I just got back from a small ride around the Silver Lake reservoir after buying some groceries from Trader Joe’s. I guess I fit in with the population out there.

L.A. is great to ride. I don’t know why people think it’s not a city for bikes, IT IS THE BEST ONE. It’s pretty flat (I mean it’s not SF), it’s large (not like NYC) and it rains like 3 days a year. It’s a bike rider’s dream.

One can start a day riding from the beach and end up in snow covered mountains during the same ride. I’m not sure if there are many cities in the world that can make that claim.

It’s great. My best memory of E3 last year was my bike ride. 30 minutes to go DTLA, 1 minute to park, 1 minute to change shirt.

Now I think the brakeless trend is the stupidest shit ever. You can’t complain about cars and how people behave toward bikes if you ride fast and don’t give a damn about being unable to slow down like smart people do, by pressing more and more a lever. You can’t say streets are dangerous for riders if you completely forget about the rules of the road. I mean, seriously.

My problem with that is that it makes cars angry against ALL riders.

I rode Paris so many times. If you are brakeless there and that you go fast, you will die in a week period. Thinking that L.A. is rude because cars don’t pay attention is not true if I compare with France, there are a lot more brakeless riders in SoCal. Here in L.A. for what I rode for now, people are much more attentive of what’s going on around them. How many times I’ve been facing a car door in France, pretty much never here in Silver Lake (last year I was riding every day). People don’t want to get sued here. Even if they can’t see shit in their big ass SUVs, they don’t want any trouble. So if you’re alert –there is no place on this planet where you can afford to not focus on what’s going on on the road while biking- it’s pretty cool.

So to me the main message would be to push people to use their bikes, not to see riders as stupid ass kamikazes. They will stay in their cars if the main “bike culture” is about being suicidal you know?

Every single possibility to say something bad about Microsoft, tech news jump on it. Every single possibility to say something good about GoogApple, tech news jump on it. The distortion is now too obvious. Apple does a bad thing with this tracking thing, denies it and what the press is doing promptly because they can’t argue against the fact that their favorite company is doing something wrong? Quickly demonstrating that MS does the same or that carriers do it anyway. Right. No journalist is going to say “hey to be fair and tell the truth, MS gets a single location and stores it outside the phone while Apple is getting every locations you’ve been to over a year and stores it in an non-encrypted file on your phone, even if you turn location services off, which is totally wrong”. That would just be too kind to Microsoft. Like you know, they have to pay for WinME/IE6/Vista forever.

Headlines are just misleading to a point that it’s outrageous for people working hard and doing good stuff at MS. I’d be mad seriously.

One example. You wouldn’t believe how many articles popped up in my rss folder about Windows phones getting bricked after the NoDo update especially on Samsung devices, how it was a total disaster etc. I have a Samsung and despite knowing that all of that was mostly FUD, I was clearly frowning.

Nothing happened.

The update went totally fine (oh yeah, they said March and it happened first week of April, that is so rude) battery life is great etc Turns out the update didn’t work on a small amount of Samsung phones (with a specific firmware, Samsung’s fault) for two main reasons: people would unplug the cable during the update, or they would have too much apps on their phone and the backup process would stop. Techcrunch is still saying and I quote “The Windows Phone 7 update situation has been a nightmare from the start”. Which is a full blatant lie. It’s been better that what I had to deal with my Android phone. Much better. People complain about this BS in comment sections but the damage is done. It’s ridiculous.

I had to wait months and months with Android, with fake dates and reports and lies, it wasn’t great at all on Google/HTC side for the same stupid update thing. It sucked, hard. People are insanely unfair and crazy toward MS, even people buying their product (get a life guys if you’re so disappointed that you don’t have the last phone’s update right right now). You have to give credit when credit is due and MS delivered two updates to my Samsung phone in three months, flawlessly, in France. And I don’t even feel I needed these because the Windows Phone OS was already very good which wasn’t the case when I had my Android stuck on 1.6 .

