Moving Paris 11e arrondissement

A few months ago my buddy JR decided to take all the walls of his apartment down to make a loft of it, lots of work and now the loft is taking place. JR also decided to move to Vietnam next month on a venture to expand his business, which leads to me moving in the loft when its ready, should be exciting.

I have been living for almost 2 years in a beautiful 27m2 apartment rue Francois Miron in Paris 4e arrondissement. The location is perfect and I am a little sad to move out, losing all my little St-Paul shops and restaurant just beside my door but I'm doubling in size and I have a good decoration budget. Let's do it...

Neige et Ski sur la Cote d'azur ce week-end?

jipp: t'es la ce we?
max: je vais skier!
jipp: what the fuck? tu va en suede ou quoi?
Max: Nice baby!
Y'avait 10 cm de neige dans les rues d'Antibes lundi soir.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27272993@N06/sets/72157610012416146/
Je dois aller a Sophia pour une reunion vendredi. Je ramene le char pourri d'Adrien dimanche et je ski samedi.

C'est zarebi de voir le vieux port d'Antibes sous la neige!

Sabourin NHL #1 GAA

How surreal to open the NHL.com stats page and see one of your long time best mates line up there in the #1 spot. He's been having the the best goal against average and save percentage for a little while but before yesterday's game, hadn't played enough games to be in the leader position. Good job buddy, and good pic, look like a bad ass!

Sequoia capital on startups and the economic downturn Presentation

Not a good time to be working for startups these days...

http://www.slideshare.net/eldon/sequoia-capital-on-startups-and-the-economic-downturn-presentation?type=powerpoint

Ideal, Scandinavie, Quebec, Video

Petit video envoye par une pot Quebecoise qui habite a Stockhom que j'ai croise lors de ma derniere visite la bas dans un port...

L'Idéal
envoyé par muvmedia

Greece 2008

Greece October 2008

Sweet 6 day getaway with the Thibault cousins in Athens and the Islands. Slept 2 nights in Spetses where we were the only tourists! Beautiful sunny weather, the sea was not too cold, the retsina very good ... not too shabby!

Les Justiciers masqués, Think big...

"Le piège des Justiciers masqués tendu à Sarah Palin a obtenu 30% de plus de volume de couverture dans le monde que les élections canadienne" Article cyberpresse
Truc de fou! Bravo! When same!
Pour ceux qui n'aurait pas entendu le desormais celebre prank, suivez ce lien.

Mac OS X 10.5.5 Combo Updater - DAVKit.framework issue

MBP Core Duo running 10.5.4 using the Mac OS X 10.5.5 Combo Updater.
After that the Finder kept crashing and generating CrashReporter errors about DavKit.framework.
Thank to this apple forum post, a simple replacement of the DAVKit.framwork System library I was able to save my leopard :)

Radar automatiques Paris: Changements, attention motos!!

Certains radars automatiques de Paris qui étaient de face ont récemment changer de sens pour être de derrière. Je me suis presque fait prendre à celui Porte de Passy Mardi soir, merci au motard qui roulait devant moi de m'avoir rallenti devant le radar :) Voir le site radars-auto

First game in 08-09

As unhappy I was Sabou didn't get the start on the Sunday night game in Stockholm, so amazing was it to watch him rock monday night on his season debut when I came back from Athens. Late night it is to watch hockey in Paris though ....
Sabou what up with the hair? Feels good to have no more, maybe I should use the clipper also :) Giddy up!

Greece meteo for the next few days ....

How happy am I today to hop on that plane for 6 days in Greece, especially when its sad and rainy in Paris :)

Volatility / Opportunity

Friday, I started looking on buying back back my stocks that had the hardest beat up but didn't get a chance to buy them before the bell. Nortel at 1,25$ and Bombardier at 3,50$ (which I sold at 6$ a few weeks back) looked pretty attractive and 2 indexes from ishares iShares CDN S&P/TSX Energy Sector Index and (poundered 60 % down in the bear run last month) and the iShares CDN S&P/TSX 60 Index Fund.

When learning about the 1700 Billion bailout plan from the Euro Zone I was really pissed I didn't step in on Friday but still tought there would be some opportunity on tuesday morning when TSX opens up after 3 days of non trading, but I was left a little perplex when I saw the bids before the opening. I guess I'll wait a little for the speculation craziness to settle down before I get in. These days I just wish I could trade all day. I want to get in the energy iShare index before the end of the day if it falls bellow 15.

Afghanistan

A cousin of mine just got sent to Afghanistan for the Canadian army to fight a war that isn't ours. Looks like he's enjoying the experience and wish him all the best. Got in touch with him on Facebook and got to see some pretty cool pictures. Keep safe little man .... feels like you were just a boy last time I saw you.

Stockholm NHL Hockey Premiere

Stockholm hockey Premiere

October 4th and 5th, the Pittsburgh Penguins were playing the Ottawa Senators for NHL season opener in Stockholm Sweden. Living in France, hockey is definitely one of those things that makes you miss home, so I was not going to miss the opportunity to visit Stockholm and to meet-up with my best childhood buddy Dany Sabourin who plays for Pittsburgh. Last time we saw was last month at my cottage in Val d'Or where we had the best fishing I had in years and we found it pretty cool to say "hey mate, see you in Stockholm!" for pics of the fishing results, follow this link

3 weeks ago Sabou confirmed he had 4 tickets for me for both game and we(J, Milot, TBo) booked flights + 2 rooms at Sheraton where the Pens were sleeping.

