Monthly Archives: June 2010

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 … Continue reading

Posted in infrastructure, Places, problems | 24 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Travel | 2 Comments

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, … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

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. … Continue reading

Posted in Blogging, Business, Future | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Travel | 2 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Places, problems, Travel | 1 Comment

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Future, Gear, history, Ideas, infrastructure | 12 Comments

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).

Posted in food, Fun, Travel | 1 Comment

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Business | 18 Comments

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, … Continue reading

Posted in Travel | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments