My bank owns my notebook
It has come to my attention today that Société Générale, my bank in France (yes, they of the €5B rogue trader loss), acquired the makers of Moleskine notebooks in 2006 for the not inconsiderable sum of €60M.
Racking up the miles
In November, I have flown from San Francisco to London, back to San Francisco, on to Auckland, Queenstown, Wellington, Auckland, back to San Francisco, Houston, back to Oakland. When combined with my upcoming trip to Bombay, I will have traveled 70,000 kilometers, or nearly twice the circumference of the Earth…
Four legs bad, three legs good
In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.
Frank Herbert, Dune
One day, the manufacturers of dining tables will finally discover that four-legged tables are guaranteed to wobble, and opt for stabler tripod or monopods instead.
Cats and dogs
It is a paradox of Franco-German relations that German Chancellors of the center-left get on better with French Presidents of the center-right and vice versa. Helmut Schmidt worked hand in hand with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, but had little rapport with François Mitterrand (then again, Schmidt never suffered fools gladly). Mitterrand in turn had an excellent relationship with Helmut Kohl, who did not get well with Jacques Chirac. Chirac had some differences with Gerhard Schröder, but saw mostly eye to eye with him. Neither Chirac nor Nicolas Sarkozy seem to have much chemistry with Angela Merkel.
Open source will win in the Enterprise
Simply because it does not involve running through the gauntlet of the typical corporate purchasing bureaucracy…