Month: May 2010

I can’t believe how much it makes me feel sad that Gary Coleman passed away. It’s obviously weird because of the outstanding cheering I receive about the news, being emotional and stuff. But,

If I exclude myself, he was the first black person I saw in my life, before Sidney and during Michael Jackson going full white. And this little dude was having the same story as mine! Adopted by a white family and having no one like him around. Well he had Willie and I didn’t. Which was making me jealous. They seemed to have fun, man.

I was in my foster family and it was broadcast on Sunday afternoon on the French TV. I was captivated, not too much about humor and situations on screen but more about what would it be to be in a wealthy white family like I was supposed to go as it was told to me at this very young age (around 5).

So yeah, it’s just memories coming up in my mind. I can see myself sitting on the couch, not touching the ground, eyes wide opened, ready to catch this little man who looked just like me. And had almost the same name too! (everybody for years would say “Ah, like Arnold and Willie!” It’s Harold you deaf ass).

Maybe it was already making me want to be in the US. Daydreaming about these skyscrapers from the sweet French countryside.

RIP Gary Coleman.

Remember those times when we didn’t have the Universal Serial Bus? Maybe not. It was awful. We had weird connectors only used by specific stuff like the parallel port, the serial port. We had to be careful about these fucking IRQ conflicts with for example, sound cards. A la mano, with jumpers on the motherboard. Ugh.

At these times, nobody –at least in Europe- was using Personal Computers. Later came the USB port, and then the USB 2 port. These made computers so much more easier to plug devices in, making them more accessible to people, who would use more and more computers and a little by a little –with the help of others widespread technologies like TCP/IP, APIC– it would change the world and make computers easier and easier to use to the point where they are everywhere.

What I want to say is this: innovation is not innovation unless it changes the life of a large number of people. Innovation is innovation when it’s cheap and makes it through the life of everyone without them even noticing it that much.

*idea*

I know, it’s playing on words but what we call innovation is useless if it needs 20 years to make it to the market or when it’s just in the hands of a few lucky –dare I say wealthy?- nerds. It’s not innovation, it’s research.

Innovation needs to spread out and find as much people possible. You might say that I’m wrong and that Apple is a walled garden and that it works for them. But it’s not really true:

They got back in the game by switching from ppc to x86 architecture, more generic and widespread. And cheaper.

They made the iPod and iTunes available on the OS touching hundreds of millions of people, Windows (I remember being shocked about it, so not Apple). They aggressively market the mp3 player with the cheap Shuffle/Nano version.

By switching to a standard PC architecture they made their machine totally compatible, like 100% compatible to almost anything, from windows software (Bootcamp) to memory sticks and stuff. Cheaper for users. Cheaper for them.

But they totally made their mobile platform closed as hell, as they did with the Mac in the 90s. And fucking expensive. Are you surprised that Google Android, with its openness and constant improvements through cheaper phones is totally hot right now or that these cheap, opened netbooks sales went from 0 to 18% of the entire computer market share in only three years?

I am not. Microsoft did the same in the 90s with the openness of the beige PC. Bye Commodore, Atari and all. MS had the same aura that Google has now, if you remember. Oh, sure it seems less slick when MS/Google are updating stuff because they fail all the time. But they increment all the time too, with hundreds of partners while with Apple it’s either perfect (iPhone) or a massive fail (AppleTV).

A closed platform is not an innovation. It’s research with users paying a lot to beta test it.

Trying to bring that research to the masses, being agnostic and just trying to make it better to the most people possible, is IMO innovation. It took MS and his partners 25 years from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 to have an OS working on millions of different configuration and giving people almost anything they want in 2010 with an OS. It took a year and half for Google to make their Android system as widespread and functional as possible. It’s not over but they already are going so fast that it’s hard to be sure that they’re going to fail. This little droid is everywhere like the butterfly was, once.

Business wise the Big Three are doing fine, with different approach from selling hardware (Apple) to selling services and data (Google). But one thing is sure:

“Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries — but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.”

Billou, aka Bill Gates.

ps: Enough with your Android tablet prototypes. I want them, under 300 thanks. And please hurry the fuck up.

In a nutshell, because it’s going to totally change and modify our relationship with half the planet who already has a birth control pill. It means chaos at first, but it means balance at the end.

