Took a taxi from Orly Sud, Paris airport, who took us to our hotel, Astoria Opera on Rue du Moscou. My room, No. 110, had an entrance directly from the lobby and was very small, but sufficient, with a nice bathroom. Shortly after unpacking, we left for the city.

Our first stop was a Café on boulevard des Batignolles, 2 minutes from the hotel. We took a metro to Montmartre. We visited the Sacre-Coeur and then took to the streets of the Montmartre quarter, apparently a favorite of many famous artists from Renoir to Picasso. We got caught by very heavy rain and took shelter in a colorful, but stylish designer lamp shop. If I remember correctly, it offered lamps for over 10,000 EUR covered with alligator skin. When the rain stopped we had a meal in a restaurant with chairs on the street, watching people and sipping wine—the usual French way.

We made a few shots in front of Moulin Rouge and took the metro to Champs Elyssees, where we had ice cream in a futuristically designed Renault Café combined with a show room. I refused getting a Haagen Dasz the fast-food way and pay 10 EUR to fight for my table with hundreds of other tourists.

It was getting late and we had to hurry back to the hotel to get dressed for Bon Heur show at Lido, our evening programme. We put on our black tie dress and hurried to Lido. By metro… It was my idea not to let conventions interfere and risk a few strange looks as we stood there in the dirty urine smelling Parisian metro in our best outfits. It was a memorable experience in itself and turned out to be the fastest way to get to the huge Champs Elyssees. We got off at Arc du Triomphe, in the middle of a huge star-shaped crossing with no idea which direction to turn. We were running late, so we had to run. As if having no idea which way to go, dressed up in black tie, wearing shiny black leather-soled shoes wasn’t enough of a fate, it started to rain. I still think we had no idea which direction we were heading when after a few crossings and several streets we found ourselves at Champs Elysees. Only after trotting down for 10 minutes, did we realize that Lido was actually not at the street’s beginning, but rather its middle.

There stood a long queue of people before Lido, but dressed up as we were and with a reservation got us first treatment and we were promptly ushered to our table. We had “very good seats” according to the reservation and the waiters, but in fact it was all the way in the corner and we sat on the outside seats as we were seated with other 4 people, who later often obstructed my view. Not only was this less than ideal, but in addition the food was absurdly horrible, the waiters were distracting throughout the show by loud talking, collecting fees, singing, loud laughter, and bumping into our peripherally situated chairs. Having said that, the show itself was impressive and worthwhile. Walking through Champs Elyssees in our black tie and using Parisian metro at 1 a.m. in the morning to get home dressed up the way we were, was also memorable.

Next day we took metro to Montparnasse with artists selling their work on the market and a great outlook from Lafayette Hotel. Museum d’Orsay made a strong impression on me and I realized I’ve never visited such friendly museum in my life.

We walked to Louvre and took a metro to Café Charbon in Belleville-Oberkampf quarter. Then we made a short stop at our hotel to get my tripod and took a metro to La Petite Chaise, the oldest restaurant in Paris. I made a mistake in the name of the street where the restaurant was so we walked into a different one with the same street number, took seats and after a few seconds realized we should better leave soon. Although La Petite Chaise looked very cosy we didn’t understand the stylish French menu and ended up ordering less than ideal food. OK, it was horrible.

At Champs Elyssees I took the mandatory night shots with neutral density filters, the same in Louvre and Chatelet. After midnight we headed back to the hotel.

Third and last day started with a visit to the Pere Lachaise cemetery. We passed by the parliament and Notre dame cathedral to the Latin quarter, on to Rue St. Germain, where we enjoyed a tasty baguette and a nutella crepe. We were running out of time again when we reached Grand Galerie of the Lafayette shopping mall and had precisely 15 minutes to do the photographing as well as shopping. No time to spare, but a precise metro schedule possibly down to a minute to reach the hotel at 17:00 we reached our line to find the metro out of operation. A minute later, when emergency people arrived with stretchers and looked underneath the wagon for body, it became clear we needed to think of an alternative. This was an opportunity to fully capacitate my navigational and orientating skills, which became clear throughout the trip. Everything happened very fast: each corner, each corridor, passage, turn needed a fast decision. All this happened in an extreme hurry in a running motion. Turn after turn it became clear that we were running in the right direction and after 10 minutes of running and navigating about 1km in the Parisian underground we were on our alternate route. Everything worked like in a film. There wasn’t a single mistake in all those turns and corridors, incredible! We hopped on the two lines running without a wait in the last second as they were announcing closing of their doors. As we got out of the Opera station near the hotel, it was raining heavily, but we made it 17:00 sharp at the entrance!

