Réalisé grâce au Kinship Editor de Michael D. Fischer.

Best use of the expression “Your mileage may vary.”

Boing Boing: Google’s driving direx from New York to Dublin, Ireland

LOL!

Office 2007 is a bit unusual, for me. Been using it for a while (since it became available to Indiana University’s community) and have been enjoying some of the features. Still don’t really enjoy the “tape” interface in Word or PowerPoint but some things seem to have been planned pretty carefully.

For instance, I’m currently writing this in OneNote which seems greatly improved over OneNote 2003. Zoho Notebook seems simpler to use (and, obviously, will be available at no cost) but OneNote is sufficiently better from previous incarnations that it is conceivably a cool tool.

Completely unsolicited, of course. In no particular order.

• Outliners
• Malian tô millet and sauce dish
• Chungking Express poetic movie
• Open-mindedness
• Lamb sandwich from l’Olivier at Jean-Talon Market
• Oregon, long-lived and eclectic Jazz band
• Passion
• Boris Vian
• Ripe Brillat-Savarin cheese from Atwater Market
• West Africa
• Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories
• Teaching
• Mussels marinère with Belgian beer
• Open Access policies for academic texts
• French Chanson
• Quality beer and all-you-can-eat ribs at Redbones
• Geeky conversations
• Beef banh mi from Nhu Lan on Saint-Zotique
• Napping
• Cultural awareness
• Flemish Red ales
• Geek culture
• Orval tart and bitter Belgian ale
• Hedonism
• Peter Sellers’s Being There
• Free/Libre Open Source Software movement
• Reblochon cheese from Migros
• Myst-like adventure games
• Lactancia My Country unsalted butter
• PalmOS (GarnetOS) devices
• Le Paltoquet French theater-like movie
• Mort Subite gueuze on tap at Pianissimo
• Mountainous regions
• Sleep
• RJ Coup de grisou buckwheat ale
• TuniZika Tunisian music podcast
• Pieces of dry beef («rebibes») from Migros
• Apple computers
• Hiking
• Ripe avocados from Atlantic Superstore in June 2003
• Calabash Music "fair-trade" music store
• Hunting Island, SC
• Freshly-baked bread rolls from Doré mie
• Well-Rounded Radio open-minded music podcast
• View of Lake Leman from the BFSH2 building
• Friendship
• Sea scallops

A recent interview with Roger A. Clemens about coffee’s health benefits on the Science Talk podcast of the Scientific American magazine. The interview relates to a short column from the Food Technology journal:

IFT – January 2007, Volume 61, No. 1

To a coffee lover like me (I don’t resent the label “coffee geek“), these do sound like good news. In fact, one would think that with coffee’s long history, most of the health effects associated with the beverage have been considered and that the lack of conclusive evidence showing clear negative effects from coffee must somehow mean that coffee doesn’t have much negative effects.

As mentioned in the podcast interview, sweet milk-based coffee drinks are a different story.  Still, one might guess that only a small proportion of the coffee consumed by people observed for studies on coffee’s effects was “black coffee” (without milk and sugar). Furthermore, it doesn’t sound like the studies reviewed provided a clear distinction between different coffee-based drinks.

As conventional wisdom would have it, a straight shot of espresso made with selected arabica beans probably provides more health benefits than the sweet, milk-based, coffee beverages made with generic robusta beans generally consumed in different parts of the world.

Of course, someone will come along to provide evidence for the negative health effects of coffee. Looking forward to these.

All this to say that, even though these studies might go “my way,” I hope there’s more evidence given for the health effects of coffee.

Maurane – Il y a mille ans…
Maurane
IL Y A MILLE ANS…

Fini le temps du des désespoir désespoirs,
Des amours jetées dans le noir. Continue reading Maurane – Il y a mille ans… →

My reply to Martine Pagé’s post about her transition to Mac OS X.

Funnily enough, I moved in the other direction (I needed a dirt-cheap computer), back in late December. Still miss my 2001 iBook (500MHz, 384MB RAM) and Mac OS X.

One thing I noticed (and was mentioned by others, elsewhere) is that Flock is much less of a resource hog on Mac OS X than on XP. No idea why. Though I never had issues with Firefox on OSX, I had switched to Flock and this made my transition to XP less fun. Safari can be a great tool, especially if you use one of OSX’s best-kept secrets: Services.

