Ahhhh Geeeeez!@#%$

No one including myself noticed that this globe to the left rotates in the wrong direction. Now I'll wake up three hours ahead of the East Coast, a shame! Lets put back the old globe soon.

Aviation Radio Traffic

(This is great!, sent by Pierre C. this morning)

Note: For those that don't know, "The Sled" is the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane from the 1960's and still the fastest airplane. In his book, "Sled Driver", SR-71 Blackbird pilot Brian Shul writes: "I'll always remember a certain radio exchange that occurred one day as Walt (my back-seater) and I were screaming across Southern California 13 miles high. We were monitoring various radio transmissions from other aircraft as we entered Los Angeles airspace. Though they didn't really control us, they did monitor our movement across their scope. I heard a Cessna ask for a readout of its ground speed."90 knots" Center replied. Moments later, a Twin Beech required the same. "120 knots," Center answered. We weren't the only ones proud of our ground speed that day as almost instantly an F-18 smugly transmitted, "Ah, Center, Dusty 52 requests ground speed readout." There was a slight pause, then the response, "525 knots on the ground, Dusty." Another silent pause. As I was thinking to myself how ripe a situation this was, I heard a familiar click of a radio transmission coming from my back-seater. It was at that precise moment I realized Walt and I had become a real crew, for we were both thinking in unison. "Center, Aspen 20, you got a ground speed readout for us?" There was a longer than normal pause.... "Aspen, I show 1,742 knots" (That's about 2004.658 mph for those who don't know) No further inquiries were heard
on that frequency.

Pierre is an old friend, a retired Air Canada Captain who just spent almost two years sailing around the globe. Check out his awesome cruise log here but use Internet Explorer. Pierre est un viel ami. Faut voir son voyage voyage autour du monde en voilier.

Illustration Blog Of Great Interest

n 1913, a pernicious little busybody named M. Blair Coan spied on visitors to an art exhibit in Chicago. Coan, an investigator for the State Vice Commission, was upset by the "immorality" of modern paintings and suspected that Matisse's painting of nude dancers might even be "attracting the gaze of young girls."
Coan stirred up a great public outcry against immoral art. He then turned his talents to spreading alarm about the imminent communist takeover of the United States. In one of his books, The Coming Peril, Coan warned that socialism would ruin society by encouraging free love and giving women the right to vote. For Coan, the most "monstrously immoral" threat was that socialism might permit white women to consort with men of other races:

I just discovered this interesting blog where the writer digresses with examples and history about the power of illustrations and the consequences on human morality. Certainly worth the trip by clicking here

"Hoptimistic", as we say in Quebec

A happy hop from the bed this morning. A little bit more optimistic about things. Mostly thanks to this great American institution, Google. Just think, I was able to view most of my architectural projects in several countries last night, thanks to Google Earth. These satellite views proved that my buildings were still standing after 10-40 years, set in their scenery and parking lots.
plus hundreds of Archimede house with their peculiar rhombic-dodecahedral geometries, sticking out like flower bouquets in either island or ski resorts. Planet earth is small and very dainty, as shown on Google Earth. And I can write about it in this Google Blogger, then I can just perform a Google Search and deconstruct all the bad mouthing that is spread around the world by the our miscontent, our insurgents. Then I can go to YouTube (another Google flagship) and see a video that totally destroys the myth of Jesus, another clip by Carlin killing Religion , one that just busts your ribs with laughter. Then I can write to my friends to invite them to see'em, sharing the enlightment, using my Google GMail of course. And all that comes in 27 languages, so that I know that all over the planet others are doing the same thing, clearing the air of all the ignorance and suppression that has been plaguing us for centuries, with shamans, kings, mullahs, politicos and priests spreading their power with lies and superstitions. And banks too. I can go to Google Finance and read the fine print on all their activities, go to Google Spreadsheets to check out the totals of their investments in Halliburton and the like, check out their salary and ethics of their CEO's in Google News, check out their honest faces in Google Images, report findings in this Google Blog, go back to Google Earth to see that the globe is still spinning and check out Google Sky to see how tiny we are with 20 billion distant stars in JUST OUR OWN MILKY WAY GALAXY. ThenI can look at the furthest clusters going back to the beginning of time and think...Shit! we've only been around for 100,000 years, a microscopic fraction of the age of the universe. A blip. If we disappear, nothing in the universe will notice it or miss us. And of course you wont see that reported on Google News. Join our blog and spin the planet with us.