As for developers, the religious wars and others personal fights always make me think WTFGUYS. Developers, designers, programmers, you shouldn’t care about who’s side you’re on if you realize that you need to be early in the game, on the market, would it be iPhone Android or Windows phone or the Kindle or anything. You’re the one winning if you can provide polished services/products to any interesting platform or a lot of them. Ignoring a platform without knowing what’s going on on it and what it can do for you is simply unprofessional. The platform meta-game is all about being in the first pack if you haven’t figure that out yet (Ngmoco, ready almost on day one for the Apple Appstore). You have to be in the first wave with good stuff, you will be the first to make money and the first to have control and power against the platform (who is all the time, trying to kill you or make you its milky cow, it’s the game).

You see, it’s just a user/developer experience of someone who was really excited about Android after making a game on iOS. Then I saw the excellent Windows Metro UI and simply wanted to try it out because well, I don’t discriminate (and I had a deal with my carrier). They got it right man, so right that a review wondered how competition was going to make something sleeker, classier and simpler than the Windows phone UX and after months of use, I wonder too. It’s the best mobile experience I ever had. I know, it’s weird to write/read this but if you haven’t tried it you can’t tell about the integration’s tightness and attention to details Microsoft did. They did a really good job, didn’t copy competition and tech news are trying to not talk about it because it’s the bad Seattle giant, the company responsible for Clippy’s birth. MS is good in the long run (the first Xbox? That seemed so dumb. .NET is almost ten years old. Remember Kinect? Fuck I was so wrong on this one, even Linux 3.0 has drivers for it) and with this polished product that is Windows Phone, the best they ever put out IMO, I don’t see why tech news would spend their entire time shitting on it. It doesn’t make sense. Oh sure, it drives traffic and views on articles. Sigh.

Of course MS screws up too. Who doesn’t? MobileMe, Kin, iTunes software, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Zune player etc

Bottom line is, big companies are all trying and doing the same things, nasty or not, your favorite tech company included (Microsoft buys companies, you realize that Apple bought the company that does their perfect trackpad? You guys realize Google bought the company who built Android?). All of these companies with campuses and buses to drive people to their desks. You either don’t support any of them because you think “they’re evil” or you just get over it and treat everybody the same way.  Especially you, not-so-tight-ready-to-sell-your-mom media.

It’s simple:

-If you live only by Apple standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.

-If you live only by Google standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.

-If you live by mixing, trying things out, making your own opinion, avoiding walled garden because they overall inherently suck, you’re right.

-If you are living like Richard Stallman, mad props and you can say that I’m stupid and sold to capitalism.

-If you’re not like Richard and try to give lessons to people using MS products while using another big brand or worshipping it like a bitch, you certainly need to get off your ponycorn.

You guys -women-, you work so much. You do so much. And yet you don’t get any damn respect.

Watched national French news all weekend. The woman who is fighting something terrible doesn’t exist at all. It was all about how DSK was doing and how France was relieved that he wasn’t in prison anymore. Not a single word for the presumed victim. I’m not even talking about these "intellectuals" known as stupid ass rich white men sharing their retarded opinion but holy fuck, I just want to hurt them so bad.

I just read about Mr. Schwarzenegger follow-up and it’s insane too. I don’t even get how you can live with all that shit in your head, everyday. How to sleep. It means you cranked up the “I don’t give a shit about respect” fader to the max, 11. The respect toward women is inexistent. That makes me think about Michelle, from bin Laden’s night on Twitter.

I can’t say I’m proud to be a man these days. I spent two days in the countryside with women doing everything, running life basically. I just picked up some strawberries, sat at the table. 2 hours from Paris and a woman is great if she cooks and can breed, like 200 years ago. For the rest if she’s too smart or ambitious, she’s just a bitch and nobody will want her and she will die alone and stuff.  It doesn’t change. It doesn’t change one bit. It’s terrible. You are so getting fucked guys I mean you need a fucking war. Starting with yourselves. This French woman who regretted to not sue DSK for sexual abuse isn’t going to testify in NYC.

Bitch grow a pair and do what you have to do: tell the fucking truth and help your sister from another mother. You opened your mouth saying what this man did. Now it is on and you can’t just say “no, thanks”. When it’s time to act, it’s time to act, goddamn. Way too much women can’t do what you refuse to do.

I think this will happen

If countries with maximum freedom cannot apply justice correctly and show the respect women deserve, we’re screwed.