For now, contraception either equals a big responsibility and physiological issues for women or a big hassle and weak sex for men. A birth control pill for us would be great for a couple of reasons:

• Real control over fertility. For the first fucking time ever guys!

I mean, I don’t even understand how we are not a lot to demand that. Fuck condoms when you are with a partner for a pretty long time and that everything is ok STD wise. FUCK them.

Seriously, it’s the equivalent of putting a plastic bag on your head to prevent getting the flu while kissing. It’s goddamn 2010 and we as men, deserve better technology than just that only one option (vasectomy is no option as tubal ligation is not for women; they’re for special cases).

Also, as much as you should trust your partner, the reality is that it’s better to manage your fertility by yourself instead of harassing your girlfriend to not forget to take the pill or worse, having doubts about what she’s doing while relying on a piece of plastic wrapped up on your stuff. You don’t want to have children at all? With the men pill you have the entire power to do so. I want it. Millions of men want it for sure. Now that comes with two downsides that would be welcome by millions of women, smiling.

• Sharing the pain of responsibility about taking a pill each day.

With great power comes great… You get it. As a man you will have the responsibility to manage your fertility. No “oops, I forgot” is allowed guys. As for women we will have to have some sort of reminder (phone app!), we will have to count the number of pills left next day after a party wondering if we took it, etc. Women deal with that all the time since fifty years. I think we can do that too. Is it boring? Yes. But less than to open up a condom package each time you want to dip your genitals in.

Almost every woman I talked to about this situation would not trust their companion on something that important. I’m not really surprised but I’m surprised that they mostly don’t want to change that. Probably a Power issue, like traditional women who can’t have a man in the kitchen and prefer to have them doing nothing. But anyway ladies, you are free to take your pill too.

And maybe it’s going to kill this situation where nobody trusts nobody. At some point, it will be natural for generations to have a control over fertility across gender. That will create a more balanced world when one of the fundamental function of our body will be controlled independently by both sex. I think it will raise a new level of trust amongst human History. I want to see that.

• Sharing the pain of receiving a hormonal treatment.

When they talk about the men birth control pill they always emphasize the fact that it has side effects. NO SHIT. No hormonal treatment, almost no serious medication doesn’t have side effects and in this case like mood swing or lowered sex drive. It’s the same for women but they might not be pussies after all. Come on pharmaceutical companies, don’t say that it’s the main issue. That’s BS.

It’s crazy how these massive companies who own billions would rather suffocate on a market than activate one. How they can’t possibly move around men, except for the Viagra thing, first acceptation of a sexual man weakness, but seen as a sexual booster (it’s not). It seems that for them women are the constant problem. It seems like men only have “positive issues”.

So now they’re working hard on a pill that boost women libido, even though a placebo is doing almost as good in studies. Also, just get some pot cookies and you’ll be set to get busy a few hours later.

Anyway, that would be great that we reach a balance in the fertility control before the moment –if human beings make it- where we will be hermaphrodite and will not discuss that shit anymore.

Well I hope we’ll not end up looking that funny though.

note: Last research on male contraception talks about ultrasound stopping sperm production for six months. Seems nice now, make it happen. Yesterday.

Last year on this week-end I was flying to the USA for the first time ever. Didn’t plan anything but maybe show the games I was working on to as much people possible. And perfect my english.

Fast forward 12 months of living in suitcases back and forth with Paris and I’m still in LA at the end.

Yesterday.

It’s always a mix of happiness and despair to think about being here. Like it’s awesome, but it’s sort of a reset and scary start over feeling too which is… Well, I just need to breath better!

Living with someone else is a big step too but I was not that much living like a Chocolate Bear so it’s going well. I always planned the future, sort of. Possibilities.

Last year.

But the biggest thing, the overwhelming feeling is that I received so much more support, interest, love from here than from France, with people I mostly didn’t know. Bitter sweetness.

But happy. Fuck Yeah Happy actually.

Also I did these:

Make Love by Harold Bouncy Rabbeat by Harold

Enjoy yourself.

That’s funny when I think about it.