The deal with the she-devil

On 8/27/07, Marc Paradis wrote:

Where do you find the time to write, read and watch all those things you do ?
Do you have a deal with the devil ?

HAHAHAHAHA...yes Marc!

Actually I dont find the time since Nik and I are working on building an eCommerce web site to sell embroideries made from photos using a digital loom. Lot of work, illustrations, code, testing etc...
I have a super-entrepreneurial partner who is 2 years older than me and is twice as productive. I cant keep up with her...she NEVER stops, like the ENERGIZER bunny. She makes me feel very lazy.
By the way I just invented something in an encounter I had with Bill Gates in a dream. We were talking about search engines and the fact that a user needs to TYPE words once in a while to find stuff in a database, a slowing process for most people. He looked at me and asked "Do you play cards?" I said "Sometimes". So he then put 2 new packs of card in my left shirt pocket and one pack of cards in my right shirt pocket. Then he says, cryptically:"Teco is going to submit a solution to that precise database access problem next week; come to the meeting and bring your own solutions",. With this he puts one million dollars in the form of forty 25,000$ bills (!) in my right shirt pocket, the one with only one pack of cards". At that point I woke up, made coffe, and went to my computer to find out that my idea is really workable, a means to sift through keywords without typing anything or even clicking.

• Then I realized that an immediate application would be the very popular YouTube's own GUI. Then I realized that I have top management connection at YouTube.
• Then I realized that Google owns YouTube and Google is an ennemy for Microsoft and Bill Gates.
• Then I heard Nikki say:"Let's get to work on the web site, it's going on 7AM..."

HAHAHAHAHAHA
J.

Monsieur Strideur's French 101

About time we input something French in that little guy, don't you agree? The kid will one day turn out to be multilingual, open to a diplomatic career like Guy Beaudry, the father of his grand'aunt Nicole. Also, didn't his mother Mia study at the United Nation School near their Waterside Plaza home (NYC)?

QiGong , Natural Medecine...

...as practiced twice a day by 100 million Chinese, Qigong does amazing things to joints, blood pressure, the immune system, the oxygen carrying capacity, balance, everything that aging people need to worry about. I am very much into that and all I can give you here is a teaser of Lee Holden's DVD that I saw in its entirety on PBS. I will try to get you the entire thing if you are interested. I never thought 7-10 minutes could do so much for stress and well-being until I tried it. I saw old people in parks or on the beach in Vietnam doing it early in the morning or at night. I will post these video clips of them that I took. One man, using sign language, showed me 10 fingers 10 times when I asked him his age, after I had signified to him with my own fingers that I was 61 years old. He smiled a toothless smile and jumped on his bicycle he had hooked on to a branch by the beach. I think I filmed him going away in a perfectly straight line through the morning traffic in Nha Trang.

L'HEUREUX MEMORIAL

Carlsbad CA has the prettiest most spectacular doggy park known to mankind, a memorial to celebrate the contribution of a citizen.  Of French-Canadian ancestry, Ms Ann L'Heureux was a pionneer in the flower growing industry around Carlsbad. This morning I had the chance to observe two different species there for a good length of time. Let us call one "A" and ther other "B". There always is a wide variety of dogs frolicking at the l'Heureux Doggy Park. But "A" and "B" describe the owners, not the ownees.

"A" sits curled up on a bench oblivious of her two large dogs. These are roaming all over the 13,000 ft2 of  park, dropping smelly bomblets here and there while she reads a book "How to train your dog" if I read the cover well from where I was sitting.

"B" comes with a tall and stout body and two even larger dogs. She walks erect until she bends over with stiff legs and picks up some other dog's poo. She manages to cover every sq yard of the park, delivering numerous offerings to the trash cans about. She then sits with a broad smile, observing her second dog that has no produced yet.

It seems that A+B=O since these two ladies cancel out each others in their social behavior.

Ann l'Heureux must have been a happy lady. The flowers around the acacias of the park are marvellous year round. 

MICROSOFT VS APPLE

Wow... I LOVE IT..but again it looks like they swiped the interface/GUI **DIRECTLY** from Apple.. have you seen the new iPhone interface on working with photos, etc?? Exact same ;-)
Mark Cira (email)

Hi again, Mark!
Nothing new here, Microsoft Engineers are known in the trade as Copy Engineers, (check out this funny video) letting innovation float around like trial balloons and then gleaning and repackaging all within their operating system. Has worked since their inception. Excell was robbed from Visicalc, Windows from the original Mac OS, etc..etc...In court they argued that Mac had taken all from the Xerox experiment of the late seventies and they won...but then at that time Jobs absolutely needed the Microsoft Office Suite for Macs and Bill Gates obliged...and lent 11$B to Apple. Problem is with this kind of horse trading is that the times, they are a-changing fast. Consider:

MS has more and more problems keeping its devils at bay, too much overly complex in-your-face settings with cascading windows ad infinitum while MACS keep the creator protected from too much technical bla-bla, still the most user-friendly computer in the world by a mile. This show of respect for the user is about to pay off big time.