I put a track on the internet and guess what, only women bought it. W.R.E.A.M (Women Rule Everything Around Me).

Reforming gloomy France.

Though only 17% of young people told one recent poll that their country’s future was promising, a massive 83% said that they were satisfied with their own lives.

This is France! Four months I’m back and I can tell and feel the same: life’s pretty good here, when everything works nicely –public transportation, internet, sunny days etc- it’s damn nice. It’s just that if you want to think a bit about the future, if you’re working in the private sector, in a small company, doing jobs that are today important or will be the only jobs in a few years, I feel that the future here is horribly gloomy and I’m not the only one (1,5M French live outside France as of January 2011). I remember a few years ago having arguments with stupid ass high school teenagers telling me that we don’t need to reform the work market and all they could say was “yeah anyway, I’ll not work in France later”. But you’re heavily protesting reforms? Goddamn Crazy French.

Most strikingly, the French birth rate has risen to just over two babies per woman. By some estimates, France’s population will overtake Germany’s by 2037. The French, it seems, are persuaded by the ambient gloom that their country is doomed—yet even their own behaviour suggests that they think it may have a future.

Ha! To me it’s not thinking about the future, it’s thinking about yourself, being a woman in your 30s and being stuck. When you’re having kids you socially jump from being a young woman struggling with your life like everybody else to a MOTHER. All of sudden everything changes and you are now socially supported and busy for eighteen years. To me this birth rate is not an optimistic way of seeing the future, pretty much the opposite actually. It feels like this: screw you future society, I’m having kids and having the life my parents had but worse and I don’t care what my children will have to deal with. The worldwide problem with sustainability, pollution etc comes from the fact that population grows. If you think about the future, today, you don’t have children (adoption would be ok though). I know it hurts.

France’s start-up scene may be relatively new, but a fresh generation of faces has begun to graduate into the big league. They include such figures as Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet of Priceminister, Marc Simoncini of Meetic, and Xavier Niel of Iliad, who launched Free, a telecoms firm, from nothing to take on the established giants.

The interesting part is that France struggles so hard to export. All of these start-ups are focusing on France and it’s not enough to create a lot of jobs. Just think about California and how the giants there –Facebook Apple MS Google- are getting most of their cash out of the state, obviously. I don’t care how, we –as any country does too today- need that to get a real economic growth (the population grows too, remember?) . Germany is so hot because they export like crazy. Outside of the big old French companies which are definitely not creating jobs but more reducing them it’s not happening here. Facebook barely existed in 2004 in its own country of birth and six years later there are 20M of French people using it. Even in the world of internet we stay French and don’t go global immediately, which is kind of the great thing of the internet right? Why not benefit from that right away? With the insane amount of culture the French have about other cultures, it shouldn’t be difficult.

The French seem simultaneously to hold two conflicting views. When asked if they backed the strikes, a majority said yes. When asked in the same poll whether raising the retirement age was “responsible towards future generations”, 70% also said yes. In other words, the French temperamentally liked the idea of protest, not least as a way of snubbing Mr Sarkozy. But, at the same time, they knew that raising the retirement age to 62, when the Greeks were being told to stay at their desks till 65, was the reasonable thing to do.

It’s smart. If your message is confusing and noisy when things get real you can choose which side you back up and argue forever without being wrong “Oh yeah I was not against that…”. Right. That’s how we deal with problems in France. Yes, it totally sucks. But when we have to do something because we really have to it usually happens in no time: the debate has been done to death.

The young, who have become serial collectors of short-term contracts, pay the price by lacking the security that the insiders enjoy.

And then it gets complicated: people have sex and form couples with often one “insider” and the other being on this short-term contract diet. Trying to find a balance. So people don’t fight the system, they accommodate around it and at the end, they’re pretty happy even if they know that the all thing is definitely unfair and not getting better. And so a generation later problems are the same +1. The plan is to find a place in the French machine that will make you go without too much harm if possible, to retirement. The social positive value is not to fulfill something –it triggers indifference or jealousy- but to exploit it dare I say, abuse it. Then you’re doing the right thing.

