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20020831 ‹#›

2359

Crêpes A Gogo and iced mochas shaken, not stirred. ‹#›

travel

Walked around the Latin Quarter a bit today. Specifically, I set out to find Columbus Café which I read about in the Wall Street Journal this past June 20th on page B1. But I decided dinner beforehand would be a good thing. I found a place nearby in Great Eats Paris - a wonderful restaurant specific travel guide that I highly recommend. However, while skating to said location I happened to pass by a beautiful crêperie which had outdoor sidewalk café style seating with a view of the Pantheon.Photo of the Pantheon at sunset Name of the place is "Crêpes A Gogo" and it's at the corner of Rue Soufflot and Rue Saint Jacques in the 5th Arrondisement. I had a Galette Nordique Epinards (smoked salmon, creme fraische, spinach), a chocolate crepe with a scoop of vanilla ice cream for dessert and a pamplemousse presse to drink. Very tasty.

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coffee

Back to the Columbus Café. Photo of the Columbus Cafe with the Pantheon in the background What's the big deal about another café in Paris you may ask? Well, for one thing they offer an amazing variety (for Paris) of mixed espresso drinks. Any Starbucks regular knows what I'm talking about. We Americans take our freedom of espresso drink choices for granted, but such choice has been all but nonexistent on the Continent. Your choices have essentially been limited to take the espresso black (un café) or with milk (un café au lait).

Another Columbus Café offering is iced espresso drinks, except they have significantly improved upon the American technique. Rather than serve the drink in a cup full of ice, they prepare it "martini" style, where they make the drink without the ice (using cold milk instead of steamed milk), and then pour it into a metal mixing tumbler with ice, shake it vigorously a few times, and finally pour the mixture through a strainer into a serving glass. Yes, you can now order your iced mocha shaken not stirred. Now if the Americans would only use espresso ice cubes in their iced coffee drinks...

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music

While watching MTV Europe in France the following techno related music sites were advertized: Magic Garden , MCM , VGAS and Pure . Warning, most content in French. I must say though, the selection of music and videos on MTV Europe is far superior to that of MTV US.

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20020830 ‹#›

2359

DVD Region codes isolate North American consumers? ‹#›

travel

Visited the Champs Elysees today. Every time I'm in Paris I like to visit the Virgin Megastore (just a short walk from the Arc d' Triomphe)Photo of the Arc d'Triomphe at sunset which, despite seeming to be part of just another MNC, has quite a different set of content for sale than it does in the U.S.

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tech

A very interesting/telling difference - the DVD section contained almost as many Region 1 discs (North America) as it did Region 2 discs (Europe). This can only mean one thing, that Europeans are buying Region 1 discs, which implies that they have multi-region DVD players (most of which do seemless conversion between PAL/NTSC formats as well). I have a feeling that this is the case in every DVD Region other than Region 1, which means that the only thing that the Region code nonsense in the DVD format has effectively done is to isolate North American consumers from the content produced specifically for consumption outside of North America. Was this the intent of domestic "Big Content" firms? I'll let the conspiracy theorists explore this one further. At least content houses that choose to can produce Region 0 discs which will play in all region specific players. The one DVD I bought at the Paris Virgin Megastore was labeled as such, and despite being in PAL format, worked fine on my Region 1 specific DVD player in my PowerBook. Another example of a great Region 0 DVD (set) is Cosmos, which I highly recommend for any DVD library.

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20020829 ‹#›

2359

Overload respite ‹#›

web

CSS working group face to face meeting concluded today. We covered a lot of topics, more than I actually expected to get through - our group chair is doing a better and better job at keeping the meetings moving forward and moving through the agenda. I would have preferred to spend more time discussing things to fix in CSS 2.1, but that's ok, we can probably do a lot of that by email.

