Jul/090
Google Latitude. The real Marauders' Map
Remember how everyone started to bang on about how mobile phones would be used to track people's whereabouts as soon as they'd seen mobile phone triangulation on the TV? Then GPS was added to phones and people started to think that if they gave their 7 year old kid a mobile phone and tracked them on a computer, it would stop them getting in trouble.
Now there's Google Latitude. Free, as Google services invariably are, Latitude actually allows you to create a network of friends who are moving around on a map according to their fairly frequently (every 5 mins or so) updated GPS location.
Amazing. It's like the Marauders' Map in Harry Potter. Here's the little snippet that Google kindly gave me which should show you my actual, real physical location.
See if you notice me going to the pub at about 6 o'clock.
Jul/090
Proud father of a Pak Choi
And in other news, my little toy vegetable patch is starting to produce. With all the potatoes, spinach, lettuce & pak choi etc coming out of the garden at the moment, I've hardly bought a vegetable for a fortnight.
Check out this bad-boy pak choi (chinese cabbage) which I took out today. My dad brought some titchy seedlings over from the UK in the car when visiting in May, and amazingly they grew into.... well.... stuff that looks like this. I'm very proud.
Real, proper veg that I grew myself.
Jul/090
Viral Emails
Viral email has been around for a long time, and there's still folk out there (my dear mother being one of them) who forward them on to their inbox. I usually skim through such email, rarely seeing anything I haven't seen before, but I saw this for the first time this morning, and thought it was quite clever. Interesting enough to post here on the blog in fact.
How the British Government is doing business today
A rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a £50 note on the reception counter and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.
The hotel proprietor takes the £50 note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.
The Butcher takes the £50 note and runs to pay his debt to the pig raiser.
The pig raiser takes the £50 note and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.
The supplier of feed and fuel takes the £50 note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit.
The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the £50 note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.
The hotel proprietor then lays the £50 note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.
At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his £50 note after saying that he did not like any of the rooms and leaves town.
No one earned anything.
However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.
Jul/092
VTT in the Grand Massif
I'm going to use the word VTT instead of mountain biking from now on. It's French for Vélo Tout-Terrain & it's quicker and easier to say and to write than Downhill Mountain Biking. French style VTT is more me I think.
So I went to the Grand Massif the other day. Camped over night at Flaine I managed to try 3 different lifts in three different villages: Flaine, Les Carroz and Samoens.
My last run in Samoens was sunny, long and epic but I'd say the best terrain is in Les Carroz. Which is handy because it's also the closest when driving from Chamonix. Carroz has got dedicated VTT pistes which walkers are not allowed on.
For a very reasonable 15 euro-bucks a day (or EUR 50 for the whole summer season if you're so inclined), you have the use of 5 or 6 lifts within a roughly 50km radius. This opens up the idea of using lifts to do a downhill mountain biking tour for people who don't really want to have to wear body armour.
View VTT in the Grand Massif in a larger map
In Flaine I got a puncture & fixed it by the side of the track in about 5 minutes. Was quite chuffed. Firstly that I actually had a spare inner tube and a pump with me, but also because..... well I don't think I've ever changed a bike tire before. And it was either get it right or push the bike 10km downhill.
A great 2 day break from the busy life I lead in Le Tour and I'll be going back a few times this summer.
Jul/092
Asian Supermarket Food Box
Some of my favourite food comes from South East Asia, especially in the summer. It could be because the time I mispent in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and India was always very hot, so when it's hot in Europe I suddenly feel like eating noodles, chillies and stir fried green vegetables.
There's only one place in within a hundred km from where I live where you can buy the right ingredients. That would be the Angkor Store in Bonneville. It caters mostly to the region's few and far between Asian restaurants.
I loved the way the packing was done. Such a sustainable method. I'd bought a box o' stuff, and the lovely lady (whose mum and dad run the shop) packed it up so expertly. As she was running my jars through the till she asked me if I knew what my jar of Pickled Gouramy Fish was for. It was obviously the most disgusting thing in the world to her, but her dad explained to me that it's OK with vegetables, but I'd probably hate it. In fact he didn't even want me to buy it. But I bought it anyway. Along with all this other great stuff. And all this for EUR 40!
