Jan´s Blog Spot

Well – nothing big, but there are moments when knowing more than one language can come in handy and choosing a brand name would definitely one of them. Want proof?

Here ya go:

There is for example an internet startup that could actually become a search engine that means serious competition for google as the people behind it are former google brass. The knack: the name is “cuill” (they pronounce it ‘cool’), which is basically fine, but maybe not as cool in France where “les cuilles” means “balls” (yes, balls as in testicals and not just as in ’round things in general’). Anyway – I’ll be sure to check out their site as soon as they go live…

Another thing that is completely different, but in the same ranks is a new brand of deep frozen diet food here in France that I did of course also have to check out even though I usually try to avoid things that are dubbed ‘light’ or ‘diet’:

…and yes, they also do chocolate ice cream – at least that’s what I still hope it was (although judging from the taste there might be more truth to the name than I thought)

In case they plan to expand to the German market I’d strongly recommend a change in names.
[In case there's anyone reading this who doesn't speak German: 'Kot' is German for 'faeces' (or 'feces' for you Americans).]

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Hey! Only just over five months and already there’s movement in my blog again. I finally spent the time to update WordPress to version 2.5 and must say the admin interface has improved (What? You couldn’t care less? Well, thought so. Back to business then…).

So all that rests is to do as Christian asked and start writing again – for starters: the next thing that happened after the last entry was “30 puissance 4″, i.e. Antoine coming back from L.A. to celebrate his 30th bday. And as the evenings motto was “La vie en rose” (life in pink) it looked something like this:

Sten and Antoine en rose

And now, a few months later, it looks like Antoine’s trying a new look (rumor has it that the launch of tomshardware.com.mx is imminent…).

Other than that there’s plenty of things going on over the last few months, including concerts, more strikes (hey – this is France after all…), vacations and new toys – more on this right here, rsn…

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In case you’re based in Germany I guess you have had a lot of discussions about the train drivers’ strike over the last couple of weeks. While I see how that is really annoying and must have been quite unnerving for a lot of people, I must also say that strikes are actually a lot more common over here in France and just to prove my point, the RATP (which is Paris’ public transport authority) staff have also been on strike about 10 days ago.

Still there are a few differences – over here most people were kind of disgruntled by the unavailability of most public transport, but things like a strike day being canceled b/c the striking workers are afraid of the angry mob customers, is something that certainly wouldn’t happen over here.

The one nice thing for me in all this was that I’m lucky enough to use line 14 of the Metro to go from/to work. “Lucky” because there are two things special about that line, one: it is very fast and two: fully automatic, which means that during the RATP strike service was just the same as every other day.

And this would where the karma thing comes into play: maybe I shouldn’t have laughed as loud when my colleagues told me how difficult or plain impossible it was to get to work those days, since about one week later (i.e. last weekend) the PNC (cabin crews) of AirFrance were on strike. And that actually did affect me, as we (my friend Tina and I) were going to Berlin to see some old friends. In a nutshell: the flight to Berlin was three hours late that we spent waiting at the airport, so I had basically taken off half a day for *nothing*.

So far: already not cool. But then there also was the matter of getting back to Paris, and as we were informed just before taking off to Berlin, our return flight had been canceled, and that was why we found our tickets changed to the flight that left two hours earlier the same day. But as simply losing another two hours of an otherwise very fun weekend trip would have been way too easy, that flight also was canceled and we were informed by a very friendly AirFrance staff member that our options were to take a bus to the beautiful city of Leipzig (which is about two hours away) and take a flight from there or nothing really. To make the already long story a little shorter: to our surprise, the flight from Leipzig did not get canceled, but still was about one and a half hours late. I had almost forgotten just how much fun air travel can be…

At least there was some time left for sightseeing, in this case “Schloss Charlottenburg”:

Other things I learned that weekend (to name but a few): the iPod Touch is about as nice as it is expensive, Christian’s car really is fun to drive, if I were playing XBox360 games for a living I’d probably starve, if you would like to save the otters, you can do so by joining the “Otterzentrum” (which I didn’t – at least not yet…) and that the “Schwarzes Café” might be the place where “we were going 10 years ago”, but still is good for a beer (or two) after a late dinner…

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So I finally got around to deploying a complete WordPress installation and that means I could finally change the theme! While I think this is one is kind of nice I’m of course open for suggestions, in case you found *the* theme to have.

Other than that I’m back from a great weekend in Berlin visiting my old friend Christian Ebayhard – the going there and back home turned out to be a little more complicated than expected, but more on that in the next post, I’m off to bed now…

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