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info

I don't have a good reference offhand, but I know I have heard that people can suffer from a news overload if they watch too many television news shows, or spend too much time reading global coverage newspapers which tend to focus on all the imminent crises occuring all over the world. Though "thinking globally" is a good thing, overwhelming oneself with descriptions of emotionally draining events over which one has no personal control over is distracting, and worse could be very stressful without any positive effects. Even though there is a television in my hotel room, I'm not watching the news channels, so I'm not getting exposed to the constant stream of breaking news. It feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

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20020828 ‹#›

2359

26 hour waking day ‹#›

travel

I arrived in Paris CDG airport at 7:30am, and after taking the RER B line and Metro line 1 Photo inside a new Paris Metro car made it to the CSS working group meeting not long after 9am. Having been up since about 6am PDT the day before and staying up until 11pm Paris time today meant that I spent 26 hours effectively from getting up from bed to getting back into bed. No net access while I'm here, so this is blogged offline, to be posted upon my return.

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20020826 ‹#›

2359

Recovery ‹#›

personal

I got just well enough to enjoy and perform at the wedding festivities, but then relapsed just afterwards. Taking a day off today to prepare for my trip to Paris, and just hangout and chll with Heather and Aysan. We had soup and sandwiches at Einstein's Cafe which had a tremendous healing effect. Spent the rest of the day getting my short term affairs in order and packing.

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20020825 ‹#›

2359

Ceremony ‹#›

family

Aytek & Steve were married today! I had the honor of participating in the ceremony which was a lot of fun. My part was to read a poem by James Joyce (James Joyce poetry is a strange concept since he didn't like to stick to anything orderly or rhythmic - reading it and injecting some amount of a pace or rhythm was certainly a challenge) and a brief description of love by Sophocles. I was relieved that Aysan went after me - there is no way I could have followed her excellent reading of Shakespeare. I haven't posted my pictures yet, but Steve posted his pictures .

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20020824 ‹#›

2359

Practice and Picnic ‹#›

astro

Huge asteroid impacted the Earth 3.47 billion years ago. Not quite "billions and billions" of years ago (that would be a minimum of 2 + 2 = 4), but nonetheless, the oldest evidence found on Earth yet of an asteroid impact.

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family

Aytek & Steve's wedding rehearsal, and pre-wedding picnic was today. Pictures posted.

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20020823 ‹#›

2359

MSN/Mac teaser, A.G. Ferrari Foods ‹#›

web

MSN for Mac to be released early next year.

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family

My folks and youngest sister are in town for Aytek's wedding and festivities this weekend. They turned out to be free for lunch today, so I had the opportunity to take them to A.G. Ferrari Foods - my favorite deli in Los Altos.

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20020822 ‹#›

2359

Blueberries and a new digital camera ‹#›

mind

Blueberries good for the brain. Stimulating environments appear to strengthen memory and learning. What implications does this have for growing up in urban vs. suburban vs. rural environments (assuming a respective progression of complex/stimulating environment to simple/dull)?

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tech

Picked up a Minolta DiMAGE X digital camera yesterday. So far so good - it satisfied my top two criteria - very small / portable, and reasonably quick to turn on and take a picture - something which digital cameras have traditionally failed miserably at.

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blog

Note: the 23:59 time stamp just indicates that the time stamps were just not captured for this entry. Second note: the heading "blog" denotes discussion specifically about my blog and blogging in general (like markup and presentation of blogs, blog software etc.)

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20020821 ‹#›

2114

cafe-www, area2 aftermath, Paris ‹#›

valley

Only in Silicon Valley. So I'm having dinner at Cafe Borrone (Cream of Brocolli soup tonight), and my buzzword filter picks up the conversation at the next table. "That guy actually said that XML was not meant to be human readable!" I know, so what, somebody said something about XML in a Silicon Valley Cafe - big surprise. But then the person he is talking with goes on to say: "I can't believe the guy who was saying that a computer should be able to infer sufficient meaning from visual rendering to determine semantics and present them." This was almost a direct quote from a recent www-tag / www-style cross-thread that I participated in. My curiousity got the best of me and I apologized for overhearing and asked them if they were talking about a a recent www-tag thread. They looked almost as surprised as I did when I heard their discussion. "Yes", one of the said. "I was talking about a recent www-tag thread." Turns out one of the guys also sits on several W3C working groups. Only in Silicon Valley cafe can you randomly overhear folks quoting from a W3C mailing list that you also happen to read.

