If you belong to the great Facebook family and don’t know what to do with your weekend, why don’t you go spend it playing with my latest production: a kickass personalized trip-recommendation application.
San Francisco
My home for the month to come…
Want a French train schedule? Ask the Germans.
So this morning, I am sitting in Parc Monceau, perusing Paris’ public-park-wide open wifi, trying to pull the schedule for my afternoon train.
Trying, because despite being on my twentieth online ticket booking for the month, trying to get anything out of French National Railway’s website feels like trying to get freshly squeezed OJ from a stone. I am not sure how exactly the whole “prevent users from getting a ticket online at all cost” fits into their business plan, but I guess if you take in account their laughably bad track record in all areas of service, it is merely brand identity on their part.
Twenty minutes and still no luck trying to get a single schedule for a local train departing 10 times a day from Paris (website timing out or randomly crashing at varying levels of the 50-step process), I had an epiphany and remembered a friend telling me about how it was probably easier booking a French train through Deutsche Bahn, German’s national railway company. At the time, I thought it was a joke.
Well, it’s not.
In approximately 1/100th of the time I spent attempting unsuccessfully to get a schedule for a French local train (from a French city, to a French city) on the official French website, I got the exact same info (available in 4 languages) on a German website.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so lame.
Saw that one in Spain and had to buy it…
Like the other Lehman, this one can also make you go blind and ruin
your life.
Daily Velib’ing
Making up for last month’s rather poor health regimen by going all-bike this month.
According to Velib’s website, I currently got a 17.4km daily average going on.
Costa Brava in October
Windy but still nice…
Exponential Growth of Plot Contrivance
At its current rate of lazy, never-ending cheap self-one-upmanship it calls a plot, Heroes probably won’t make it past mid-season before its characters have all been made into equally indestructible super-human beings with god-like abilities. What then? Do they settle it with a tickle fight.
Is this show written by teenage nerds on ritalin, or did they just post a poll on the back covers of sci-fi mags?
My fun-filled weekend
It’s 4am, do you know where your children are?
It’s Saturday night, just past 4am.
Right now, I could be:
- In my bed, sleeping.
- In my bed, not sleeping.
- Somewhere in the world’s largest city, getting drunk, dancing to loud music, watching girls in Japanese schoolgirl outfits wrestle in jell-o. Possibly all of the above.
- In the middle of the desert, doing drugs and discovering my inner totem animal.
Instead: I am in the middle of an empty office lab overlooking deserted downtown-Tokyo, staring at a monitor, running Support Vector Machine simulations.
Something, somewhere, went very, very, horribly wrong with my life.
Happy Garden
… at the top of Kyoto station…
The japanese version is a [rather weak] pun on the kanji for grass (葉 = Ha = grass).