Today’s stop on the Paris museum tour is proudly brought to you by La Vache.
Amy and I took the Metro to Place de la Bastille, wandered around for a while, and eventually found today’s destination – Musee National Picasso Paris. I love Picasso’s art (all of it, including the real hairy private part stuff ever since I saw it with my mom at the Guggenheim retrospective a long time ago) and the Musee National Picasso Paris is one of my favorite museums in the world. The current show is a compendium of work by Picasso of his famous lover / muse Dora Maar along with an extensive selection of Dora Maar’s work – including many amazing photos of Picasso and the first photo montage of an artistic work in progress – which happens to be Guernica.
You aren’t allowed to take photos in the museum, but no one was looking and I figured you’d want to see what Dora looked like. Yup – that’s Dora (actually Femme a L’oiseau – Dora Maar 17 June 1939). It took us 90 minutes to have our way with the museum, at which point we wandered into a cafe and had a typical french lunch (mine included some veggies with aspic.)
Full of art and food, I took a taxi over to 3i’s Paris office for a meeting followed by a stumblefuck around Paris to the Metro back to our apartment to jam through a bunch of phone calls and email until dinner (which of course didn’t start until 8:30, this being Paris and all.) Since I woke up at 3am, I don’t think I’m going to have too much trouble sleeping tonight.
There are cows all over Paris (yes – those are spoons on the cow.)
Very cool. I wonder if I’ll stumble over a purple one.
Amy and I just watched Monday’s 24. Oooh was it good. Since I haven’t figured out how to work the TV here in Paris and I’m not sure if / when 24 Season 5 is on over here anyway, I had to do some work to watch things.
I started of trying my Slingbox, which I love. However, when I fired it up to watch 24, I got the following message from my Tivo.
Yup – my Tivo crashed. We installed a new bitching Sonos system for our music a few weeks ago and I got this crash one other time – I guess the Sonos hardware is kicking off too much heat. Since we’ve been gone since Sunday, I have no idea when this happened, but I decided to assume that it crashed before Monday and subsequently didn’t record 24. Plus, I was tired of waiting to watch 24 – I needed to watch it tonight.
Since I’m already paying for getting Fox via my DirecTV account, and since I’m a complete 24 addict, I decided that it’d be hard to accuse me of stealing a TV show if I simply downloaded it to watch on my laptop (although I’m sure someone could try – if someone from Fox wants my $1.99, go ahead and email me.) Apparently, I can now download these for $1.99 from the iTunes Music Store, but I’ve heard rumors that the quality and DRM experience stinks. So, 380mb (and about a half hour) later we sat down in front of my laptop and enjoyed a delicious 44 minutes of 24.
Amy and I went with our friends Dave and Maureen to the opera last night. Yes – the opera (the music thing, not the browser.) Now that I’m 40, I’ve decided it’s time to make sure I do more “grown up things” and the opera seemed like it fit the bill.
Amy is a classical music fanatic and loves the ballet, so I’ve always spent plenty of time at the symphony and the ballet. I particularly like ballet as it’s usually a little warm in the theater which generates a deep nap (one of those sloppy sweaty ones) if the ballet isn’t captivating me (I love modern, I fall asleep during story ballet.)
So – I expected to enjoy the opera for a little while and then fall into a deep sleep. We saw The Abduction from the Seraglio and I was blown away. The Ellie Caulkins Opera House is phenomenal. The seats are comfortable (we had great ones), the acoustics were awesome, and the set was beautiful.
Abduction from the Seraglio is in German, which was a little weird since the “radio opera” I usually hear randomly is usually Italian. There were these cool little electronic translation screens on the seat backs (“The Figaro System”) that translated the opera into English, which made it really accessible.
I loved it. Even though I was wiped out from my week, I stayed fully engaged. The music (Mozart) was engaging and the performers were stunningly good.
Of course, we started with dinner at Kevin Taylor’s at the Opera House in the basement of the Opera House. The food was awesome and the decor / environment was really interesting.
It’s always great when your “first time” of something goes well. Last night was really fun. Thanks to my friends Dave and Maureen for making this event happen.
I read two great posts today.
Resilience underlies my desire to run a marathon in every state and I’m always on the quest for finding someone who is a 100x better programmer than everyone else in the room (I’ve been fortunate to work with a few of them over the years.)
Yum.
Glenn Hubbard, the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, is an absolute riot. By way of Ezra Roizen, I saw Hubbard’s renovation of Every Breath Bernanke Takes and Dean, Dean Baby!, economic / finance spoofs performed to the tunes of Every Breath You Take and Ice Ice Baby. Sheer brilliance – the dean of every business school could learn something from this. Schmalensee, when are you doing a video?
Update: Several people have told me that the person in the video that looks like Glenn Hubbard is not actually Glenn Hubbard. Having taken a number of economics courses in my life, I’ve simply decided to “assume Glenn Hubbard” which I’m sure is something that Dean Hubbard would understand and be comfortable with.
Bill Ritter – who is the democratic candidate for Governor of Colorado – just launched a blog to compliment his website. Amy and I have become supporters after a very important (to us) conversation that we had with him about women’s rights issue. Like all good political candidate websites, it’s even got a nice form for contributing to Ritter’s campaign.
Rick Stratton sent me a picture of the original Treadputer today.
I guess I need to go on eBay and find myself a Super Nintendo and a Power Pad just so I can have some variety in my workouts.
We made some ergonomic upgrades to the Treadputer this week.
The main changes, compared to the last iteration, are:
We are still working on the headphone / microphone configuration. Getting this right has proven to be a lot harder than we expected due to ambient noise, weight (it sucks to have real headphones on for two hours while you are running / walking), and modality (speakers and microphones don’t mix that well.) It’s also time to put a better desktop background on those pretty monitors.