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Comments:

  1. Murphy Horner

personal

Ugh, I'm still recovering from what appears to be a super-nasty flu that I caught at Area 2. Sore throat for several days, with the usual stuffy, woozy head syndrome. Energy levels finally back up a bit, but I still don't quite feel rid of it. I've been trying to get a lot of rest because I have to get better since

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family

Aytek's wedding is this weekend. My activities start Thursday night, and continue through Sunday afternoon. The very next morning

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web

I fly out to Paris for a W3C CSS working group face-to-face meeting. The meeting starts Tuesday morning (an hour and a half after I arrive at CDG airport), and continues through Thursday, August 29th - the date that changed Amelie's life.

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20020815 ‹#›

1446

area2 ‹#›

music

Went to Area 2 yesterday. Too busy to plan ahead and turned off by the high ticket prices ($40 for lawn?), I simply decided to walk over after the show had started with some friends who already had tickets. More than a few scalpers were somewhat desparate to unload their rapidly decreasing in value holdings - I picked up a reserve seat for $30. The two arena format (stage and tent) worked well - running back and forth whenever artists were changing over or attention spans lapsed. Moby is a riot - perhaps the most intelligent musician I've seen on stage. Finally got to see Digweed spin. Yes, he is that good. And David Bowie - he's still got it.

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20020814 ‹#›

1534

HyperCard‹#›

tech

I am not the only one still using HyperCard, including the creator who describes how HyperCard could have been the first Internet browser.

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anthro

Protoborg microcollectives are beginning to emerge. Note the conspicuous lack of use of any personal pronoun.

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20020813 ‹#›

1718

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mind

Mental Aerobics keep your mind sharp. Whose up for another strategy game day? Learn something today? Sleep well tonight to make sure you remember tomorrow.

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psych

Pessimism not only shortens life span, but also worsens health.

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health

Eat your carbs. Low carbs may cause health problems. Do you cook? Keep fingernails short. Bacteria love long fingernails.

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20020812 ‹#›

0845

Posted ‹#›

personal

Welcome to my personal log. Thanks to Jeffrey's encouragement (and some of his "Daily Report" styling), and to the inspirational examples provided by him and Rogue Librarian, Daley Weather, poprocks, powazek productions, harrumph!, boingboing, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Entries expected somewhere between daily and weekly.

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20020811 ‹#›

1658

Flood vanquished‹#›

game

Completed "Heroic" 1-player Halo.

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20020810 ‹#›

2200

The weekend starts here‹#›

art

Went to the American Craft Council 2002 ACC Craft Show San Francisco, held at the Fort Mason Center. Not a regular occurance, but...

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family

Mom was in town. She's here to help with my sister Aytek's upcoming wedding. But there was just enough time for a quick lunch today at Crepes on Cole, chased with iced mochas at Coffee, Tea and Spice. Before hitting the craft show, I had to introduce my mom to Mendels art supplies. That left only a couple of hours for the craft show which was just enough to walk through all the booths.

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20020808 ‹#›

2345

Web standards and bird brains ‹#›

web

During the past two weeks, W3C published many documents, e.g. CSS TV Profile 1.0 CR, CSS2.1 LCWD (now with orange!), CSS3 Basic User Interface, CSS3 Fonts LCWD, CSS3 Backgrounds LCWD, and XHTML 1.0 SE REC. Shipping a new web specification is not the same as shipping a new web browser, but if done properly, both can advance the state of the web. Judge for yourself.

And before the flurry of specs - a joint contribution by several browser vendors to help the formation/publication of an official W3C HTML 4.01 Test Suite.

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bio

Perhaps "bird brained" should be a compliment. Smart crow makes a tool to help retrieve her food. Lost parrot squawks his name, helps those who found him return him to his owner.

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astro

Venus gets with the Moon - Perseids follow.

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