Driving in the shuttle to the airport, I realized I knew many of the streets and quarters we were passing. In just 3 days… Nice trip!

Finally the weekend is here and I have some time to shoot a few photos to document my favorite computer. It’s an Apple PowerBook G4 12-inch. Very happy to have it. Enjoy the photos and leave a few comments if you like.

Technical Jiggery Pokery

I could hardly ever imagine a more professional and perfected theme than the Qute and look, here is another one, which is almost there! Hate to see Qute go, but I’ll give this one a try.

Towards the end of the book you may find this part, which explains basically why Holden Caulfield is not right denying the whole world around him and gives the reader together with Holden’s sister only moral support agains the self-destroying attitude of the main character.

…

He went over to this desk on the other side of the room, and without sitting down wrote something on a piece of paper. Then he came back and sat down with the paper in his hand. “Oddly enough, this wasn’t written by a practicing poet. It was written by a psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Stekel. Here’s what he-Are you still with me?”

“Yes, sure I am.”

“Here’s what he said: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.’”

…

You could tell he wasn’t tired at all, though. He was pretty oiled up, for one thing. “I think that one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there. But immediately. You can’t afford to lose a minute. Not you.”

I nodded, because he was looking right at me and all, but I wasn’t too sure what he was talking about. I was pretty sure I knew, but I wasn’t too positive at the time. I was too damn tired.

…

Once you get past all he Mr. Vinsons, you’re going to start getting closer and closer–that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it–to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour.

(The rest of Mr. Antolini’s thoughts regard the fact the scholarly men can express themselves better and clearer and are much much more humble. He also went on about finding out the size of one’s mind during the studies, knowing precisely how much and what fits in. Also he mentions that scholarly men, when brilliant and creative to begin with (which is rarely the case), tend to simply leave more records behind them. So they contribute more and let others learn from them.)

Almonds (bitter as well as sweet) contain about 50% of a fatty oil, which is, though, too expensive to be used for cooking. It is made up of glycerides (80% oleic acid, 15% linoleic acid, 5% palmitic acid).

Bitter almonds contain 3 to 5% amygdalin, a so-called cyanogenic glycoside composed of mandelic nitrile and gentobiose. Vegetative parts of the almond tree accumulate the analogous prunasin (with glucose as sugar component).

On enzymatical hydrolysis of these glycosides by β-glucosidases, the aglycon mandelic nitrile (2-hydroxy-3-phenylacetonitrile) is liberated. A second enzyme (mandelonitrile lyase) converts mandelic nitrile quickly to benzaldehyd (C6H5-CHO) and hydrocyanic acid (HCN, also known as prussic acid). By chance, both compounds are olfactorily similar, but hydrocyanic acid is highly toxic; bitter almonds’ value as a spice is only due to the benzaldehyd.
Almond flower

Hydrocyanic acid is a dangerous poison (about one twentieth of a gram is considered lethal for an adult), but it is also very volatile and susceptible to hydrolysis at higher temperatures. Therefore, significant amounts of hydrocyanic acid are highly unlikely to accumulate in any dish prepared with bitter almonds. On the other side, incorporation of whole raw bitter almonds is fairly dangerous because, in this case, all of its hydrocyanic acid is formed in one’s stomach. Serious poisoning is quite rare with adults, but children may be killed by just a few bitter almonds. Very similar warnings hold for other plants of the genus Prunus, the kernels of which all contain amygdalin: Peach, apricot and, to a lesser extent, cherry and plum. One kernel of bitter almond yields about one milligram of hydrocyanic acid.

It should be noted that bitter almonds can only develop their aroma if both water and the necessary enzymes are present. The two enzymes (called together emulsin) are desactivated by heat; thus, bitter almonds must never be fried nor roasted, for they will not develop almond aroma afterwards.

Sweet almonds are, by centuries of cultivation and breeding, very low in amygdalin and, thus, harmless; however, even sweet almond trees sometimes yield single bitter almonds (up to 1% of total crop), and some sweet almond cultivars still contain traces of bitter almond aroma. This does not apply to Californian almonds, which can be regarded totally destitute of amygdalin.

