Our ten best things about St.Barths

1. The views and colors around every turn
2. The beautiful stay at La Banane
3. The great shopping time
4. The great dinners   (K’Fé Massai, Pipiri, Hideaway, Wall House)
5. The beaches, specially Le Gouverneur and Saline, specially in the morning
6. The feeling of being "out-of-the-world" for a while (no news, no crime)
7. Drinking Ti Punch and Planteurs every time that is possible :-)
8. The people of St.Barths
9. Leaving St.Maarten behind (if you like St.Maarten, you won’t like St.Barths)
10. Smoking some great cigars 3 times a week after the dinner (eg.: Davidoff Grand Cru No.4)

Do you know Silktide (strange name) and its SiteScore?

SiteScore is a free tool which rates how well designed, popular and accessible your website is.

The entire testing process is handled by advanced computer software, which means a test is free and only takes a few seconds. SiteScore also gathers user feedback on all the websites we rate, to help judge how appealing a design is.[…]

SiteScore rates all websites on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest).

Some interesting inputs. For example, I realized that all my pages were found in violation of the the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This means that my blog/website is unlawful in Britain for example… I must say I haven’t know these ones and I will have a look at these guidelines. Sorry for that, I hope I haven’t blocked somebody….

Sooo, what are the results for didierbeck.com?

Not bad, specially if I could correct the part “Accessibility” ;-)

PS: I think I tested this tool based on a post of Dragos I didn’t found anymore, sorry…

[via vowe]

You had a tough day because of one of your client? Have a look here, it is excellent and good for your spirits. Some abstracts:

Hey – in the screenshot of the HTML layout you’ve sent me none of the links is working. Can you fix this?

I’d like a gradient from blue to red — but get rid of that purple in the middle.

The invoice says the software is supplied on a 200 foot tape, so we’ve reserved a hangar to store it.

I need this section of the site to be completely locked down with passwords on a per-user basis. Don’t make it so that people can’t get in if they can’t remember the password though.

We couldn’t make a screenshot from your website, would you please fix that…

We want a Flash website…but we don’t want a lot of animation or sound because it’s too destracting…and it needs to be easy to update so that our secretaries can make changes.

[via Thomas & Sylvain, directly from Toulouse]

A great picture of Sylvain from the Airbus A380, taken from his … garten during the first flight of this incredible machine. The engineers surely used Catia, you know, this “piece of software which is changing the industry”.

The plane seems to be very quiet, also in comparison to other smaller planes.

No link to the Airbus’ website. Each time, I tried to load the A380’s page, it crashed Firefox…

[via PointBlog, in French]

NYTimes.com published some information about its website traffic. Impressive, wow!

[via padawan]

Funny, extensive, (partly) true, and informative :-)

Preamble

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

[source: Sam’s archive]

On *very heavy* rotation this last time: the last CD of Moby – Hotel. Btw, have a look at the Moby’s website, really great, and a cool design. He opened a journal (a kind of “semi-blog-form”, i.e. without comments/permalink), which has attracted my attention during the last 30 minutes, at least… Moby is also shooting a lot, and he is publishing lots of pictures he took himself. Captivating, too.

An extract of his Journal, explaining the meaning of the first hit of Hotel – Lift me up:

‘lift me up’…this is a complicated one…’lift me up’ is about the human propensity towards turning off our higher, critical, rational cognitive functions and willfully and enthusiastically degenerating to an atavistic tribal state wherein we don’t judge things from an empirical, rational perspective, but rather from a limbic, feral, tribal perspective.
and it’s also about how religious leaders and political leaders(and, well, entertainers, too…but hopefully in a relatively benign way…)play upon peoples willingness to lose themselves in said atavistic, tribal, collective, irrational behaviour.(most descriptive line: ‘it’s sweeter than doubt’, regarding the certainy that comes with ‘true belief’…).

I have seen Moby for some days at a French TV show called Taratata (in French), a very good exclusively-live-music program, with an excellent sound and mix quality. Moby sang (and played bass guitar on) two tracks: Lift me up from Hotel and Natural blues from the last one. Impressive, wow!

