2 Neurones & 1 Camera

A movie review I was recently reading stated, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, thatAction movies are basically children's movies for adults. That is to say that they are expressly designed to hit very specific pleasure centers to generate a predictable and uniform reaction.

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In the past 6 months spent working in a Web agency, I think the term I've seen most painfully misused (including, quite likely, by myself) is strategy.

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In the past few months I have started a reflection on trends for the mobile web. Any good reading you would recommend in this area?

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Walking is man's own, unique in the animal kingdom. Michel Serres, the charming thinker, rambles on in a gorgeous short podcast episode (in French) about how the walking pace, like the rhythm of the beating heart, is one of the most effective stimulants for thought.

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No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.

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I'm too lazy to build a real iphone app over the week-end, but I wanted to prove that it doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to provide bixi users mobile access to the status of the stations. 30 minutes and about as many lines of python later…

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One of my favorite recent pastimes has been the listening of TED talks. I can't express how much I admire this conference, the themes it tackles, the great speakers it secures, and the smart, smart move of making all the talks available for free on the web, booming its exposure to the world and making it a conference more people want to attend, not fewer. Chew on that, RIAA, MPAA and your ilk. If anything, TED should be renamed along the lines of “1000 ways to make the world a better place”, which would be much more fitting than “Technology, Entertainment and Design”.

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On the occasion of the first “Ada Lovelace Day”, which aims to highlight remarkable women in technology as potential role models for present and future generations of women, I started looking for the epitome of the “Renaissance Woman”.

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I like the people working at my usual supermarkets. Nice, friendly, helpful people. I have a special fondness for the people, often kids, working on packing the customers' purchases into bags. That's a fairly dull job, quite likely awfully paid, and yet they do the job, and they do it well.

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Before the 20th century, travel was slow: months on a boat or on roads. Travel was the hardships of migration for most, formative fun for the well off, and adventure for novel heroes. Then came a century of wars and population displacement. But between those wars, a few strange things happened. The 1930s saw the invention of paid vacation, and thus, mass tourism.

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Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. (Says Banksy)

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For the past few years, I have been extremely lucky to work on some really wonderful projects, with millions of customers, a healthy user community, and a very good karma for the service they provide to the world. I've been paid to spend up to half of my time working on those projects. And yet, these projects never made a penny. I've been working in the strange world of open source / free software.

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With a generation scattered around the globe, with friends from Oslo to Buenos Aires, from New York to Shanghai, I share a recurring dream. Not a month passes without hearing about that dream, or having it myself: living in one big house with all my friends, my family, all my loved ones.

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I can't remember when was the last time I went to see a performance of contemporary dance. Probably never did. Theatre, sure, opera too – although I clearly spent more time in the last decade at museums or rock concerts than opera houses, I am equally comfortable banging my head in a muddy radiohead concert or swoon in the “poulailler” of Paris' opera for Le Nozze de Figaro.

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