Next year we redistribute political cards and it will be interesting to see what will happen. Still looks so gloomy though.

WhatUpWithThat by Harold

I enjoy so much this achievement of opening my favorite music software with an empty page and then later there are 30+ tracks, dozens of parameters everywhere and hundreds of possibilities around a “simple beat”.

Then I release it and it feels like “yeah well, it’s cool but it’s just a beat”. And then I remember how little things make the song or don’t. It’s so incredible. It’s like life!

I read this Vanity Fair article and it reminded me of this Russian dude who recently bought a $100 million house in Cali, the biggest sale for a property in the US, ever. He’s not even going to live there. I know right?

Give me just 1% of that and I would pay cash for a high tech fully upgradeable almost off the grid passive house I would design and shape like I want. I would invest the rest of the money in diverse projects and try things out. If I failed with everything I still would have a comfy and healthy life while saving the Earth with my don’t-cost-anything-to-run small property.

Something like that, but smaller. Hot damn.

A million dollar. It seems so crazy and unreachable to me while it’s barely a tip for these people . And I’m part of the 10 or 20% of the population for whom it’s not that bad at all…

That’s why I feel so compelled to at least use that luck to do something that makes sense and not being ready to sell my sister for a fucking art book or a guitar collection or so many shit I could go crazy for. Owning things is not an end and it’s just so much what our society is telling us to do. So I’m like fuck no. I just want to own a place for the exact same reason that everybody wants that too. Live a good life. But for the rest… We waste so much. And I am lazy! I would not want to have a $10K unique bass, what about maintenance and what if it breaks? Standard, good stuff is great. It’s true peace of mind.

I hope people are going to invade this Russian house this summer, throw some parties and heavily pee in the fountain.

The thing is I’m not searching for racism proof, racism finds me. I’m on a funny Tumblr and there’s this Google search result about Asian people and I feel obligated to try it out too. Then I try with white black Indians… And I kind of freak out:

Let’s see if it’s better in 10 years?

“Why do black people exist”. It’s just weird because it doesn’t really sound offensive yet it’s the most hostile thing from all searches. Suddenly I feel the urge to make this little picture editing to show the world that well, people using computers are mostly white and not that bright if I look at these screenshots.

Later I click on a BBC documentaries link via Twitter. I go through the list, I see Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner? I click on it and read:

150 years after the war his reputation is being re-assessed, as historians begin to uncover the dark side of his life and politics. They have revealed that the president who ended slavery secretly planned to deport the freed black people out of America.

Wikipedia. Google. Lerone Bennett Jr. A book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream 20 years of research, 688 pages. Bipolar reviews and comments, people praising the amount of work and that nothing is black or white and people complaining that this book is biased –you mean like mainstream “common” History?- and so on. It reminds me of stuff, like the Good Hair documentary I saw a few months ago:

The main focus in the film is the extreme lengths that black women are willing to go through in order to look a certain way. A common ideology in the African American culture is that the straighter the hair, the prettier the woman. On the contrary, a woman wearing her hair naturally (with no chemical processing) is viewed as unkempt or unprofessional. Black women are willing to spend thousands of dollars on their hair, even if they cannot afford to do so.

I think about Bill Russell, a basketball player –one of the best ever- I discovered through Flea’s Twitter account, who lived crazy times and hard segregation. I think about this documentary I haven’t seen yet because the start hurts so bad, Crips and Bloods: Made in America, something I wanted to see because it’s about L.A. (and directed by a famous skateboarder). It starts by explaining how black people were not allowed to be in the Boy Scouts so that they started their own clubs, who would have to deal with police all the time. Gang’s hood culture was born.

I think about Katrina and the second part of Spike Lee’s documentary is probably one of the most painful thing I have ever watched.

And everything makes sense. This crazy feeling of insecurity or that I have to prove something all the goddamn time. Why despite virtually being free, I feel something heavier and heavier that is making me think more than twice, too much. Damn if even I feel it, with my sweet 200% white back-story and family I can’t imagine what’s like for other black people and black men I see around. Unconsciously I make music because also, it’s where it’s fine to be a black dude in this society. Constantly asking myself “can I? May I? Should I?” because I know what people see, I know stereotypes are also true and that I try not to be that and yet I am sometimes. It makes sense. It comes from a long way. Social inertia is ridiculous. 

