I found this stunning YouTube video on John Chow's blog here.

The Bugatti has to race a mile, turn around, and race back. The EF-2000 has to take off, race a mile into the air vertically and then turn around and fly towards the ground another mile and then cross the same finish line as the car.

VERY well done and hilarious that somebody bothered to do it at all!

I decided to get out for a run in the cold sunny weather today and ran around Ile Saint-Louis:

It was a crisp beautiful autumn day. I was the only runner in shorts, and one of the only runners out at ALL. There don't appear to be many runners in Paris. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

On the way back home, I ran through a back alley and found this great cathedral.

And a few blocks from home there is a little shop with this sign. I liked the sign and thought that it was worth taking a photo.

There are a lot of tiny little shops near our place that have art in them. Wait what on earth is that in the window??

It's a bust of Michael Keaton's Batman. Creepy.

Aujourd'hui était le jour 3 ici à Paris. Olivier et moi réellement avons obtenu de prendre le petit déjeuner ensemble, alors il se dirige pour travailler, et je suis allé au loin au yoga de Bikram. Il y a un petit studio impressionnant juste près de notre endroit, droite autour du coin d'un magasin de Apple.

(photos courtesy of www.yogabikramparis.com)

Alors je suis allé de nouveau au au braver les bas-côtés de BHV pour trouver un fusible pour le transformateur que j'ai fait sauter, et pour acheter quelques dishtowels. Je suis parvenu à diriger ma voie par ces essais et tout le personnel était très utile aussi longtemps que j'ai souri. Beaucoup. C'est un fait que des humains sont câblés pour sourire sur la commande pour long car vous les rayonnez un sourire et puis leur demandez de vous aider à parler meilleur français, ils semblent répondre bien.

Maintenant de nouveau au travail sur mon timezone américain du nord !

Oh yes, a little promotion for Vonage. I brought my Vonage adapter here to Paris so that I could have all of my North American phone numbers ring here. And it's working perfectly. So my SF and Vancouver numbers all ring my phone here and I can call out just like when I'm at home in Vancouver. It's a bit surreal actually how well it works. When did VoIP actually start to work?? It used to be a nightmare.

Technorati Tags: paris, bikramyoga, puppy, travel

I'll keep this short or I'll get all sappy. I love hanging out with this group and pushing our bodies and suffering together. It's the best thing I could possibly do with my time. Thanks guys (and girls).

Every time I read this I go off into fits of laughter. Having spent fifteen years now doing project management on one thing or another, I can relate to this very deeply. Sometimes Scott Adams really nails it.

"This is an A to B conversation, so C you later."

Thanks to Ean and Sibylle for throwing a great Club Fat Ass party - the Capilano Canyon Night Run. About 40 30 of us gathered at the William Griffin Rec Center tonight to do the run.


Sibylle threw me out of the short distance group, so Blue and I joined the tail end of the long course team. Thankfully Doug was at the end doing sweep. Then I stopped to wait for Doug...and lost the group entirely. So I joined up with Ryan and Ellie...and we got lost. We backtracked and found Craig who led us....onto the short course.

Finally we intercepted the Long Coursers, lost Ryan and Ellie to the LC team and Craig, Blue and I ran on through the night in relative solitude enveloped in fog. When Craig and I were almost done the course, I was attacked by a pack of coyotes that ripped at my flesh. One by one, I beat them off me, and ran to catch up with Craig. [Update: Apparently somebody at the party spread rumours that there were no coyotes and that in fact I tripped into a prickle bush that tore up my leg and hands after doing my business in the bush - the nerve of some people!]

The run ended about 1h 30 min later back at William Griffin, and was followed by a quick trip to soak in the hot tub at Harry Jerome. Lo and behold, the hot tub was out of order. Or they saw us coming all covered in mud and decided to put the sign up to stop us from muddying up their hot tub!

So, never a group to be daunted by such a thing, we created a game of six person, four ball murderball in the pool, much to the dismay of the lone swimmer in Lane 1 who we seemed to graze more often than he wanted.

Murderball was followed by a fantastic potluck at Ean and Sibylle's place. Unfortunately it looked like it was full swing when I had to hoof it back to get to bed so that I could get up early for a ride with a buddy.

Thanks for the great evening everybody!

THIS is the reason you don't allow overly broad stupid legislation like the Patriot Acts I and II and the most recent Military Commission Act to pass. They are always unintended uses that far exceed the original intent of the law. In this case, a couple in their mid-forties were being overtly sexual on a Southwest Airlines flight and have been charged under the Patriot Act (which was designed as a tool to charge terrorists.)

What a joke. Why are Americans putting up with this? WAKE UP. Unbelievable.

I mean, don't get me wrong. They should have been hauled off the plane if he was threatening the staff, but charge them with mischief, not under the fracking terrorism act.

Craig Ferguson had a funny episode on this story: "When the other passengers saw these goings-on, they were surprised and thought....'What, entertainment on a Southwest Airlines flight?'" Funny. But not.

Mark Morford has just written what can only be described as one of the most incredible customer testimonials I have ever read. Every company on the planet should aspire to create the kind of loyalty and lust and pure unadulterated joy that Apple seems to have successfully created in Mark's eyes.