There is not a lot of products we use that are changing us as much as alcohol does. We forgot about it because beer and wine are all over the culture of hundreds of millions of people but seriously:

Weed makes you sleepy and horny and laugh. Coffee is almost the perfect opposite. Cocaine makes you chatty and friendly and brings you restlessness. But none of them are making you miserable and pathetic as alcohol can or does. When I went back to France in November I was struck by how much there is drunk people around, from 8am to 8am. All the time, hanging out. On Sunday mornings, the RER station would host vomit here and there, in the corners. During the last World Cup I saw so many people drunk as fuck, going for a ride in Paris when France was defeating Spain or Portugal that even used to it I was shocked. Like it’s 7:30pm and they can’t already walk by themselves, peeing anywhere. Creepy and gross. Being in California is such a change for that. And no, it’s not because the wine is bad.

I think you’ll have to click it.

I’ve been drunk quite a lot since I’m 15. France, cheap and widely available alcohol. I know the feeling. I know how you don’t give a shit about anything but because I’m not a big mouth character, even deadly drunk I would not do stupid things or embarrass myself too much: I would gently lay down and sleep, while feeling I’m at Six Flags for a long time. But I’ve seen so many alcohol poisoning with people passing out stuck in some extreme drunkenness that I guess it always made me aware that as casual alcohol is, it’s deadly strong if you don’t manage it. One time I woke up with a full hangover and all I wanted was some Pastis, badly. I knew I had to stop immediately. 

It strikes me that you can be so out of yourself while being drunk, like saying things you totally don’t think at all and will not remember, not being able to control your body, feeling the need of violence. How you turn aggressive, how you switch from being happy to feeling like shit in 5 seconds. 

Almost as annoying and helpless as a crack addict except that you don’t have to suck dirty cocks to get some more. You just have to go to the liquor store. Which is a good thing I guess: prohibition doesn’t solve anything.

Anyway alcohol is quite a hard drug but because it’s so widespread in our societies since 10,000 years, there’s no question about it. It’s interesting how Western Culture is blind to something that causes a lot of problems (how many early dead, how many families destroyed, how many women beaten on pure alcoholic rage; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands if not more). It’s crazy that you can be drunk in Japan and lay down on a sidewalk like a piece of shit while you can’t smoke weed without big trouble, like 5 years of jail just for marijuana possession.

Old internet picture never gets old. 

In France these days, young people are using Facebook to RSVP massive boozefests. It started in November with 3 000 people and 50 acute alcohol intoxication. A few days ago a new record fell with 10 000 people and one dead. 

Seriously having alcohol as the only legal and Occident-White-approved drug is a total disaster and a fucking joke toward drug policy and health. When I’m stoned I can write/read a complex article or just enjoy to take the sun quite surely even more then. When I’m drunk, I can’t do either of them. I just want to drink more and talk louder.

Google Android.

I have owned an HTC Hero for four months now. I’m looking around it as a user/customer but also as a developer/creator.

OHAI

The Good

As a phone experience, well it’s the best I’ve ever had with everything you like on smart phones these days: seeming less interaction with social media, useful apps and games. I’m kidding for the last, I don’t play on my phone. And I’ll talk about Android games in the bad I guess ^^ But the awesome good is: you are free. No motherfucking iTunes sync my ass ever. Never.

For the developer side, setting up the environment is easy and the SDK is well done in terms of readability. I for now didn’t see anything obscure or weird. I had never worked with Eclipse and Java before and well it’s not making me crazy yet, as I was expecting. Nice.

The Bad

Games usually suck on Android. Like really, thanks to Java The Big Butt. It might change though, with a JIT Compiler coming up. But more important is the fact that major apps like the Gmail one sucks hard. On a Google OS powered phone!  They really want us to launch a browser and go online where Gmail UI –on mobile web- is much better. Ha! Thanks but I’d rather have an app. Facebook does the same. Sorry but my browser on my phone is just to quickly check a link. On a 4” screen I don’t want 10 tabs.

Or the camera app, trackball to take a picture? Stupidest idea in the world (shaky pictures guaranteed). Also, there are some mysteries sometimes: I can’t find the Amazon app and install it on my phone, no matter where I go. Can’t find it on the Market on my phone, can’t have it with QR Code (no matches), tried in Paris, same here in LA, like this app doesn’t exist for my device. Frustrating even if hey, I was living without it last year just fine.

Also, but it applies to any app market, there’s some pretty bad written apps, would it be in terms of stability or UI. Hell, the Digg application is such a piece of shit. The Evernote one is weird and not intuitive at all etc

For the dev, I didn’t go deeply enough to say, except that I’m surprised how there’s not as much resource as I would think. Besides the traditional “Hello World” and a bunch of useful examples, well it seems like you have to try to do your stuff then. So it’s not really bad, just a little bit dry.

