Source: Mercedes Magazine

wow wow wow :-)

U2 rocks!!

That’s pure energy, that’s rock’n&roll;, that’s live playing

I am listenning to / watching the DVD U2 go home: Live from Slane Castle – Ireland and I remarked that I haven’t posted something about it yet, although I played it so many times for months!! That’s somewhat criminal, I must apologize. This band is so deeply integrated in my own life that I sometimes forget to speak about it!

U2 was one of my first contact with music in 1984 when I was 12, and what for a contact! I mean with The Unforgettable fire: Pride, 4th of July, Bad, MLK. Not so bad for a start. Afterwards, it was just a kind of never-ending-love with this band. You remember The Johsua Tree? I mean: Where The Streets Have No Name, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, With Or Without You, Running To Stand Still, Red Hill Mining Town, One Tree Hill, Mothers Of The Disappeared. Surely one of the best album ever recorded! without mentionning all their great concerts.

With or without you is somewhat particular because it is linked to Laurence – my wife – and myself. You know, all the couples have their song. We have two: With or without you from U2 and On the turning away from Pink Floyd. Both still present after all these great years (16) ;-)

Back to this DVD: 160’000 people in two days, the 20th anniversary of U2 in their own country, the Slane castle (they played there in 1981), a great tour world-wide. U2 played “at home” with their first tribe. These 4 guys are just AMAZING. A must-to-have, definitely.

[Via Mena’s corner]

Six Apart, the American weblog tools maker, which has Typepad and Movable Type under control – surely two of the best well-known publishing utilities (although I’m not using them ;-) – acquired yesterday its French partner UBlog. UBlog was formerly acting as an exclusive agent in Europe for both products.

Six Apart announced the creation of a new subsidiary called Six Apart EMEA (Europe Middle East Africa), leaded by Loic LeMeur, former owner of UBlog and one of the most famous French blogger. Loic (happy birthday ;-) is now Executive Vice-President of Six Apart.

I think a good move for Six Apart and UBlog. I’m convinced that it is very complexe for an American company to enter the European market without a local relay!

PS: have a look at the post of Loic.

Mercedes presented a beautiful and impressive pictures serie of its famous cars in the last summer release of the “Mercedes Magazine”. The pictures were taken by a German photographer – Dietmar Hennekas, with special all-chrome Mercedes cars. This serie is available as a Mac and Windows screensaver.

  

Source: Mercedes Magazine

Organizations are never really stable!

Conclusion: change is the normal situation.

The development of an organization proceeds in discontinuity

• Stable stages (profit, growth) alternate with short period of profound crisis.
• Crisis constitute the ends and beginnings of stages of corporate development.
• Crisis also have positive functions: they are sources of energy against tendencies to remain put.
• Fundamental change identifies the transition between two development phases.

Classic enterprise lifecycle – dangers and opportunities

—————

Source: G. Müller-Stewens / Ch. Lechner

Some quotations about changes

Changing something doesn’t necessarily implies that things are getting better.

But if we want to make things better, we definitely have to change something.

Georg Lichtenberg

Who only does what he can, remains what he is.

Herman Hess

Change – the linguistic roots

—————

Source: G. Müller-Stewens / Ch. Lechner

[Via Michael Moore’s website]

wow, unbeliveable great start of the Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival.

10. That actor who played the President was totally unconvincing

9. It oversimplified the way I stole the election

8. Too many of them fancy college-boy words

7. If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported

6. Didn’t have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger

5. Of all Michael Moore’s accusations, only 97% are true

4. Not sure – – I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe

3. Where the hell was Spider-man?

2. Couldn’t hear most of the movie over Cheney’s foul mouth

1. I thought this was supposed to be about dodgeball

The start of the Moore’s documentary is also very good in France ;-)

I was shortly outside at 7.00pm and we had about 14°C… It’s crazy, aren’t we the 11th of July? For chance, we got our first sunflowers in our garten (thx france-anne ;-).

Introduction

For some days, I had a nice 4-days workshop about Change Management in an old Swiss monastery. I would like to share with you some ideas and tools about this subject in the coming days.

The presented ideas are mostly based on materials from two Professors of the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland): Ch. Lechner and G. Müller-Stewens.

I am testing the Mozilla Firefox browser (v0.9.2) since a few days and I must say that I am very positively impressed by:

• the ease-of-use
• the skins possibility
• the speed
• the bookmarks management
• the integrated pop-up blocker
• the integrated download manager
• the tabbed browsing
• the great IE settings import function
• the size and memory footprint of the application – install file: about 4.8 MB

I’m using exclusively IE since months, excepted for compatibility tests and I found the other browsers (Netscape, Opera, Mozilla) not convincing at all.

As I said, I find Mozilla Firefox really interesting and I will invest more time in the coming days to evaluate it!