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Cycle for Life!
Update
Autre chose de pertinent, ou d’intéressant que je devrais ajouter dans la barre de droite ?
The Wedding Crashers
Hier soir j’ai vu The Wedding Crashers, et j’ai simplement adoré. Il s’agit surement de la meilleure comédie que j’ai vue depuis longtemps. (Team America, ça ne compte pas, c’est certain que c’est drôle: c’est des marionnettes!)
Owen Wilson et Vince Vaughn font un superbe duo, meilleur à mon avis que Wilson et Ben Stiller.
Évidemment, il faut le voir en anglais, parce que tout ce qui est comique dans le film provient entièrement du jeu des acteurs. La version française devrait être illégale, ou plus chère, ou n’importe quoi pour forcer le monde à écouter des films en version originale. Et en prime, il y a un acteur surprise qu’on aime tous et le générique embarque avec une chanson de mon groupe fétiche. Jamais je n’aurais cru entendre Aside de The Weakerthans au cinéma.
“Return To Flight”
La navette Discovery a finalement décollé sans problème ce matin. J’ai pris un 10 minutes pour regarder le lancement, et je dois dire que ça me fascine.
Quelques faits intéressants:
- Le bouton rouge écrit “Liftoff” au-dessus n’existe pas. Le décollage est plutôt fait par un ordinateur qui enchaîne autour de mille commandes dans les secondes qui précèdent le décollage, et le tout sans erreur de type 2…ni de ”… application failed. Would you like to send a report to Microsoft ?”
- 35 secondes après le décollage (T+0:35), la navette traverse l’air plus dense de la basse atmosphère. À ce moment, la puissance des trois moteurs de la navette est réduite à 72% pour diminuer les forces aérodynamiques qui pourraient endommager le véhicule. 40 secondes plus tard, les moteurs recommencent à pousser à leur maximum.
- 90 secondes après le décollage (T+1:30), la navette ne pèse plus que la moitié de son poid initial. Car pour s’alimenter, elle brûle une demi-tonne d’azote liquide à la seconde. La grosse bombone orange se vide rapidement.
- 2 minutes après le décolage (T+2:10), les deux fusées blanches ont terminé leur travail. Elles se détachent et seront récupérées par deux navires de la marine américaine quelque part dans l’Atlantique.
- Si jamais il y a un pépin, l’équipe a jusqu’à T+4:10 pour annuler la mission et faire atterrir la navette d’urgence quelque par en Europe (ce matin, ça aurait été en Espagne). Après ce point, la navette est trop loin, et elle va trop vite pour pouvoir revenir sur terre.
- Après T+5:25, la navette est assez haute et assez rapide pour atteindre son orbite même si un de ses 3 moteurs lâchait complêtement. La situation peu paraître extrême, mais j’ai rien trouvé à propos des mesures d’urgences si jamais ils perdent l’usage de la strap de fan, des galippers ou ben de la pompe à eau.
- Ça prends seulement 8 minutes pour se rendre dans l’espace. Ce matin, à T+8:41, la commandante de la navette a arreté les moteurs, puis a détaché la grosse bombone orange qui sera complètement brulée en retombant sur terre. Il ne lui restait plus qu’à se donner un autre petit “boost” beaucoup moins puissant pour se placer dans un orbite plus haute et plus stable, ou elle rattrapera la station spatiale d’ici deux jours.
Google MOON !
Comme je disais ce matin, …il y a 36 ans on marchait sur la lune pour la première fois. Aujourd’hui, les gens de Google nous le rappelle en lancant la suite logique de Google Maps:
Et si on zoom dans le fond, on a la preuve que la lune n’est rien d’autre qu’un gros morceau de fromage suisse. Yeah!
Citation du Jour
Il y a 36 ans jour pour jour, Neil Armstrong marchait sur la lune et prononçait ce qui allait devenir les seuls 10-12 mots que l’humanité allait jamais retenir de lui. Sur les millions d’autres phrases qu’il a dites dans sa vie, à mon avis ça fait pitié. J’ai donc creusé un peu pour trouver une autre citation de Neil:
“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
Neil Armstrong (1930 – … ), Astronaute Américain
iTunes Music Store, 500 Millions de ventes
Apple ont monté un gros concours parce que la 500 millionième chanson sera bientôt téléchargée sur le iTunes Music Store. À chaque 100 000 téléchargement, ils donnent un iPod mini et un certificat cadeau, et le client qui achètera la 500M toune gagnera 10 iPod pour lui et ses amis, des certificats cadeaux et un voyage pour aller voir Coldplay en concert. Wow, quand même un beau concours pour souligner l’évenement
Mais ce matin j’ai été lire les petites écritures pâles qui constituent les réels rêglements du concours, et voici ce que j’ai trouvé:
4. Eligibility. In order to be eligible, entrants must be 13 years of age or older, and a legal resident of one of the 50 United States, including Washington, D.C., Austria, Belgium, Canada (excluding the Province of Quebec), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland or the United Kingdom.
…et c’est souvent le cas dans les concours internationnaux. Pouvez-vous bien m’expliquer pourquoi ? Ça me frustre.
