Reminds me of this Barney Stinson quote: “Suit up!”

Via Bits (NY Times).

- Where are you from?
- From France.
- No, I mean, your origins?
- Oh, Laos.
- Great, have you already been there?
- Never.
- Don’t you have family there?
- I’ve been adopted actually.
- Oh, sorry (getting embarrassed and moving on another topic…)

This one last sentence is the one I don’t get. Why are people sorry every single time I tell them this “story”?

Sorry for not knowing my biological parents? Sorry for being educated by total strangers? Well, I’ll tell you what. A couple (or, maybe it’s just a woman) abandon me like cowards and you’d be less sorry if I lived with these parents?

Truth is, I’ve had the best parents any kid could have dreamed. They reached the perfect balance between severity and freedom for making me grow up the right way. They succeed at a task a lot of people fail: taking good care of their child. Now there’s no reason for you to be sorry about that, right?

So, next time you’ll meet another adopted people, think twice before saying you’re sorry!

Note: Please don’t use this picture, it’s a really personal memory.

Truth is, I’ve always blamed bookmarks for not being efficient. I’m a keyboard guy. The less I use my mouse/touchpad, the more I use my keyboard to do stuff, and, the more I’m happy. I guess this is the way I’ve been raised, I’m a Mac guy, I grew up with keyboard shortcuts, and they’re so efficient. So why would I waste time grabbing my mouse and moving it to be able to click on what I want, when I just can type a URL much more faster with my cmd + L shortcut? For sure, autocompletion features helped with this choice, too.

I’m bookmark free since 1998. And I’m happy with not having any bookmarks on my computer.

But a few years ago, a revolution happened: touch interfaces, iPhone, and more recently iPad. Thing is, I don’t like to move my fingers to another device, and I think it’s a waste of time. But with an iPhone or an iPad for instance, there’s only one real device, which mixes the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen. So now, it becomes much more efficient when you have bookmarks, since you don’t have to move your hand/fingers a lot. They’re just one touch away, while it’s a much more complicated process to reach a bookmark on a classic computer

And I really thank Apple for this. Because thanks to their touch devices, now I see the real value of bookmarks.

Photo credit: Dave Crosby

This guy isn’t really smart. No offense, really, what I mean is that he’s not Sheldon Cooper or Albert Einstein, he didn’t go to college, and I’m not even sure he went to high school. But the thing is, this man is now an entrepreneur. Gardening is a dirty job, it’s a lot of hard and manual work, with sometimes hard work conditions (rain, hot temperatures, etc.). I have to admit something, I admire him. The fact that he is running his own company makes me have a huge respect for him.

We didn’t share a lot about his entrepreneur experience, but here some key things about entrepreneurship.

The client number of my father is number 0001. The very first one (it’s actually very weird when you see that on your bill). He gave him a chance without knowing if he was good or not. He didn’t have any experience before working at my house. The only reasons he hired him were because I knew him, and because my dad usually prefers to support local economy.

My friend is a hard worker. He does a great job. So, my father recommended him to his clients and his friends networks, so that he could have more clients to work with. This is why your network matters. It helps you grow your business.

I strongly believe that if you do a great job, there is only one issue: you succeed. And someday I’d like to be an entrepreneur.

Claire Denamur – In the mood for l’amour

Joyce Jonathan – Je ne sais pas

Izia – Let me alone

Cœur de Pirate – Pour un infidèle

As I discussed yesterday with Jérôme & Sophie, I think a blog based exclusively on pictures taken in fitting rooms would create great opportunities while being totally inexpensive. Plus, in terms of marketing, it can be really really positive for brands.

Now ladies (especially Sophie), think about it, be creative and innovate the startup way, if you don’t wanna be considered as yet another famous-fashion-blogger follower. Do it because I’m sick of seeing fashion blogs that look like each other.

Photo credit: Flickr user torley

It’s been one year today. I love you. And I miss you.

Photo credit: Elsa Kawai

It was great seeing Mathieu, Wendy and their friends. It was also very fun to meet some amazing people like Melody or Iris. Too bad I didn’t get the chance to meet some other people I had planned to meet, but since I’ll come back someday, it’s not a big deal.

More pictures on the dedicated Flickr set.

For those who asked, I won’t move to Paris. This will be a remote job, which means my office will be my home, so I’ll stay in Toulouse for now. I assume it’s gonna be hard, but as I’ve never worked this way, I think it will definitely be a good experience.

I’ve always said I really like this project (see my French blog post about it). Hellocoton is certainly one of the coolest French projects I’ve seen so far. I’m really happy to join the team, and I’m excited about developing new features on the website. Also, I’m very excited about working in a startup which has an in-house designer (people who know me know how much I think the UI & UX aspects are important on a website).

It’s the beginning of a new chapter of my life, and I’m pretty sure this new adventure will be as awesome as my previous gig.

Today, it’s time for me to say goodbye. Of course, I’m going to miss my colleagues, and I’ll keep an eye on what’s going on in this very interesting startup. Again, thanks to my three bosses, who offered me this amazing first job opportunity.