The Ugly

The Awful Market Fragmentation. This week an article went out about this subject.

The phone business is complicated: you have manufacturers, carriers and on top of that the Operating System, Android provided by Google. The OS is now reaching the 2.2 version next month. My phone is stuck at the 1.5 version because HTC the manufacturer, is too busy selling brand new phones updated with the 2.1 version. They said they would upgrade old phones –not phone carrier or Google job!- and they lie (update postponed two times) because they’ve never done/see that before: people were buying new phones. Now? With these little pocket computer sold at 300$ at least, people don’t want to change all the time anymore, not just for the price: we’re all setting stuff and don’t want to throw everything away and start over. But the hardware race is on, my phone is only available since 10 months and there are already some Android twice as fast with 4 times the memory embedded. They really want users to go crazy and buy the last “now seriously, it does everything super fast” device.

It’s getting worse in America Fuck Yeah, where there’s GSM and CDMA. GSM is the thing we all know with the SIM card and all, used by 3 billion people around the world. CDMA is mainly available in the US and they are of course totally incompatible (no sim card in it).

It is really annoying because it feels like a trap everywhere: even with an open source OS on a phone I bought without any contract from any carrier (which are giving full data access only on year contracts and not on prepaid cards), I am not free. Depressing.

[Dev side] The thing is my phone can totally run the last Android version as I tried with a custom ROM. There’s a parallel market where people would “cook” your phone OS bringing the last updates from Google (that’s why the Nexus One is nice: the only phone where you don’t have to wait for any manufacturers or phone carrier updates; direct from Google) and making people donate/pay for premium access and custom options. The 2.1 update brings a lot of little improvements for the user but a lot more for the dev. Therefore what version to target if you want to build an app?

For example my phone does multitouch. On Android 1.5 it’s not allowed to use it apparently, though some apps use it (Dolphin browser). On 1.5 I can’t pinch zoom Google Maps and on 2.1 I can. And it’s working perfectly.

Also, two app store? Why Google? Couldn’t it be easier if you had updated all phones to Android 1.6 and the new market for everybody? It’s not helping selling apps for sure and developers can’t live on free software all the time.

It was supposed to be simple guys, WTF? Contracts, patents and agreements between network and communication giants must be ridiculously insane behind the curtains. Add the never finished software development process on top of it, and you get a real mess.

It’s going to be very interesting with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 at the end of the year. The thing is Android has a really positive reputation amongst people, getting sick of Apple’s behavior. But the problem with open source always has been to support both users and developers (something MS is really good at; WordPress is a good example of a big scale successful open source business) and if Android’s support is basically “buy a new phone”, people will switch, even to walled garden. Remember the Vista mess when MS thought that every Windows user would upgrade their machines and vendors their drivers? Didn’t work out well. Windows 7 works from 2003 machines to now. More than 100 million licenses (which means at least 150 million computers running with it) sold in six months.

So dear Android Ecosystem, just a few words for you:

Don’t. Screw. The. Users. You. Already. Have. If you do, the’y’ll bury you into oblivion.

 
Yeah yeah yeah. Be my friend but don’t fuck with me buddy.

Food.

It seems to be in the top 3 discussion here in LA or maybe the entire US. Maybe top 2 actually.

Food is everywhere. On TV it’s purely insane, it’s a joke with my girlfriend: “get our Supreme Dunkin Deep Fried Chicken Burger PLUS two Beef Tacos and French Fries with unlimited dipping sauce only for nine ninety-nine!”. Sometimes it’s not far away from that and every 10 minutes. It creeps me out.

Calories is the unit. Everybody talks with calories and knows quite deeply about nutrients or how much calories you can have in the day.

I never knew or took care of that shit, ever. Just knew that sugar was not food, that eating vegetables can almost be unlimited and that water is all you need to drink.

I’m lucky of having grow up in France with healthy home cooking for all my early years, leading me to do the same. I’m lucky of being born in a country, Europe, where the food system is maybe a little less corrupted by financial expectations and more driven toward health of its people (seriously, the FDA is a sad joke).

I realize that chance by watching two absolutely must-see videos especially for you US people. First, why would we eat better? Well to feel better, for a longer time.