19 Juillet, 8h14:
Accompagné d’un café, j’ai fait un peu de recherche ce matin à propos de ça. J’ai rien trouvé de solide, sauf que je suis tombé sur ce blog , et j’ai écrit un email à l’éditeure pour lui demander de me guider vers une réponse. J’attends une réponse. Mais dans un de ses articles, j’ai quand même trouvé quelque chose d’intéressant: Dans le code criminel, les jeux de hasard sont interdits. Les petites équations mathématiques des concours ne servent donc pas à éliminer les participants stupides. Grâce à elles, les concours ne dépendent plus uniquement du “hasard”, alors ils sont légaux.
20 Juillet, 15h36:
J’ai reçu une réponse de madame Natalie Gauthier :
Nous savons que le Code criminel interdit les loteries et les jeux de hasard qui incluent l’espérance d’un gain, la détermination du gagnant au hasard, et le versement d’une considération par le participant. Aussi, les provinces ont le droit d’exploiter les loteries et les jeux de hasard. L’Ontario Lottery Corporation a des règles aussi sévères afin de respecter les dispositions prévues par le Code criminel. Ce qui ne serait donc pas relié à Loto-Québec, contrairement aux commentaires laissés par l’un de vos participants.
Peut-être que la Loi sur sur la protection du consommateur est plus sévère.
Je poursuis mes recherches et je vous reviens là-dessus.
c’est à suivre !…
21 Juillet, 8h43:
Finalement, voici les grandes lignes de la réponse détaillée que madame Natalie Gauthier m’a envoyée par courriel:
Le Québec impose des règlements sévères et bien précis sur les concours publicitaires afin de protéger le public, notamment par la Loi sur la protection du Consommateur, la Loi sur les loteries, les concours publicitaires et les appareils d’amusement » qui s’appliquent au concours publicitaire ainsi que les « Règles sur les concours publicitaires ». Vous pouvez en lire plus sur les règles sur les concours publicitaires en suivant ce lien
En résumé, une personne au bénéfice de laquelle est tenu un concours publicitaire, dont la valeur totale des prix offerts dépasse 100 $, doit dans les délais prévus, aviser la Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux (RACJ) de la tenue d’un tel concours en lui transmettant la formule prescrite dûment remplie et se conformer à toutes les conditions relatives à ce concours publicitaire prévues par les règles.
De plus, une personne au bénéfice de laquelle un concours publicitaire est tenu doit fournir un cautionnement à la Régie lorsqu’elle n’a pas au Québec de siège social ou de place d’affaires déclarée conformément aux lois du Québec.
En cas de doute, vos lecteurs sont invités à demander un avis juridique par un membre en règle du Barreau.
Bref, les organisateurs de concours publicitaires préfèrent exclure le Québec que de se conformer à la Loi sur la protection du Consommateur et à la Loi sur les loteries, les concours publicitaires et les appareils d’amusement. Voilà les réels “coupables”, car en réalité ces lois existent pour nous protéger.
D’autre part, je suis agréablement surpris qu’une experte en droit et en marketing ait pris le temps de fouiller dans les détails pour satisfaire ma petite curiosité. Il y a vraiment des gens biens. 
Merci madame Gauthier !
Optimus
Les bonnes idées de design industriel me fascinent. D’abord parce ce qu’elles sont souvent impressionnantes, mais surtout parce qu’elles sont parfois très simple et que je me demande pourquoi je n’y ai pas pensé avant.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Le 12 juin dernier, c’était la graduation des finissants de l’université de Stanford. Les gradués ont eu la chance de célébrer leur réussite avec Steve Jobs, le CEO d’Apple et de Pixar, qui était présent pour leur partager sa vision de la réussite et de la poursuite des rêves au moyen de trois épisodes de sa vie personnelle.
Le texte peut être trouvé un peu partout sur le net. Je l’ai trouvé très intéressant, voilà pourquoi je le place ici moi aussi.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. Lire la suite…
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs
12 juin 2005
Update:
Encore mieux, je viens de trouver un enregistrement du discours. C’est tellement plus agréable de relaxer et d’écouter quelqu’un nous raconter son histoire que d’en lire une asser longue transcription.
Wikipedia,Articles farfelus
Vous savez comment j’aime Wikipédia.
J’ai récemment trouvé un article qui regroupe les liens d’une tonnes d’autres articles inusités. Vraiment, on vit dans un monde fou et j’adore ça!
Bush se réveille
“Listen, I recognize the surface of the Earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem”
George W. Bush, 5 Juillet 2005
Bravo George! Seulement 4 ans en retard avec le reste du monde ! Dans 2-3 ans, il va peut-être s’acheter un lecteur CD. Tu vas voir George, c’est ben l’fun! T’as plus besoin d’avancer ou de reculer ta cassette pour trouver la toune que t’aime!
Je me demande bien ce que Steven J. Milloy pense du réveil de Bush. Allez voir son site perturbant: JunkScience.com
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Who ?
My name is François Côté. I live in Montreal, QC, and I've been blogging in french for a couple of years.I'm a Web Producer for CloudRaker. Because I love the Web and tons of other things that I want to share, I will also try to communicate my thoughts in english once in a while.
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