I have plans for this month: With Victor, I’ll visit some friends (Wendy, Mathieu, Elsa, and others) in San Francisco between March 13th and 23rd.

When not in SF, I’ll be working on an awesome but top-secret project with my friend Cédric. More on that when It’ll be released.

After my trip, I’m going to start a super exciting new adventure, but I’ll write about it later on.

Photo credit: Elsa

Of course, this hotel might not be a good one for me, because I have hard times trying to sleep, but I assume it’s OK for most of people. And you can sleep in a 4star class bed for approximately €40, so I guess it’s worth the price.

There’s a lot to learn from the 9 hour capsule hotel in Tokyo. I tend to think that most web applications should embrace the same key principles of this hotel: high quality, minimalism, and easy to understand features.

I’ll certainly spend a night there when I visit Tokyo someday.

Via Design Boom (shared by Mathieu)

The 2UNFOLD laptop bag is definitely going into my wishlist. I heard some women spend more than €400 for a simple LV bag. I guess €379 would be worth it according to the 2UNFOLD’s versatility.

Via Piotr’s tumblelog

Again, thanks to Exsonvaldes for the show. You guys totally fit my definition of what an artist should be: better on stage than on CD. “There’s no place like homes”, their new album has been released today on the iTunes Store, and it’s worth buying (I bought it saturday after the show, so I know what I’m talking about).

Also, thanks to Thien & Laurent for hosting and organizing the show, but also thanks to Victor for hosting me this week-end.

Video credit & more info: Victor

WTF is it exactly?

Well, to make it short, Bllsht.net is a place where any twitter user can denounce another user and proclame he/she is saying lame stuff. It might be a bit mean at first, but it’s in fact really funny. It was built because Victor and I noticed that the blogosphere, especially the one from Paris, has a lot of haters.

What’s the point?

A friend of mine told me he didn’t get the point. Well, it’s true that voting x or y is full of shit is not that interesting. The real point is personal. Of course, it’s all about the fun, but it’s also a matter of skills. I love side-projects because they are like a playground where I can try new technologies. I could have done this website using LAMP stack, which is certainly the most used stack in the world, but I chose different technologies to improve my skills.

The technical stack.

The app is hosted on a very basic server (and very low-cost), it’s not even 64bits enhanced.

The webserver is Lighttpd, mostly because I think Apache’s configuration is a real pain in the ass neck. Lighty serves static content such as images and css files.

The code is on Tornado, the open-source Python framework that powers FriendFeed (Lighty acts as a reverse proxy). I like it because I like the way you can code different actions according to the HTTP method, which makes the code a lot more RESTful (the code is a bit similar as web.py apps or Google App Engine apps). If you’re a developer too and don’t know about Tornado, you might wanna have a look at my basic Tornado app on GitHub. Plus, I’m getting a bit sick of PHP, which is really messy. Python, on the other hand only let you write nice and clean code.

All the stored data is stored on MongoDB, which is a DocDB such as CouchDB (but much more advanced imho). At first I’ve been playing around K/V store like Redis, but MongoDB includes in some ways classic RDBMS features, which is not negligible…

I might be writing soon a blog note about creating twitter mashups and using the twitter API.

A big thanks to my friend Victor for the design, and to my friend Wendy, who was really helpful for copywriting (yes, my english is crappy…). Also, thanks to the early beta-testers for their feedback.

I don’t know what I’m gonna do with the old design, maybe a Tumblr theme. So stay tuned!

Feel free to leave any suggestion/criticism in the comments section. Even if you’re drunk.

This is a picture of the Koutoubia Mosque. I guess it is this Mosque, but I’m actually not able to confirm. The whole set is available on Flickr. Sorry, the battery of my camera went down during the trip. Also, you may want to see more pics of this trip.

Again, thanks to my three bosses (Julien Romanetto, Frédéric Montagnon & Gilles Moncaubeig) for organizing this awesome trip!

This project was launched by Crush + Lovely (and Deltree), one of the coolest creative studio in the world. If you don’t know about ‘em, you really should have a look at their gorgeous website. Seeing so many gorgeous stuff makes me think that I wouldn’t mind to work at in (or launch) a company like Crush + Lovely

Via Mathieu

Please, note that comments in French will be ignored (and maybe deleted, because I am devilish haha), as well as impolite ones.

Enjoy

I remember when I first discovered Cocoon, two years ago, on Jennifer’s old blog (The new one is called Baskets & Minijupe, which literaly means Sneakers & Miniskirt), on a Friday afternoon. Pownce was alive at this time, and I had no idea that this little girl met on a hype social network would become one of my very best friends. And now, everytime I hear about Cocoon, It makes me think of her.

Take care & get better Jen.

FYI, this painting is part of Public Ad Campaign, an initiative of Jordan Seiler and a few artists (including Philip Lumbang) who just replaced dozens of illegal billboard ads in New York by street art paintings (more details on the NYTimes). It reminds me a bit of DoGood HQ, a browser plug-in, which is supposed to replace ads with green related initiatives ads.

More cute friendly bears saying “Oh, Hi” on Unurth.

Via Good.is.