Asian Supermarket Box from Listingslab Productions on Vimeo.
View Angkor Store in a larger map
Jul/090
New Cards Yeah Thinking about sending a card to someone
Thinking about sending a card to someone? why not choose one of these from our new luxury ballbreaker range, fresh out today, keep one step ahead of the pack yeah, available
Jul/090
Aquaculture
That's my new word for the day. I'm gettting a little bored of work. C'est normale right? Work is work and aquaculture is?
Well, its the term used for fish husbandry.
It seems to be commonly thought that freshwater fish are difficult to farm and hold up farmed trout as an example of how unpalatable trout is. But how about Organically Farmed Carp? Made famous to certain foodies by Hugh F-W, Philip Booth was featured in the Channel 4 serie. I was wondering how he was gettting on after a few years. Turns out he has a blog. And a very good one too.
http://ruscombegreen.blogspot.com
Aquaculture Specialist
http://ruscombegreen.blogspot.com/2007/11/uks-first-organic-carp-farm.html
Jul/090
C’est La Crise
I learned a new French expression in the bar the other night. 'C'est La Crise'. La Crise is the crisis. In this case, the financial crisis. I overheard a local business owner complaining that his sports equipment rental shop wasn't doing much business this summer. His friend shook his his head and said those words morosely. Brilliant. A catchall phrase which sums up everything that's wrong with the world these days.
It reminds me of working in London in the year 2000 when the dot com bubble crashed. It was obvious the party was over and the money had run out. Everyone was getting laid off and there was nowhere to go to once you were laid off. Tough times. I left the country and went to live in Australia for a while rather than rubbernecking that particular car crash. But after a year or two, those people who knew what they were doing could find work again. What goes around comes around?
will give financial advice for food
Jul/092
Most dangerous of dangerous sports
I've had a go at lot of dangerous sports in my time. Scuba Diving, Parachuting, Surfing, Climbing, Skiing and Paragliding to name but a few. All of those have their own particular risks of death and injury, but without doubt the most dangerous sport I've ever done in terms of risk of catastrophic impact injury and broken bones is downhill Mountain Biking. I've blogged a bit about the kind of body armor we use, but you can't protect every inch of yourself.
After Sunday's outing in Les Houches I have got one of the largest bruises I've ever had in my life. My more experienced biking partner Fred convinced me to try jumping my bike over a couple of fallen tree trunks on the steep single track we were descending. I failed spectacularly to do this, instead crashing the bike and wrecking my unprotected thighs on the pedals and rocky ground.
A couple of days later and the best bruise is looking like this. Doesn't hurt though. Further proving what a double 'ard bastard I am :)
Mountain Biking Bruise
Jul/090
Funky Foods Chamonix
Great news for the Chamonix Valley today. Some very good friends have been working towards setting up a new delicatessen in town for a while. A husband and wife team consisting of a very talented chef, and an equally talented hostess have decided to stop hosting chalets and sailing yachts and open up a shop here in Chamonix.
After a few delays (setting up a business in France is always a pain), our friends picked up the keys to their shop yesterday. Funky Foods will be opening for the winter season this year after an extensive re-fit (the shop used to be a hairdressers).
I'm glad to say that Listingslab Productions will be doing the Funky Food Chamonix website and in my excitement I have even come up with a logo. A proper designer will be working on the brand in the coming months, but it's a start.
I'm stoked about this venture and happy to be involved as the web-geezer. I've been building up a portfolio of Chamonix based websites for a while now. I'm developing an Internet Marketing Service at the moment. I'm using free open source technologies such as Drupal and wordPress to rapidly create effective marketing sites for small businesses at a very low cost. It's a business model referred to as Professional Open Source, and the initial research and development has shown great results.
Here's a short list of some of the Chamonix Valley based websites we are currently running our beta service on:
Le Delice Restaurant
All Mountain Performance
The Savoy Bar
Alpine Ski And Golf
Chamofix
The aim is to be adding to this list over the summer. We want to remove the cost barrier to creating a small business website in the first place and instead create long-term marketing partnerships with these companies.