Another writer recently posted a fantastic article over here at the Creating Passionate Users blog discussing how Tim Bray was chastised (and celebrated) in his own company for saying that one of their products was "F**king cool!" Every company should read that article.

In a related story, I was discussing with a colleague last night why he loved Confluence, the wiki software we're starting to use from Atlassian. He related the following story to me:

I was asked what the use case analysis of this product had been - what had we done to lead us to the conclusion that this was the product we should use for wikis. I said, "Well, I downloaded the product and ran the eval copy and thought to myself, 'this kicks ass!' Then I realized that they gave us the source code so we could modify it if we wanted to and I thought 'this kicks ASS!' Then I found a list of all the plug-ins that we could use and realized that I could even build our own plug-in and integrate our own product right into the wiki and thought, 'Man, this KICKS ASS!'.

THAT was one of the best analyses I have seen on software deployment in a long while. Atlassian should be proud that their product can generate that kind of response from people.

(*And yes, as a side note, just in case anybody asks, I did a full feature analysis on the top 10 wikis and found Confluence ahead by far. Is it perfect? No. It has been popularized by early adopters so they have a lot of work to do to make it palatable enough for it to "jump the chasm" and appeal to the broader mass market, but it is pretty simple and functional and beats the others hands-down as an enterprise wiki.)
 
That same colleague also showed me the Customer Comments section of the Perforce website. This company makes change management tools. Overall, not a sexy business. But the customer comments are brilliant. Here are but a few examples:

"I reported a bad link in Perforce's online docs -- and received a response in 52 seconds (according to the mail headers). To properly measure the performance of perforce support you would need to account for clock skew!"

David Sanderson - Fringent Technologies

"Einstein said the speed of light is the highest in the universe. It looks like you are faster... "
Carmen Enachescu - Geac

"The quick response is very much appreciated! Of course, I should have known we'd get such exemplary service... we're talking about Perforce here."
Lori Lustig - Macromedia

"I am astounded by your response to my question. You did three things well:

1. You answered the question that I asked, not some other one;
2. You answered it thoroughly;
3. You answered it swiftly;
4. You answered it correctly.

"Wait -- that's four things that rarely happen! I feel like I've hit the tech support jackpot! AND It was not an accident that your product was the first item on our list of things to buy. Hmmm... You could make a sales campaign around that -- "What's the first thing to buy when starting a new company? Perforce, of course.""
Jeff Stearns - The Savage Beast

All I can say is WOW. There are some companies out there doing some amazing work and creating incredibly passionate, loyal fans. Sharing those stories gives us all something to aspire to!

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

"What GoDaddy Knows" by Bob Parson, CEO of  Godaddy

• You need to be careful about who to listen to - like analysts who don't understand basic business.
  
• www.bobparsons.com - he talked about why they filed for and then withdrew their S1 application to become a public company. It cost him $3M to realize that once he went public he would have to listen to the advice of a lot of people who had no clue about his business.
  
• "I met a lot of analysts who didn't know the basics and who focused on short-term financials rather than on good solid business basics."
  
• Here's the lesson: "people love the convenience and speed of transacting business over the internet but when it comes to resolving problems and learning features, people much prefer to deal with other people." 920 of our people are in customer support. But analysts would ask: when are you going to move your customers to self-service? Ummm. Never.
• Cashflow is WAY more important than paper profits.
• [I agree wholeheartedly with Parsons here and this is one of the top lessons I drill into the startups I work with. For a small company, cashflow is life & breath!!]
  
• We will have $340M revenue and cash of $50M (?) of cash flow ($1M free cashflow PER WEEK) so I think we're doing okay.
  
• When it comes to promoting your company, everybody wants you to fall in line and offend nobody. That's just the wrong idea. To be different you have to be polarizing.  Market analysts asked "when you go public, will you stop being so offensive?" Hah!!!!! So I found an offensive ad agency and forced them to make me an ad with a buxom brunette with Godaddy.com written across her chest. Their ads can be found here. We have been promoting our business with "GoDaddyesque ads" - which is now defined as: "somewhat tasteless and slightly inappropriate." The biggest mistake you can make is to please everyone - particularly investment analysts. It's much better to alienate 10% of your audience and have the other 90% pay attention.
• [There  have been multiple studies in the automotive industry that seem to show the same thing. Cars that polarized their audience into love/hate like the Beetle, the Mini, and other memorable cars, performed better than the average cars that people couldn't tell apart from each other. The summary lesson was: build interesting vehicles that people will either love or hate, don't try to please everybody.]
  
  
  
  
  (graphic courtesy of this article from the Creating Passionate Users blog)
  
  
• we let podcasters create their own ads for us - they're weird and crazy and even a bit "off" but they're specific to their audiences so in that way, they were perfect each and every time.
  
• FINAL MESSAGE: Don't forget the fundamentals and be VERY careful who you listen to.
• [Dan Pena uses the phrase - "Don't listen to the morons" where "moron" is defined as anybody who hasn't done what you're trying to do - which is most people. I tend to agree with Pena on that point so I appreciated Parson's talk and thought it was the most grounded back-to-basics talk of the day. Thanks Bob!]