Highlights:
- Stockholm is an incredible city, its beautiful, people or so so cool, kind and helpful(after an hour of hard work I was able to recover my bran new 800Euros SLR camera that I had forgotten in a cab:)
- 2 great hockey games with the best seats in the arena just a few meters from Mario Lemieux
- seeing Sabou and being able to spend some time with him in Stockholm
- partying up in a private party with the players and pounding 6 bottles of Pommery
- Falling face to face with Mario Lemieux and the players all week-end and having a chat with Lemieux after a morning coffee.
- Travelling there from Paris with some of my best buddies

Ah man, hard to be back in Paris and go to work ..... thanks Bou for the ticks

The Beehive I once belonged too

	''Oracle Beehive delivers the only complete and open platform for secure communications and integrated collaboration. Oracle Beehive provides a complete range of collaboration services including conferencing, instant messaging, email, calendar, and team workspaces that can be deployed either on premise or through Oracle On Demand. Its cross-platform, open standards based architecture supports familiar clients like Microsoft Outlook and can coexist with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. Oracle Beehive delivers the next generation of collaboration through an integrated user experience and unified administration that leverages the enterprise capabilities built into Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Oracle Applications.''

Before I came down to France I spent 3 and 1/2 years at Oracle and most of it working on an R&D project called Beehive. My surroundings during that experience were truly some of the best professionals there are. An amazing little Time management company from Montreal called Steltor founded by Montreal locals and former McGill graduates Peter Egyed and Andre Courtemanche that was later bought by Oracle. That little family environment from Steltor survived inside that huge Oracle Corporation and part of the Beehive project. I had to leave the team to pursue some personal objectives I had set for myself and it was really the hardest and awkwardness professional move I had to do. Today I look at this product that I work hard developing and feel nostalgic I couldn't stick till the end but I am very proud to have been part of it. Having experienced Lotus Notes 8 for the past year I must tell I truly believe Beehive can get down there and get some good market share from IBM and Microsoft Exchange. Being open to protocols such as CaldaV co-authored by my manager :) it has a huge advantage on competitors. Looking at my Oracle stocks today I'm not missing the stock options I had to forgo as much as I used too ... I wish Success to Beehive and Oracle.

You can look at the demo here

The currency factor

During my first employment experience in Montreal back in the days, I worked for the world leading website for precious metals information and trading Kitco.com. With Alex, we developed a pretty sophisticated chart generation framework which is used to generate the thousands of charts you can consult on the site in real time.

Especially these days, I use these charts every day to analyze investment trends. Its cool to see some real life usage of what we work for.

The coolest feature of the framework is the ability to compare the price of commodities in different currencies. On the chart bellow you can see that on 60 trialling spot the price of gold has increased in Euro and decreased in US dollars.

Greg against Borja in Finals of Les Internationnaux de France de Squash

If your in Paris this week-end and want to discover an amazing sport, come down to Paris Univesite Club on Saturday night. Greg Gauthier, the 2nd ranked squash player in the world, Frenchmen and good friend will be battling for the title of the French Squash Open with Borja Golan the Spanish revelation of the tourney who brought his A game to Paris this week and caused 2 major upsets in two breathtaking matches. Greg has been on top of his game not loosing any game since the beginning of the tourney. Everything points to a clean win tomorrow but the Spanish fighter will be there playing every ball like it's for his life. You can look up site squash for more info.

The investment banking business responsability

Fetes de bayonne 2008

Last of this summer get-away was the week-end of my BDAY in Biaritz for les Fetes de Bayonne. We drove there during the night for the biggest traffic nightmare of the year in France. We thought we were wise driving by night but it dind't make a difference. The 7 hours drive ended up being 12 hours long in traffic jams. Getting there was all worth it thought finishing up with a chill day surfing some nice waves in Anglet.

Fetes de Bayonne 2008

Long week-end on the Cote d'Azur

Last week-end was on long week-end. On the Wednesday before, me and Alex decided we weren't going to stay in Paris and booked a flight for Nice to meet up with max and the Antibes crew. Here are Alex pics on Flick

So Max picked us up at the airport on Thursday, we went for diner on the beach in Juan Les Pins and payed 130 Euros for a bottle of wine, thanks to Alex for fucking that one up ;) Then we had Pisco at Claudios and finished the evening at MILK for a late nighter.
On friday we drove to Hyères close to Toulon where there was a little fiesta in a house on the sea for Sandrine boyfriend anniversary. Nice and windy day on the Sea side. Saturday we played tennis on clay, went for a boat ride to finish up with unbelievable duck with giroles sauce and foie gras at Maria-Jose and Claudio's place. Better than the one at Brulot one of my favorite restaurants in Antibes We finished again at MILK to take the plane at 6am back to Paris. Great times.