The older I get, the more I understand why smart black people who seem to be loved by any race end up building a bubble, living inside: Meshell, Dave Chappelle, Chris Tucker, Dieudonné, Prince whatever. It’s way too fucked up to be in the middle analyzing that shit, man.

 
Obama will always represent that first. Holy shit it felt good even if it sounds stupid.

Anyway, peace. And fuck carrots.

The Art of Steal

It’s a documentary about the Barnes foundation one of the most amazing painting collection in the world.

 

I’ll take this comment from The Awl: “What you have is a powerful group of city elites with real estate and tourism dreams (they’re also avaricious philistines, by mere coincidence) determined to seize the control of this spectacular asset, and there simply isn’t anybody with the power or position to stop them. Their success has been a complete tragedy.”

I wish I could go before the collection moves downtown Philly in June…

The Perfect Vagina

Kind of eye-opening to see how women can be able to ruin their genitals based on what people (that is, stupid jerks and bitches) think of it. I always thought that big lips were like a big cock. More surface, more pleasure. I didn’t know the porn industry had such power by displaying small vulvas, a big turn on for men apparently (not a fan of the kid-looking pussy, thanks). I was amazed that these women didn’t even know that vaginas are unique, like their male counterpart. What the fuck??? We all are different, genitals included. It shows how depreciated this organ and source of pleasure is, even today in a pretty liberal society like the UK. Girls do what you have to do: be proud of it.

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

Outstanding article from 1982 –thank you the Atlantic, thank you- about the diamond bullshit, the exploitation of Africa, the insane wedding marketing in the US/Japan that would create demand “forever”, the 100 years monopoly, the absence of value of this so-called precious rock… Seven very well documented pages. There’s only one conclusion: don’t ever, ever buy any fucking diamond in your life. I’m glad I haven’t because I always thought that it wasn’t looking good. Some people use credits to buy this useless shit that is not even an investment. It’s pure loss.

Nothing that will make you smile, everything good to know though.

It seems like a decade. This service totally changed my life.

Debut

I don’t know how many French were signing up in early March 2007 but I was, after the famous SXSW that really showed up what Twitter was. I immediately tried it thinking that it was a great idea. Microblogging. Sweet.

It wasn’t to follow friends because even today Twitter isn’t popular in France –at all- so it wasn’t for that. It was for discovery. Hooking up with strangers that’s right. Maybe dating too of course. Whatever was going on.

Everything you do. Even that.

My first follower was Baratunde Thurston. Yes, it was incredibly powerful to see a BLACK MAN on the internet and nerdier than I was. Funny, witty,  in the transmedia-internet-geek world, I thought that was awesome. He had a few hundreds of followers and when he worked his ass off, live-tweeting Obama’s election and campaign it was magic. He’s now Director of Digital @TheOnion and has 74,887 followers… I can’t wait to meet him because it has to happen. So many times I wanted to write to him but was too afraid to lay down some stuff.

French people in Paris on a Saturday night.

I immediately wrote in English. For me it was not even a question –why would I tweet in French when no one understands it?- and I wanted to improve so much at it that I had the idea to bring some rhymes and for like a year and half I tweeted this way and geez, it made my brain stronger and my dictionary skills better despite weird, silly, corny tweets. Mind game.

Twittervision

Anyway I just loved the fact that I had some insight in very different lives across the world, here a geeky mom in St Louis, there a web developer in Czech Republic, UK, US, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Australia… In real time, not on an irc channel with nicknames but on the web, via sms with pictures and “real” names.

More and more it became a really neat source of information too. At first I didn’t want that too much being an avid user of rss but I couldn’t resist and see that I would see a tweet and then the same in the rss feed, later. Sean Bonner showed me how much Twitter is useful and relevant in the news realm.

I giggle every time.

I also tried to follow funny people because the 140 characters limit is great for that. What value can you add on a personal level if you’re not relaying news? Comedy. I stumbled upon Alison Agosti who had about 400 followers. I thought it was a bug when I saw more than 100K like a year later but she’s funny as hell and she has a vagina too so it’s totally normal :-)

But the big thing for me has been the #itstartedontwitter with my Verdell Wilson.

