I’m no expert at surfing (I managed to do a few successful take-offs, though), but the Pavones bay seems to be a real surfers heaven, a lot of people come from all over the world to surf Pavones’ famous left, from pros to surf fans.

This pictures were taken in the four famous spots in this area: Playa Zancudo, Puerto Pilon (where I was staying), Punta Banco and Playa Rio Claro de Pavones (generally called Pavones, famous for having the longest left in the world).

More pictures on my Costa Rica set on Flickr.

Oh, and you should check out the behind the scenes footage, too.

This is the proof that the Pyrénées have great skiing/snowboarding spots, contrary to common belief :)

Fun fact: usually, pro riders Facebook pages are categorized as Athletes. But Kilian Martin’s Facebook Page is filed under Artist. Which is actually much more appropriate, because the guy really is an artist.

I guess the photograh of Les jardins du Luxembourg in Paris catched my eye, for some reason.

Tame Impala is an Australian band who makes awesome psychedelic rock. Lonerism is probably the best psych rock album I’ve listened to since White Fence’s Is Growing Faith, and God knows how much I love White Fence. Oh, and I love how they define their music: psychedelic hypno-groove melodic rock music. Simply awesome.

Here’s Keep on lying, probably the best song of the album, almost six minutes of pure happiness.

More pictures are available on my Flickr (well, more isn’t really appropriate since the whole set contains only a dozen of shots)

Kødbyen is the meat packing district of Copenhagen. It is where every butcher in town make business. Somehow, in the middle of all this meat industry and its warehouses, bars rise at night, and Kødbyen becomes the best place to party in the city.

There’s a room for everyone, whatever your style is. There are some metal bars, some more fancy like Karriere. We ended up in this little bar called Jolene. This bar used to be located in Nørrebro, but has been shut down by the authorities for excessive noise. The owners brought it back to life in this trendy neighborhood.

My friends and I use to stand in front of the door of bars, listen to the beat, and then decide if we go in. We got seduced by a very good Berlin inspired, bouncy but minimal electro beat. So we decided to step in. The first thing you notice when you enter is a writing on the wall: “We are not a fucking cocktail bar”.

The tone is set. This must be the place.

Photo credits: Mikael Colville-Andersen

I found this live video of Charlotte singing Treasure Island and I instantly loved it. Her voice is incredible and it’s really too bad we can’t feel how much potential it has when we listen to her studio album.

Charlotte O’Connor is signed on Drop In Music (Quiksilver records). Her new single Addicted will be out on May 12th 2012 (yes, tomorrow), and an EP should be available later this summer/fall.

Special merci to Marie :)

Did you say it?
“I love you. I don’t ever want to live without you. You changed my life.”
Did you say it?
Make a plan. Set a goal. Work toward it, but every now and then, look around.
Drink it in.
‘Cause this is it.
It might all be gone tomorrow.

Anna Chalon is back and now goes under the name of Kiddo. Here’s a teaser of her new song “La Parisienne”, the entire videoclip should be online in the next two weeks, according to what she told me on Facebook.

Her first album, Where to?, is expected in fall 2012. I can’t wait for the release. Meanwhile, you can discover some of her new songs on Kiddo’s soundcloud.

This short movie was shot for the Urban Plagne Festival, a pro contest mixing cinema and freestyle skiing/snowboarding. This team ended up third, but they really deserve to be number one!

Here’s the main track, “Sayso”.

The EP is available on Evy Jane’s bandcamp.

Today, I’d like to share their song “Alunde (Aluia)”.

I couldn’t tell if this song is their best, but the story behind it is quite fantastic. The song was actually recorded in a Toyota Yaris with an iPhone 3GS in one take. Yes, in one single take. And it went straight to the album. How cool is that?

Their album, “Sagan”, is available on 1860′s bandcamp

After caving, hunting northern lights (we unfortunately didn’t see any), swimming in the Blue Lagoon’s hot water, we ended up in this little house of food called Eldhús, which you might be able to see if you’re in Reykjavik these days, in the middle of the Tjörnin lake. We had the chance to attend a very nice dinner cooked by Chef Thomas Sellers and meet some locals at the same time.

This last minute trip was amazing. Iceland wasn’t really at the top of my must-go list, but it is now. I can’t wait to go back and discover all the delicious things Iceland has to offer that I haven’t experienced yet (and yes, I think I’ll keep going back until I actually see a northern light with my own eyes).

More pictures can be found on my Flickr (including some pics of Reykjavik).

PS: Sorry about the vintage filter, but it was almost mandatory since everything was so dark ;)

Claire has released a new EP yesterday, including one of her songs and three fantastic covers. Here’s my favorite one, “Hang me up to dry”, originally performed by Cold War Kids.

Oh, and they released their new album “Young & Old” yesterday. So far, so good.

Fallulah – I lay my head

Mark Ronson Ft. Amy Winehouse – Valerie (the song actually starts at 0:30 but it’s worth seeing the intro)

Metronomy – Everything goes my way

The XX – Crystalised

Also, I kinda miss this meme, so I was thinking that maybe I’d post some songs every mondays. And since I’m not sure I will do it, I highly suggest that you subscribe to my friend Maxime’s mailtape, which will be sent in your inbox every sunday for sure.

Nadeah – Odile (from the album Venus Gets Even)

Mina Tindle – To Carry Many Small Things (from the EP Mina Tindle, via Littlesa)

Yellow Ostrich – Whale (from the album The Mistress, via Maxime‘s Mail Tape)

Beirut – East Harlem (from the album The Rip Tide, via Jen)

1. A lot of free hosts: it’s easy to find a PHP host, you just have to google “free php host” and you find a ton of free PHP/MySQL hosts
2. Bigger community: The PHP community is really huge, and it’s really easy to find a PHP developer
3. Easy to learn: Most people in the IT field have some notions of C. Adding a $ before every variable, forgetting about typed variables, and you’re good to go. It’s even simpler if you’ve done some Perl too.
4. We know when the line ends thanks to semicolons
5. Big websites use PHP: Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, and I should add Overblog because I used to work there. All these websites use PHP, and it scales pretty well.
6. Mark Zuckerberg uses PHP: The richest programmer in the world (well, he’s not a real programmer anymore, but he used to be) is a PHP developer, so PHP can actually make you rich!
7. Typing skills: due to a more “verbose” syntax, PHP improves your typing skills. This way, any PHP developer types faster than any Ruby one. And this is very important, because you chat faster so you spend more time actually working! ;)
8. Real blog engines & CMS: While PHP has WordPress, Drupal and Joomla (to mention the most famous ones), Ruby/Rails’ most famous products are Mephisto, Radiant and Locomotive. I think we can objectively say is that there’s a clear lack of features/plugins on the Ruby based systems, probably due to the smaller community?
9. Pear is better than Rubygem: OK, this was just a troll, to make the audience feel hurt and yell “BOOOO” very hard…
10. … Which leads us to our last slide: PHP dev have sense of humor ;)

Of course, saying that PHP is so much better than Ruby is pure bullshit, and this talk is, as I hope you guessed, a big big sarcasm. Trolling apart, I think this talk is also quite interesting, since somehow it shows some of the weaknesses of Ruby and its ecosystem.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun preparing and doing the actual lightning talk, and I can’t wait to create another funny one with Camille, even if some people don’t seem to understand our offbeat humor ;)

Slides by Camille Roux & Bastien Labelle: Why PHP is (so much) better than Ruby?