050424_1522~01.JPG
050424_1453~02.JPG
050424_1435~02.JPG

– Got up at 9
– Ran half-an-hour
– Drank a pint-sized homemade smoothie
– Sitting on the grass in Yoyogi park with Rie
– Doing equations and writing my thoughts on superfluid quantum vortices, like a good little boy that I am…

If serious drama doesn’t happen soon, this damn thing is gonna turn into a LiveJournal with pretty pictures of sakuras…

[and those shitty overexposed pics are what you get when you rely on a cellphone screen for luminosity feedback]

When I grow up, I want to become a snarky jaded bitter old man, just like him. Complete with asshole-tearing writing skills and all.

Ah, I wish…

No, please, don’t object: try as I might, I know I’m nowhere near that level of bitter, yet… I can’t keep up.

Plus, it just might be that I don’t care enough (I’m told caring only comes with age or when you go off your meds).

But I’m sure glad somebody does.

When doing any academic work requiring a bit more than casual concentration, my choice for musical background invariably veers toward jazz.

House or techno is great coding music, but just takes too much of my attention off; and the kind of classical I can study to, also tends to get on my nerves quickly whenever the studying doesn’t go as smoothly as it should…

On the other hand, old jazz tracks, first half of the century, New-Orleans, Dixie, later French stuff… they just got the perfect mix of bouncy instrumental and subdued beat that helps keeping you in a working groove without turning your nerves into a knot. My playlist currently rotates lots of old no-names Charleston big-bands and swing tracks, along with everything I got by Stephan Grappelli, Django Reinhardt or Sidney Bechet…


As a high-school student in Paris, my buddy Pierre and I used to hang out quite often with local jazz musicians. Pierre’s younger cousin, despite being barely pubescent, was an incredible jazz piano player. Last in a lineage of music nuts, he had been enrolled very early on in the family affair, a band that had once, in typical jazz fashion, spanned over three generations and was now composed of the son-father duo completed by a couple other professional players. Among them was Daniel Bechet, son of Sidney and all around talented drummer.

Of the numerous episodes of strangely anachronistic fun I remember from these days, one particularly stands out:

Continue reading

This is quite possibly the most pointless item posted to this blog to date (all right, competition is tough there), but I’m so ecstatic I can’t contain it (yea, I have no life):

Safari apparently received a minor update in the last OS X package (the ones that gets downloaded and installed quasi-silently through the Update manager), and they have finally fixed the “Undo bug”!

Continue reading

Here is a geeky post that, for once, might be pertinent to more than two or three readers. Read on if:

  1. You have a website.
  2. This website uses a database (most blog platforms, for example, do).
  3. You would really hate to lose all your data in an accident.

It think there is no need to be an übergeek to satisfy all three points above.

So the problem is about backups. Backups are a beautiful and easy thing, in theory. In practice, nobody, but the more anal retentive among us and those paid to do it, will ever go through the pain of manually backing up their data on more than episodic occasions. And since Murphy’s Law applies more than ever here, you can be sure your next server failure will happen the day before your next backup.

Continue reading

You know, for all my left-wing political hysteria and the incredible amount of time I spend complaining about the state of democracy in the world, I am not much of a conspiracy theorist. I do not believe in that big evil masterplan to keep us all under control.

If anything, I am a strong proponent of the old “Never attribute to malice, what can easily be explained by stupidity” adage… Greed and stupidity, to be exact. And certainly many overt collusions between groups of scary individuals with similar interests. But no international cabal to hide the truth about alien abductions and the enslavement of poorer nations.

Just. plain. stupidity.

Yet, some times I can’t help but wonder. Especially when I wake up, have a look at the triumvirat that now presides over the United States of Earth, and realize they all play for the same team…

See, it all started with our beloved Consul, Supreme Commander of the Armies, followed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to be finally joined in their fight for the Greater Good by none other than the Grand Inquisitor of Our Holy Mother Church himself. That sure is quite a powerful trio we got here…

Continue reading