Because MS has created an army of malevolent hackers with nothing more to do it seems than to bring it down. An unending stream of patches flies back and forth between the millions of PCs and MS, some of them more dangerous that the foe they are trying to defeat. Meanwhile APPLE has chosen the UNIX language, the sunniest and most robust language ever devised for computers, and OPENED IT, creating an army of friends.

Apple has also cleared the two biggest stumbling block to its inroad into mass computer markets: it ditched Motorola to use the ubiquitous INTEL chipset, making its OS able to deal with ALL software for the PC with just minor adjustments ( for GUI and COM protocols within). And then by adding the Dual-core to the mix while having a much shorter pipelining, this guarantees that their iMAC at 2,8mHz is actually faster than a PC at 4mHz in most operations (Photoshop, 3D rendering etc...).

To make matters worse for PC's, a generation of iPOD users are now going into the Apple stores that just a few years ago where deemed by the same crowd as a refuge for elitist faggots. And once there, they are discovering that the machines actually look incredible, do everything and are well worth the extra cost, saving thousands of hours in your life (this happens to be true...and documented!). Nothing comes close to the new iMacs for class and efficiency.

QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM

The latest quaterly report blew right past analysts that have been riding PC's to wrok all those years. No the stunning increase in APPLE profits did not really come from the new iPhone...but hold on to your motherboard, from a 30% increase in computer sales. Could we say that persistence in good design and care eventually pays off even though the risks and tasks are enormous? PC's have feets of clay as more and more software is migrating to servers (GOOGLE will soon have everything, including a better Powerpoint...free). The size of MS makes it capable of taking a lot of abuse, like GE or GM, and maybe Apple will never get more than a 20% market share, but who cares? My point is that if you have enough money to use a recent high-end Mac and all related software and peripherals like iPhone, then do it with the same gusto as you would race your Porsche engine in front of a GM dealership pushing the latest gaudy Saturn convertible under a row of balloons.

Check out another one of these small labs risking life and limb developping stuff that Microsoft will soon plunder:

And the, the final word to Bill Gates, a very honest man....and generous (unlike Steve Jobs!). I'd love comments on this last statement.

100 HOURS

The thrill of victory? Too soon, of course, but the difficulty in stopping to smoke "turkey" is exactly what they said it would be, peaking with just AWFUL sensations at or near 70 hours. Now that I have overshot that marker, it seems like a party to go on with the effort. The next challenge is to drive to California with Nikki puffing in the car. Boy she's in for a surprise of open windows.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the 15 pound Halibut we caught yesterday morning. Enough food there for a small foot patrol. I filmed the filleting by Tom. Movie to come soon.

This is the first day of...etc..etc..

And it's also the first morning of the first day of another attempt to quit smoking cold turkey, this blog helping me nail down the progress and venting steam if the need arises. Yawn...!
Update: IT is now 6PM and I havn't smoke since 10PM last night. Eat celeries with darling Amelie who never smokes a day in her short life. Also 3 catnaps; very helpfull. No point in playing the "blame game" . Nikki is ans was always a good smoker, a pack-a-day with no deep inhaling. I was the bad monkey sucking on those things at an ungodly rate.
Sanity now slowly returning.
Hé! Tomorrow another kayak sortie a 8AM with Tom Iles. Just think, 2 non-smokers in 2 kayak crossing pairs of 2 dolphins and pairs of 2 seals (more rare as they are loners) and pairs of pelicans pondering the foggy slick and glassy sea we have out there at that time.

