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Everyone hates us

Our policies are so heinous and disrespectful of the rest of the world that the people of the world no longer hate just our president, but us as well.

http://pewglobal.org/commentary/display.php?AnalysisID=104

This report from last year shows that George Bush is doing serious damage to our credibility as a nation. It is serious enough that foreign dislike has extended beyond our elected officials and now extends to all Americans.

Why should we care? A low opinion of America as a whole means that the next administration will have a harder time gaining allies in all ventures. It means that foreign tourism to America will be down. It means that American tourists abroad will be treated poorly. It means that our exports will have a harder time finding markets. It is a serious problem.

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I (heart) Qwest

The only major telco to not cave to the NSA.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm?csp=34

excerpts (follow the link for the full story)

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers’ information and how that information might be used.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

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Joel Durand, Chocolatier (St. Remy, France)

The chocolate artisan of St. Remy, Provence, France

website

Best known for his Chocolate Alphabet series; he creates delicate, subtle and delicious confectionaries. His alphabet chocolates are small, square chocolates stamped with letters in gold-leaf. Each letter is a different flavor. My favorites are the ones that showcase the provencal flavors: lavender, violet, thyme. We bought a box from his shop and he was there and very friendly. Since we got back, I’ve been metering mine out to preserve them as long as possible, although now that I see he sells them on-line, I might just have to become a regular customer.

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Eating in France

1) In Nice, if looking for quality food, avoid the places near the Promenade De Anglais, unless you have a specific recommendation from someone you trust
2) In Paris, avoid any place offering a 10 Euro menu. It is a tourist joint that doesn’t think you know better
3) Don’t eat dinner in the old town of Eze. You have three very expensive choices, none of which are worth it.
4) Don’t start doing the conversions between Euros and Dollars for the food you are eating because you will give yourself a coronary.
5) If you are eating in a decent restaurant, a carafe of their house wine is going to be much higher quality than you would guess and it will be substantially cheaper than a demi-bouteille or a demi-litre of a wine off of their wine list. In a similar vein, learn how to order a carafe of water unless you enjoy paying for bottles of expensive mineral water everywhere
6) If you are going for Soca in the Cours Selaya in Nice, do it early. It is closed when the rest of the flower market is packing up, not when lunchtime is over.
7) If you are having a hard time finding a good place to eat, hit up a boulangerie, a charcruterie and a légumerie instead; you’ll be happier.
8) Order in French even if you aren’t very good at it. Outside of Paris, they will appreciate it and will help with your pronunciation and grammar. In Paris, they will just switch to English, but I think that they still appreciate the effort
9) French people eat late. This can work to your advantage, especially in Paris where the good restaurants fill up and long waits are common. We usually ate around 7:30 when most of the restaurants were just opening. After dinner we would walk around and if we noticed a place that was packed with locals (you can tell by the (lack of) overall volume and (large) amount of smoking) we’d head there the next night.
10) If you know where you want to eat, make reservations. It will guarantee your spot and will get you better service
11) In Paris, they now have no smoking sections, but they are filled with Americans and are not in any way separated from the smoking sections. Actually, in most of the restaurants we ate in, they would create a non-smoking section the first time it was requested. It would be in the worst spot in the restaurant and would still have clouds of cigarette smoke billowing over it. Better just to not stress over it: look for a table with its neighbor tables having no or very few butts in the ashtrays and sit there.

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PalmTX as laptop replacement (review pt. 2)

I bought the TX for e-mail and web access during my Europe trip, here’s my thoughts.

A major reason for my purchase of the TX was that I wanted an easy way to check e-mail and surf the web without having to lug a heavy (and hard to replace) laptop around on my Europe trip.

How did the TX perform? Pretty well. Almost as well as I had hoped it would.

The benefits:
1) I had no problem finding and connecting to 802.11b networks and was surprised to find them everywhere we stayed, including St. Remy in Provence (thanks Biscuit, Biscuit for the free wi-fi!)
2) It was no problem carrying it around, the protective case that I got with it was much heavier than it was and even with that case, it fit into an inside pocket in my coat
3) The battery lasted long enough to take care of stuff in the cases where I had to leave my hotel room to get wi-fi.
4) The web program and e-mail program worked o.k. and a lot of stuff was reasonable even on the small screen
5) Nice to have some games to pass the time.

The problems:
1) A bug in the blazer web browser made it impossible to load some php pages which made it impossible to sign up for our hotel’s wi-fi in Nice
2) The 802.11b connector would disconnect from the network to save power if you hadn’t used it for a minute or so. This was a super pain in the ass because we had a card with a super long code we had to type in every time we connected to the wi-fi in our hotel in Paris.
3) The mail program got confused on which mail it had downloaded and which mail it hadn’t, leading to multiple downloads of the same mail.
4) Not enough memory to make the video player or audio player features worth-while
5) too hard to compose long messages with Graffiti
6) Bug in the mail program where you can’t easily delay message sending until you are connected.

I’ve had many PIMs over the years, but I’ve never really stuck with any. I don’t really need constant access to my information or whatever, so now that the trip is over, I’m not sure what I’ll use the Palm for. I can let you know that the “Speaking Language Translator” isn’t really worth your money. Not that it doesn’t work, but mostly, you aren’t going to whip it out in the middle of a conversation with a shop keeper, so it isn’t really that useful.

The one thing which I did absolutely miss from my laptop was the ability to play movies. The TX doesn’t have enough memory (and big MMC cards are prohibitively expensive). It would have been cool to be able to watch some pre-recorded TV shows or movies from home sometimes.

Most of the biggest pains we had with the TX where in its software. I couldn’t find a way to configure the network to stay connected until I disconnect it manually which is really painful if you have a code you have to enter in each time you connect to a network. The php bug in the web browser made it impossible to load some pages. The bug in the mail program made it annoying to compose mail while not connected to a network. We had to save our messages to the draft folders and then when we connected to a network, edit each “draft” message so that we could send it. It would be a lot easier if stuff got saved in your outbox when you were connected until you did get connected.

Would I recommend this as a laptop replacement for other travelers trying to keep the crap to a minimum? Absolutely. If you were planning on keeping your pals at home updated on your travels with extended e-mails though, I would absolutely recommend one of the portable keyboards. That would have saved us a lot of headache.

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King Bush

George Bush doesn’t believe America’s laws apply to him, he has declared himself above the law.

If you didn’t already know this by his illegal spying on American citizens, the Boston Globe has an article on another 749 laws that he doesn’t believe apply to him…

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Interesting quote from Chris DeWolfe in the NYT

There was an article on April 23rd in the NYT about MySpace in which Chris DeWolfe made a classic mistake…

Mr. DeWolfe argues that MySpace won’t suffer that fate because, in just two years, it has already become so entrenched in so many lives. “People are truly invested in the site,” he said. “All their friends are on it. They spent months building their profiles. And so the cost of switching is too high. If we keep building the features they want, they will stay on the site.”

I’m pretty sure that Orkut and Friendster said the same thing, buddy.