Moby was also interviewed during the show and I must say that he seems to be a very nice person: a lot of (black/British) humor, very smart, humble, and *very* engaged politically (he is fighting against Bush and his administration since years).

Highly recommended artist and CD!!

Some very inspiring thoughts in this article of Wharton from March 2005 – Got a Good Strategy? Now Try to Implement It:

Only recently have people begun to realize that effective execution is a competitive business advantage. Companies are now seeing that if they execute better, they perform better. If they integrate long-term and short-term objectives, if they consider incentives, controls and feedback, they execute better. And if one company has that and the other doesn’t, the competitive advantage is clear.

[…] Execution takes longer than people expect. Political and organizational problems typically surface. So you develop a strategy, but you have to go throughout the organization and through dozens of planners to make sure it is carried out. It takes longer. Once execution starts, it could be one or two years, or even require a three-to-five year time frame.

There is still the perception that smart people plan and grunts execute. The short answer is that those who have power or influence have to embrace, believe in and foster execution. Some people think it is a lower-level responsibility – that’s the older perception of execution – but this simply isn’t true.

When companies separate the planning and doing – that’s wrong. Executive strategy requires ownership at all levels, from corporate level managers on down. Strategic success really demands a simultaneous view of planning and doing. The greater the overlap of doers and planners, the greater probability of success.

Execution takes longer. Execution is a process, and not an action or a step. And execution involves more people than strategy formation.

Advices – Lessons Learnt

• Three things are cheap in St.Barths, and just these ones: alcohol, cigars / cigarettes and gas ;-)
• You need a car. Don’t ask if you can walk or take a bicycle…You need a car and a 4W car! The rest is bullshit.
• French and English are spoken everywhere.
• Euro and $ and accepted everywhere. No problem with credit cards.
• Voltage is 220V, 60Hz. French plug converters are required.
• Cell phone: nothing special if you have an international subscription.
• DO NOT forget to bring something against mosquitos. There are really annoying…and quite strong in St.Barths (although all the hotels are treated two times a week against mosquitos).
• Time zone: as US East Coast, 5 to 6 hours difference with France
• Typical tropical region for the daylight: all the year between 06:30 and 18:30, so that the people are waking up early and going to bed quite early in the evening.
• Weather: also typical tropical weather. Some clouds in the morning, a little very pleasant wind, somtimes some suddend tropical downpours (short and normally duting the night), 28-30°C during the day, 22-24°C during the night, 25-27°C in the sea :-)

[via Joi Ito]

Till today, I haven’t really understood what is actually the issue between China and Japan. I honestly thought that our Chinese colleagues are a bit exaggerating and using the story with the teaching books as an excuse to push some nationalist requests. The reality seems to be, as usual, a little bit more complicated. Thanks to Joi, my “Japanese representative”, to clarify it in this very moderated, historical and clever way!

One of the biggest problems is that most Japanese don’t understand the issues. Another point is that most Japanese are not great supporters of the military. When I think about the military in Japan, I don’t think dirty nationalist thoughts. Rather, I think about May 15, 1932 when Prime Minister Inukai was assassinated by the military which ended party-based politics in Japan until after WWII. I think about the Japanese military taking over the government and sending Japan into one of the worst periods in its history. I think about the small children being sent off to war as Kamikaze or human torpedos and I think about the letters homes from them that are enshrined in Yasukuni Shrine. There are letters from terrified little boys writing about how scared they are about going to war. Most Japanese do not trust the military and most Japanese believe that the military run government of the 30’s was an illegitimate government as a result of a coup. Many Japanese believe that the Japanese people were victims of the military.

Having said that, I do think that the text books and teaching in Japan underplays the actions of the military in China and I believe the Japanese text books are a real problem that should be addressed. I really think that the Japanese don’t understand how victimized the Chinese and Koreans were and I believe this education needs to occur. I would point out that it is not just this aspect of Japanese textbooks that is broken. Japanese text don’t use the word “revolution” or “civil war”. It was the “Meiji Restoration”, “The American fight for independence”, the US Civil War is the “North South War” etc. There was a move to simplify Pi to just 3. In other words, the Japanese ministry of education needs an overhaul. Maybe they should use Wikipedia instead.