How to live to be 100+

What he’s saying about the heavy plant based diet and exercise, the Grandmother Effect or the father not wanting to pay to do pretty heavy stuff in the house and do it by himself like this old multimillionaire Californian man… Well this is almost exactly how I grew up. How my parents –for no particular reason except that they were not sure it would dramatically improve their lives- would not buy robots to do the cooking but use their arms to do all these kitchen tasks to make something to eat. 365 days a year. How they would work every weekend –and enroll me- in the garden, fixing things and never ever have a 8 hours couch/food/tv program. I would of course want to do that and eat more pies and more burgers but somehow, I would say to myself that if I’m never sick, always in good shape and feeling good then the family diet must probably have something to do with that.

But also I need to be active. I always want to do stuff, fix, create I really have a hard time sitting on a couch more than for the length of a movie. I felt that there’s a sweet spot of body activity where the food quality I absorb in reasonable quantity doesn’t really matter –it just needs to be diverse-, it can even be the worse fat ass burger ever. My body is working so well it detoxifies itself. The human body is an amazingly smart, self-cleaning machine, if used. Not for burning calories, which is a dumb version of saying that your body is a full system and needs in order to activate all its parts including protection against bad stuff, to run. When sitting on a chair, it’s idling.

The second video is talking about that and also, how sugar whatever it’s processed –HFCS– or not is a poison. And in large quantity in all the US food. I looked at a yogurt in the fridge. No HFCS, but 23 fucking grams of “sugars” in a 170g portion! It’s like 5 sugar cubes in half a mug of coffee man. It’s ridiculous.

Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

Have you ever tried not to eat any sugar at all? I did. It was the worst experience ever, but I learned something this day: I can’t live without it, even if my body doesn’t really process it.

I decided to stop any sugar a few years ago, from the morning cube in the coffee to yogurts to the chocolate at night just to see what it would be. It took me three days before feeling absolutely, terribly depressed like an old crap on the sidewalk. I wasn’t expecting that at all, I remember going back from the store, feeling sick looking at all these cookies and sugar things all around. I went back buying some Petit Ecolier half a hour later.

I couldn’t believe that it was MUCH harder to stop sugar than stop smoking. Like, it’s not even the same scale. You usually substitute smoking with eating candies. You have nothing to substitute for when you stop eating sugar and your brain goes crazy really fast for that. At least for me.

Anyway again in this video, Robert H. Lustig shows how no soft drinks is a must-have for any kid diet. Just water and milk. That’s how I lived and still do though I can add some wine now. But if people around the world were drinking as much soft drink than I do or my family does, there would be no soft drink companies at all. And that would be ok.

I think I’m even immune to it now. Every time I try some Coke my stomach doesn’t even want to speak to me. It just gets mad at me and it is right when I see the slides of the above conference.

*tractor beam*

Someone in my family grew up with daily Coke from 6 to 12. She had a belly. She stopped soft drinks for the same amount of time and moved much more. She lost it. It demanded a lot of efforts and it was hard.

So seeing how a Coke can
is the equivalent for your metabolism of a beer can –hence bellies-, I’m not surprised. But you can’t say that it shouldn’t be allowed for kids to parents giving their children soft drinks. I mean, if you want to stay friend with them.

And that’s sort of depressing. The importance of food and diet here in the US feels oppressing sometimes and more precisely, out of proportion because the answers are rather simple and your genes don’t really matter: there’s good and bad carbohydrates cholesterol fat whatever, you will never have the perfect diet recipe by suppressing something –except sugar, but it’s hard- and that calories count is a really, really poor measure. Just eat the less processed food possible –never would be a good start-, not too much but diversified food, no processed drinks either and be physically active. Incroyable. We know that since the 60s ffs! It doesn’t stop parents. Even in France and Europe, obesity is growing up: less bread (glucose, good sugar) more buns (sucrose and HFCS, bad sugar) is a signal of a wrong  trend for sure.

I don’t care about food (in terms of taste) as much as I care about balance between my everyday activity and the fuel I need for it, adjusting it. That’s the important part for me, and I don’t want to track that with an app or follow any diet on the internet. I want it embedded in my habits. I just have to teach my body, over and over again with the bad –but kind of good let’s face it- food spreading endlessly around me (I’ll miss my perfect, healthy baguette forever).

Be careful, don’t slip. That’s what I’m saying to myself. Especially since I saw Wall-E.