CANTAMAR BLOG

Never to busy to blawg a bit. Right? Nikki is having a second life*, I'm starting my fist book, the dogs take their walks and their flea protection, we have a martini every day at 5PM, we saw a good French movie last night ("The heart skips a beat"). Camille finished her novel and Nikki is mailing copies of her second novel to her friends here and there, mostly there. It's getting hot here and I will kayak tomorrow morning. Working with solar house concepts, tinkering, thinking and eating ( yeah! 186.6 from 180 last winter!). Also A LOT of piano, moviemaking on the PC, more walks with the dogs, a new invention here and there, music downloads and soon, uploads. Life is good, with side trips to California, indulging at Barnes & Noble while Nikki shops at her precious Hospice second-hand store, 99c store, Vons etc...A few days a month at Camille and Paul's house in Carslbad, talking literature and drinking, eating chili, pizza, etc...Some outings, like Red Lobters, Torito's, an occasional movie and frequent trips to doggie park with Lulu (JackDaniel), Belle (Yorkie), Chase and Max (Labs), Sheila (American Eskino), Amelie (Pomeranian), Sesame (pomeranian) and....me(Canadian).


*Nikki will post something here one day to explain what exactly is a second life

Miss Nurture

Although I haven't found it yet, I feel certain that the Internet has a 'Nurturing Tutorial" for older stiff males like myself. Twice this week I have been accused by my better half of not caring about her unfrequent pains and aches. Yesterday she wanted to help me remove my rubberized diving booties as she was seeing me in labor, huffing and puffing on a chair outside after a fishing trip. I did tell her that this was probably not a good idea. She then pulled and tugged and slipped her grip, falling on a chair and hitting her elbow. True, I didn't rush to console and rub, not feeling her pain to be that intense, happy that she fell sitting on a helpful chair, a little upset that she hadn't heeded my advice that her help was not required, and basically wanting to give her a lesson for not listening to me, to borrow my father's parlance."

Fact is, I DO CARE, I care about accidents, about the dangers of doing things beyond one's strength, about the fact that accidents often happen when four hands work on a delicate problem that can be resolved with two hands, albeit more slowly.

But go tell that to "Miss Nurture", a true champion of bequer bobo as we say in French, capable of caring for three very furry dogs attacked by furious fleas, caring for our aging neighbors and one difficult aging customer, me. Of course there is no doubt that she deserves better under the circumstances; I should have attacked her elbow with two wet lips, have her cry on my shoulder and pat her derrière gently, mobilizing sweet words from my arid lexicon.
It's just not in me. As the dear girl said to me this morning after I failed to nurture a leg cramp, "Women are nurturers", ( i.e. "youguys are useless shits!")
I do care. Probably too much. Before I met her on a dating web site, I had put into my profile that I did not wish to meet a smoker. I just didn't see myself in the future pain of seeing a beloved wheezing partner dying from a lung disease. I had quit smoking a few years earlier and did not wish to be exposed to second hand smoke, true. My desire for sharing a healthy life plan with her was very real. She quit before we actually met, patched up and apparently happy. Things did not turn out that way.
Thirty extra pounds later, her all-smoke-and-no-exercise sister suggested that Nikki was not pleasantly plump, but positively fat. Out came the cigs from every directions. I fell back five years in my life, got to smoke again and remove a possible five years to my projected existence. Wait!, I got the maths wrong!
Anyhow, curiously at that time we were all, sister-in-law included, exercising at LA Fitness. I was beaming with tenderness to see my baby on the threadmill in her running shoes two sizes too big. I was seeing wellness and stamina come slowly back into our lives with the desire to smoke being smoked out. Plus being the coach to that collective effort gave my ego a decent kick; I felt like a true nurturer, the male version thereof..
Two years and a thousand packs of cigarette later, I still care so much that I probably spend an hour every day trying to conjure up a method to have Nicole (and myself, of course...) quit smoking and starting to exercise. Anything will do, brisk walks to the beach instead of a slow shuffle, hiking in the nearby mountains, rollerblading on the basketball courtyard just a stone throw from our house.
But sharing the goal of a healthy mind in a healthy body is verboten in this household, taboo.I need to keep my worries to myself.
It's all pretty hopeless I sometimes think, and my peculiar pain raises no sympathy from my better half, nor from her sister for that matter. "Just quit smoking and exercise...and leave us alone". Wanting to share these goals with her (or them) is my downfall. Caring for her is my challenge under these circumstances, as there are a lot of people who think that their bodies, their ethics, their health and their thoughts are a strictly private affair.

From BBC

I know one. I know this guy who would rather spend two hours removing his rubber booties and dive suit than have a fair maiden flutter about with too little strength to help and more than enough zeal to hurt herself. End of story. Now let's light a cigarette and smoke ourself silly.

Amelie

Amélie vient de faire sa première communion. Nous sommes bien fiers. Elle commence ses cours de ballet dasn 2 semaines. Nous sommes bien fiers.