Principally, sweet and bitter almonds are very different products and can never substitute each other.

Source: Gernot Katzer’s Spice Dictionary

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
-George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)

Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.
-Henrik Ibsen, playwright (1828-1906)

Dnes som dostal mily mail v ktorom bolo toto:

Žil raz jeden malý chlapec, ktorý mal veľmi zlú povahu. Otec mu dal vrecko klincov a povedal mu, že vždy, keď sa nahnevá, nech zatlčie jeden klinec do plota vzadu za domom.

Prvý deň chlapec zatĺkol do plota 37 klincov. Za niekoľko týždňov sa naučil kontrolovať svoj hnev a počet zatlčených klincov sa postupne znižoval. Zistil, že je jednoduchšie ovládať zlosť ako zatĺkať klince do plota.

Nakoniec prišiel ten deň, keď sa chlapec ani raz nenahneval.
Povedal to otcovi a otec mu navrhol, aby teraz chlapec vytiahol vždy jeden klinec, keď sa za cely deň ani raz nenahnevá. Dni sa míňali a chlapec po čase mohol povedať otcovi, že v plote nezostal ani jeden klinec.

Vtedy zobral otec chlapca za ruku a zaviedol ho k plotu. Tam mu povedal:
“Urobil si dobre, chlapče, ale pozri sa na diery v plote. Ten plot už nikdy nebude taký, aký bol. Keď povieš niečo v hneve, tak to zanechá pravé takéto jazvy. Ako keď zabodneš do človeka nôž a vytiahneš ho. Nezáleží na tom koľkokrát povieš ľutujem, rana stále zostava. Rana spôsobená slovom boli rovnako ako fyzický úder.

Priatelia sú vlastne veľmi vzácne drahokamy.
Rozosmievajú ťa a podporujú ťa vo všetkom. Vypočujú ťa, ak máš starosti, pochvália ťa a vždy sú ochotní otvoriť ti svoje srdce.”

Tento týždeň je Medzinárodným týždňom priateľstva.

Ukáž svojim priateľom, ako veľmi Ti na nich záleží. Pošli tento e-mail každému, koho považuješ za PRIATELA. Aj keď to znamená, že ho pošleš späť tomu, kto Ti ho zaslal. Ak sa Ti vráti späť, znamená to, že máš okruh priateľov.

Don’t need it? Get one anyway! You’ll not regret it.

I felt no need for an MP3 player and although I thought of iPod as a nice little toy, I didn’t WANT one as I didn’t find much time to listen to music anyway..An impulsive buy a few days ago after I held it in my hand for the first time surprised me and worried me - afterall, it wasn’t a small amount of money. After I uploaded a few tunes on it my remorses have gone away.

iPod is a stunning gadget, probably the most beautiful one, and I’ve had many. If you have a sense for detail you’ll appreciate it even more. Handling, navigation in the menu, the touch sensitive surface, all is an ingenious work of art.

Recommendation - don’t try to save money on the remote if you plan to use your iPod outside.

Message for WinXP users - please follow my instructions to upload songs for the first time on your iPod. If a good soul somewhere hasn’t written them on the ipodlounge, I’d be lost and very distressed. Here we go:
1) Charge up the battery.
2) Go to apple.com/ipod and download the newest updater (2.1 now) and install it.
3) Connect your iPod to your PC. Go to my computer and format the removable drive that appears there with FAT32. This will take up to 20 mins, so don’t worry.
4) Now run the iPod updater which you installed in step 2.
5) After the updater puts the necessary EPROM information on your iPod it will tell you to plug it into the power supply to flash the ROM.
6) After you plug it into power supply flashing starts and after a few minutes you are ready.
7) Install iTunes (apple.com/itunes/download) and connect your iPod. You’re set. It works like a charm. Not to mention the incredible speed with which gigabytes of songs will transfer to you iPod.

The above has save me lot of nerves, and from what I read some people actually returned their iPods because the process for WinXP wasn’t documented. Apple should do something about it, perhaps their website, hint-hint?

As for the headphones, I’m quite an audiophile and they are very good, not too big too, like many say.

Good luck and many enjoyable listening hours.

iPod has changed the way I listen to music…