laduree

A small amount of time hanging around in cafes before back into the usual mayhem of meetings and schedules.

la différence

Usually when I'm travelling for business there is little time to see the places that I visit. That's unless I'm there for a while on some kind of assignment, when I do manage to get out. So despite being in Paris three times in the last few weeks, this is the first time that I've really had a chance to amble around, take in some sights and sit in cafes.

Yes, I've been in Paris on my own time rather than for work, and that makes quite a difference to the perspective.

I do know my way around pretty well and have stayed in plenty of different spots in the past, so there is a familiarity to the geography and the way things connect together. I'll admit that I mentally transpose London's format onto Paris when I think about some of the areas, with Gare du Nord as Liverpool Street, the Champs Elysee as Oxford Street and the Eiffel Tower as the part around Waterloo. The Rive Gauche is the bit by Southwark. Its a weird way to think of the areas, but it works for me and its the only city where I have that kind of arcane geography, useful for calculating walking distances.

Of course, the actual areas I've just described are uniquely Parisienne, and everything from the weather to the police look very different.

But that's another story.

Paris

still in Paris

Places

I am in Paris tonight but i only just realised I've been in a different place every night this week.

keep cool and carry

Almost a Wordless Wednesday moment.

prinsengracht

It may be two forty in the morning, but I've just finished work until my 0700 call.

blur

Maybe a quiet blog week as I'll be spending most of it in planes, hotels, offices, cars and taxis.

beats per minute

An early morning bicycle spin today, which was more or less a test that the various parts of the bike in question were functional.

I've been out a few times over the last few weeks but on a different bike with extra lights and other paraphernalia associated with the wintery months.

My last trip on the bike with the thin tyres was the day I slithered rather ungracefully to the icy ground and even now I have the last remnants of the scrapes to my knee.

It started today with me squeezing the tyres and noticing the front one was too squidgy. A few moments with the footpump fixed that and the back tyre seemed okay. I clipped on the little speedo/monitor gadget and remembered to press start.

Pleasant early morning, birds chirping, little traffic and then after about 20 minutes a beeping sound.

The speedo unit was beeping at me. By this stage I'd gone up and down a few hilly bits and was starting to feel the exertion. Except the unit was saying my heart rate was about 35 bpm. That's low. It said it was too low. It certainly didn't feel like 35. More like at least 135.

I decided it was better to switch the unit off and read the instructions again.

cat's eyes

I've been listening to the Cat's Eyes album, which is by Faris Badwan, frontman of the Horrors, and Rachel Zeffira the opera singer.

But this isn't a faux classical trip, just a classic.

The first time I heard it as an album was in reverse, courtesy of that iTunes thing where a CD's tracks get reversed in 'recently loaded' or whatever its called.

And the first striking thing I noticed was the space on the sound. Really wide - a kind of old school analogue stage with the music rolling gently away. I continued with the reverse listening and decided that this was one chilled album.

Most of the songs are only two or three minutes long, but the effect is a very solid work of instantly re-listeneable music. There's all kinds of little sonics included, a touch of early Pink Floyd synth and Cor Anglais on a track called 'Bandit' plus sweeping violas and vibraphones dotted here and there. Laura Palmer would have played it at Twin Peaks.

There's channeling of 60's style pop, and some tricks played with the vocals without resorting to the annoying comedic ueber-autotuning on most of pop radio output at the moment.

Spacey trippy, pass the jasmine joss.

insidious robots among hipsters

I was asked a couple of questions about twitter the other day. In responding I was reminded of a few of the daft things I did when I started using twitter.

I've never paid much attention to the number of followers etc, being more interested in deciding which people or organisations to follow to get information about things I'm interested in. When I started, the whole of twitter was relatively empty compared with nowadays, and it did take a time for some of it to click into place.

My @rashbre is therefore a chronological mix of some friends, some well known people and an eclectic mix of other 'follows' dependent upon whichever fad I'm interested in at a particular time. So there's high-tech, photography, bicycling, music, writing and a bunch of other topics that I track.

The thing is, my @rashbre account has far less followers than another one of mine called @frederickblogs (fred blogs) which I set up as a joke and which has only ever posted six or seven entries.

Then there's the little set of characters I created as part of the launch for 'The Triangle'. @trianglebigsy, @triangleclare, @trianglejake and @chuckmanners. They all get more followers than me, although they all have scripted tweets that blurt out at random intervals. Here's an example from @chuckmanners:

...I am also being folllowed - The sweater has a Danish pattern.
...gaffer tape on a bike saddle is a great way to hide things
...heading for the tube. easier to hide.
...hiding out in this cafe whilst the people who looked as if they were following me walk on by. Call me paranoid??
...theres some smoke coming up from that grill. looks suspicious.
...i think i am being followed along this street.
...this lock up garage looks like something an arms dealer would use.
...That guy across the street has different earphones in each ear. I think he's carrying a wire.
...Just found another Phone sim card in this rental car. That's the third one. Something suspicious about this.

Of course, the messages from Chuck are supposed to be a little bit paranoid, whereas the ones from Jake are more 'whimsical hipster bohemian'. I set them up ages ago and its surprising how when they turn up and interact with one another it creates a sort of vague backstory, which was the idea after all. I see @sarahlund is doing something similar.

And then my somewhat pointless @bubbleoOo which sends streams of bubbles into the twittersphere at random intervals. Simply things like ...oooOOO OO.O o .

Yes, it also has more followers than @rashbre.

And don't get me started on @mrtictac.

right royal edition

There's always a few safe bets for car innovations at the start of April.

Alongside the new Land Rover self-levelling tax disk holder (very useful on a 4x4), there's also the new BMW M3 2011 Royal Wedding Edition, in an exclusive Bridal White, with a special version of the logo.

I downloaded the advertisement using gestures with that new Google Motion software, which interacts via the camera on my iPhone.

It's a lot easier since the AA smoothed the roads around here with their AA Pothole Assist

little eagles

I see its fifty years since Yuri Gagarin's first orbit around the earth. To celebrate it as a piece of Big History there's a new play by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It's by Rona Munro and tells the story of Sergei Korolyov who was the chief designer of the Soviet space programme.

The play shows how Korolyov leaves a Gulag in Siberia after being wrongly accused as a Nazi sympathiser (because they both made rockets). He makes his way some 4000 miles to Moscow whilst still technically under arrest, so that he can rejoin a rocket programme.

Then he juggles the demands of the new politicos Kruschev and Brezhnev whilst figuring out how to get to the moon. He may not have made it to the green cheese, but his teams celebrated many of the other firsts associated with space.

It reminds me of the strange reverse logic of space travel. When I used to read comics as a lad, the space stories were futuristic but had possibilities. Most technologies accelerate, but space travel has gone into reverse. There's actually 12 men that have walked on the moon. Some have now died and others are in their later years.

Korolyov's little eagles are still very rare birds.