three boys and a little game of Risk

So Dennis proposed that we try out the site Warfish, which proposes a free correspondence Risk-like game (it emails you when it's your turn, and you play on the website). We sort of randomly fell into character, playing the game a little bit more like Diplomacy than anything else. Well, game over. We won't be telling you who won, but on this blog, we will be serialising our diplomatic communications and news broadcasts, hopefully with screenshots of the game on the side (maybe something like one post per round of turns, or one post per game year... will have to see).

Note that you can expect the writing to be awkward and for the story to be rather outlandish and silly. Do bear with us. We were making them up as we went along...

message to the americans 5 - julien

Julien comments to the American people about astronomy, telescopes and the economy.

In French, English subtitles.

Note that I've copied all my Message to the... videos to its own videoblog. The idea is that I can use that blog as a platform for collaboration with other expats around the world. Anyway, any messages collected by me or any of the GFD will be cross-posted here.

darcs developers at fosdem 2006

One of my recent hobbies lately has been to hack on my favourite revision control system, darcs. Last weekend at FOSDEM 2006, I actually got a meet a small handful of the developers, including David Roundy, the guy who started the project. Here we are:

slowly but surely

A long overdue purchase during France's biannual sales.


One thing you need to be careful of is that American underwear words can be false friends with French ones. Well, maybe one specific word anyway, "boxers". What we call "boxers" in English are "caleçon" in French. What the French call "boxers" are these tight clingy things with only a vague resemblance to boxers. Not tighty-whities, which appear to be called "slip" in France and not very frequently white.

message aux français 1: serena et kelvin

My sister in law Serena, and my brother Kelvin, speak to the people of France in the first ever message to the French. Topics addressed: Bush, Chirac and french friens. Thanks for letting me put this on the net, guys!

Ma belle soeur Serena et mon frère Kelvin parlent au peuple français dans ce tout premier message aux français. Les sujets abordés: Bush, Chirac et les frites. Merci, les gars, de m'avoir autorisé de mettre cette vidéo sur le net!

message aux français 5: mary

Mary speaks to the people of France. Extracted from my interview of her in July.

Mary s'addresse au peuple français. Extrait de mon interview avec elle en juillet.

b224+ gathered to celebrate eric's birthday

Yannick from b224 made a quick video during the traditional erician birthday dinner.

Merci, Yannick.

eric gets things done (questions answered)

Dennis had mailed me some questions about implementing the techniques in Getting Things Done, so I thought that maybe I should try posting a video blog response to give a better picture of how it all works.

Click picture to watch.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, GTD is this book with a pretty handy system for taking care of all the things in your life you want or need to do. It's turned me from a disorganised mess into something leaner, meaner and much much happier. And so I've been talking to people about it and annoyingly enough, evangelising. Sigh... I hate evangelists.

Seriously though, if you are at all like me in your chronic non-on-top-of-the-ballness, you should check this book out. It's not one of these annoying habits of effective people, what is the meaning of life, I am lovable and capable deals. Rather, it is a highly useful system broken down in language that even a lazy-ass techie like me can understand.

au coiffeur? chez le coiffeur?

I told the barber: "I don't like putting crap in my hair", but he didn't believe me. Then again, I also did tell him that he could whatever the heck he wanted and that I had complete confidence in his abilities.

Click picture to watch.