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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Chat with me!

You can chat with me if i'm logged in Google Talk, and you don't even need an account!

Monday, February 25, 2008

On my shoulder - The Dø

The DøOn My Shoulders

(via canal +)

Buy music online? maybe later

I've tried to buy an album online. Jack Johnson's new album.

I thought it would be normal to buy the album as I wanted to listen to it ASAP. I don't usually buy music: I use Last.fm to discover new stuff but didn't start actually buy music although I now have money to do that. There are more and more music tracks/albums i would like to buy. It's just that I didn't start doing it.

So when I saw Jack's new album, I thought: "let's do it".

I don't use iTunes. I don't buy the Apple hype. I "get" it but I don't wanna be a part of it. So I was happy to see Amazon offer free-DRM music to its customers. Unfortunately, that's USA only for the moment. If you use Deezer (a french music start-up) and want to buy a track, there are 2 links: Amazon and iTunes. The link to Amazon.fr (which says DRM-free) actually leads to the search result page for the track and the results are actually CDs. Same for Last.fm. The link leads you to the page of the CD. :-(

Okay, so who will sell me some mp3? I tried fnacmusic.com. The websites is terrible to navigate through but I finally found Jack's album. There are different ways to pay. It's not well done but I finally paid the album. The download process was terrible. It seems there was a bug because I couldn't download anything. I first thought it was my computer but I could finally download it 1 week later. The help section is really terrible. The whole experience was just a big mess.

But the worst part was when i found out i didn't actually bought mp3 but DRM protected WMA files (With some artist, you have the choice but not for Jack Johnson). What the hell am i supposed to do with those? I downloaded them with my parents computer. One by one. Terrible process. It seems the license was given to this computer, and after lots of reading, I found out I could transfer it with Windows media player to an MP3 player. Ouf! my player was compatible. Actually even that i couldn't do. and I tried listening to the files but I could only get the 1st minute of the song. There was something wrongly done in the process of getting the license. Never again.

Anyway, I finally found a way to download free-drm mp3 files. And not one by one. I won't describe how I did that. Let's just say it took 5 minutes and that I won't buy mp3 again before they make it simple and easy. Can't believe they could actually invent DRM protected files.

PS: The new album of Jack Johnson is a little bit too cheesy for me...

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Conseil survie dans le métro à Paris

Le conseil-survie du jour: regarder l'état du plafond quand vous attendez sur le quai!

Bon d'accord, les chances sont minimes pour que quelque chose vous tombe sur la tête. Pourtant, c'est ce qu'il aurait pu se passer hier soir dans le métro, en rentrant du boulot: plusieurs blocs de béton/plâtre se sont décrochés du plafond et se sont écrasés sur le quai et la voie. un bloc de la taille d'un ballon de handball n'est vraiment pas tombé loin de moi. ça aurait fait de gros dégâts.

C'était sur le quai de la ligne 7 à la station Opéra, direction La Courneuve.

Il semblerait que des trous est été comblés au plafond et c'est cette matière utilisé pour combler qui est tombée. C'est mon expertise.
L'incident s'est produit alors que le métro rentrait en Gare: les virbrations auraient été la cause du détachement.
2 stations plus loin, le conducteur de métro a fait une annonce disant qu'il avait vu ce qui s'était passé et qu'il l'avait signalé.

D'après ce document ratp, il y a eu des travaux "du 4 juin au 17 août 2007 inclus" dans cette station.

J'ai pris des photos de la fissure comblé. j'aurais du prendre le bloc de béton.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Promoting birding 2.0

Petit post pour le blog de la LPO FC sur Geobirds. Je vais essayer d'attirer leur attention là-dessus. extrait.


Voilà un site intéressant pour les ornithos anglophone et passionné d'Internet (y'en a?): http://geobirds.com

Geobirds est un site d'Amérique du nord qui fournit aux ornithologues "connecté" un moyen de recueillir leurs observations. Il surfe sur la vague du web 2.0 (basé sur le 'user-generated content')... avec des outils collaboratifs qui gèrent les données caractéristiques de l'observation naturaliste... la date, la situation, la localisation, l'observateur, le temps... un champ de commentaire est disponible.