Only the beginning…

It’s also been an amazing tool to connect with indie game developers as the RT process just do that, making you discover someone else via someone you already follow: this is why the new RT ain’t worth shit, making the discovery process less transparent and more intrusive.

Because of the constant stream, the more I was following people –and usually Americans- the less I was caring about France and what’s going on here. I was realizing that like rss I could just jump to the information’s source. More fascinating global, less local circlejerk.

I also saw that Twitter was used a lot by black people in the US and that I was writing English better than 98% of them. That would sometimes make me angry but I would get over it, what else is there to do?

Now I think I’m hitting a wall with Twitter. Yes having friends partying in Austin while having a tsunami in Japan, wars and conflicts in the middle East is like watching a horror movie with a comedy and a documentary at the same time. It isn’t healthy even if as the TV, I’m hooked, reading and reading, trying not to miss a tweet which could ruin the story unfolding in front of my eyes… I mean I knew about upcoming riots in the Middle East weeks before they happened, thanks to Twitter. Twitter gives a sense that there’s no time zone at all but there is and I just can’t keep reading tweets in Paris after California is up because it’s like dozens of updates after each refresh. It’s exhausting.

Backend

On the dev part, I thought Twitter very clever to let people build clients and competing over innovation. Now they’re being like total dicks, blatantly stealing ideas (the Android client was quite unique but not really efficient, the last refresh is a copy/paste of Seesmic) and saying “don’t do anything else guys, we’re in charge thanks”. Not cool.

On the business part, I just don’t get why the Flickr/Pinboard business model (pay once forever or once a year) is so disregarded. What the fuck is wrong with getting real money and stop the ad bullshit? If power users are ready to pay a fee, you should let them: they will drive followers to do so. People made Twitter.

I never had a big thing for trending topics but these days there are like effing useless, full of scammers and fake accounts. I’m still amazed at this 4000+ RT of a fake Dave Chappelle account using the #prayforjapan, what the hell people. Or the all Charlie Sheen thing. Like a lot of things when there’s a crowd, we often all get so dumb.

So I wonder what the future of this service is going to be. Like the internet showed, clones are probably going to emerge, open sourced. Dave Winer is trying to do that with rss so that you can update everything including Twitter in real time with a feed.

 

Whatever happens now, it will never be the same. Thanks guys.

If we legalize all drugs, minorities –I mean, everybody but white people- would automatically get control of it (estimation for the US only for 2003: 321 billion $).

If it happens, the balance of power between the “West” and the rest of the world would change so dramatically that it can’t happen. For now.

Maybe even some region of the world would become much more attractive than Europe and the US. Mexico’s insane violence (2010, 15 273 people murdered) is pretty much all drug-related. Other than the annoyance of the high possibility of getting killed in the worst manner possible, I’m sure it’s a nice place to live.

I’m always amazed to see that cannabis for example was totally legal when the business was controlled by the English empire. It went illegal when India claimed its independence. It became illegal when Jamaica claimed its independence.

It became illegal in the US when Mexicans and black people were using it, changing dramatically the country in the early 1900s, working their ass off and inventing the cool that will spread out and be part of the US culture. White America  could stop the prohibition but just couldn’t take that “minorities” were and are happy with weed.

It’s illegal in France because hashish equals Arabs and that despite being a country open to so many things and ideas, France doesn’t want to accept its culture blend. Which also means sharing power (millions of euros market) with non-white people. And this nasty play about values and moral on how drugs are bad while alcohol is legal and globally, the leading cause of death for males aged 15-59… During that time the prison system is a profit-making industry (click on the number 1). I mean, it’s just sick man.

So in the end there’s no rational political behavior about drugs because it’s just a matter of losing huge power: could you imagine how strong would become South America if instead of smuggling cocaine to the US and Europe they were trading it to the richest, smartest white people in the world like they do since decades but this time without the BS? They could fucking rule the UN, Swiss banks and own the NASDAQ. Latinos ruling white institutions?

Yeah, it’s the worst nightmare ever for the current system. Hence the century old war on drugs. It needs to stop.