary Content Network, the headline says, in a story by Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired. Some quotage: “Free Wi-Fi is in my mind just the price of admission — we want to create … new sources of content that you can only get at Starbucks,” chairman and president and CEO Howard… Continue reading
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Missing Polly Platt
When I got my first French consulting client in 1994, I found an indispensable guide in the book French or Foe, by Polly Platt. So I made sure we had hauled it east from my office bookshelf in Santa Barbara, and took it with us to Paris, where I began reading it again today, the… Continue reading
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Prepping for Paris
Tomorrow we fly to Paris, where I’ll be based for the next five weeks. To help myself prep, here are a few of my notes from conversations with friends and my own inadequate research… Offbeat Guildes. Already have ours. We can update it during the trip too. La Cantine. Co-working Via @slatteryz Paris – interactive… Continue reading
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A newspaper progress report, sort of
Back in October 2006, I posted Newspapers 2.o, listing ten “hopefully helpful clues” for papers needing to adapt to a world that would only get more and more of its news online. I ran the same list in August 2007, adding an eleventh suggestion. So here I’m visiting the original ten, with my own brief… Continue reading
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Mass Inconvenience
So this is what it takes to shake me out of my blogging torpor: a message on my phone with the short form of what the National Weather Service says here: Tornado Watch Central Middlesex County, Southeast Middlesex, Northwest Middlesex County (Massachusetts) TORNADO WATCH OUTLINE UPDATE FOR WT 263 NWS STORM PREDICTION CENTER NORMAN OK… Continue reading