Ah, Services! The best tools for compulsive writers. You know, those menu items like "Summarize," available in pretty much all Cocoa apps and several Carbon apps. They also include support for the system-wide multi-lingual spellchecker (a fantastic tool for us, bilingual writers). Be sure to check out some of these, especially WordService. And once you start using Nisus Thesaurus, you’ll wonder how you did without it.

Perhaps the main trick with the Mac, mentioned in several comments here, is to only use the mouse when you really have to. Especially if you use the Mac to write, at any length. Use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. Luckily, they’re very consistent across the system so you’ll be used to them in no time. When you’re writing, shortcuts are much more efficient than any kind of mouse movement. And you can usually apply shortcuts to any menu item. Menus are there to find out about features or to reach some of the lesser used features of an app.

Writing, on the Mac, is really pleasurable with the right tools. My favourite writing tools overall are outliners. Yes, there are outliners on any platform. But Mac OS X users arguably have a much better selection than anybody else. (What is widely recognized as the best outliner on Windows has been discontinued a number of years ago and doesn’t support any XML format.) If you’re interested in outlining, be sure to check ATPO. If you’re not yet into outlining, you might want to give OmniOutliner a try (IIRC, it comes preinstalled on new Macs as a trial version).

Another thing you might want to do is check out the wealth of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open-Source Software) on Mac OS X. Not only are most Linux projects also available on OSX but there are very high-quality projects made especially for Mac OS X. These tend to be über-productivity apps (i.e., efficient software for actual work) like the TeXShop TeX editor and the BibDesk bibliography manager. Or academic apps like TAMS Analyzer. But there are more "mainstream" apps like the Camino browser (mentioned here) and the TextWrangler text editor. To be honest, I almost never bought software for Mac OS X because so much of what I needed was already available for free.

Mac OS X is also a very cool geek platform. While the Mac OS turned us long-time users away from CLIs, Mac OS X integrates GUI and CLI elements extremely well. More often than not, I had a Terminal window open to do quick manipulations on files and processes. As any Unix geek knows, the shell is often the best place to accomplish real work.

I guess I’m writing this more out of nostalgia for my days working on Macs than to give you specific advice. There’s clearly a lot to say about Mac OS X.

Tags: Mac OS X, Windows-to-Mac, Camino, TextWrangler, BibDesk, TeXShop, OmniOutliner, Firefox, Safari.app, Mac OS X Services, keyboard-centric, writing tools, productivity, efficient computing, CLI, GUI, blog comments, Martine Pagé, compulsive writers

They got me. Not hooked, but interested again.

When you download Qumana, you’re expected to fill in your email address. It’s not required and the use of the email address is explained on the download page. For those of us with good filters against unsolicited emails, it’s not too scary. Didn’t think too much of it.

Tried Qumana a little while ago, along with other blogging tools. Can’t remember what it was that didn’t really convince me at that point, but there must have been something. Been blogging in my blogging system‘s Web editor since then. And wasn’t really thinking about other solutions.

Just got an email from Qumana telling us about a new beta version of their blog editor. Though the new features don’t sound that compelling to me, it got me interested again. And here I am, trying Qumana again.

And, you know, it’s not bad at all. Quite comparable to ecto. But free.

What would be really, really nice is a del.icio.us-like way to add tags, labels, and categories. Qumana does have an "insert tags" button which lets you add comma-separated tags. But these are, AFAIK, not connected with WordPress categories or Blogger beta labels. And it’s not exactly as useful as it could be. First, it could be a field in the editing window instead of a button. And it could work like del.icio.us in providing you with a context-sensitive list of possibly-relevant tags. This might have been the deal-breaker with Qumana for me before. You can use your WordPress categories, but you can’t add any.

Qumana’s strategy, of sending a reminder email to those who downloaded the program, is pretty much what it should be. It’s not sneaky, it’s not pressure-selling, and it’s not begging. But it’s a good way to connect with users. These guys got a clue.

Tags: Qumana, ecto, blogging tools, email reminder, cluetrain, marketing, respect users, categories, labels, tags, del.icio.us, WordPress, Blogger beta

LE PLUS BEAU VOYAGE:
J’avais trente-trois ans. Et ma vie.

Tiki Bar TV – Watch Tiki Bar – Forbidden Cocktails In A Swank Pad

One of my favourite podcasts…