Places

Amy and I have had a great first week in Paris. The weather has been amazing, the food has been incredible, and the cell phone experience has been abysmal. Here are a few things that I’ve learned. Running on the Champs-Elysees at 4pm sucks. Go to the Bois de Bologne instead – it’s great. I need a lot of sleep. Sleeping until 13:00 is fun. It’s not worth the effort to get a local SIM card. Being a vegetarian at lunchtime is tricky if you like hanging out at a brasserie. French women often forget to put pants on under their short frilly nightgown-like tops. Smart cars are everywhere which makes Amy laugh. Nespresso coffee is delicious. So delicious that you should have four each morning. Wheeeeeeeeee. Balconies rock. At least the one we have does. Amy rocks. But I knew that already. We need to work harder at picking sushi places. Conveyor belt sushi is mediocre. No one seems to be paying attention to the Tour de France here. At least we aren’t. Paris is more ethnically diverse than Boulder. French people are nice if you say “Boujour, je ne parle pas francias.” They smile and then speak in English. You can buy pajamas at the Monoprix. Lots of fun Americans came to Paris this week including @fredwilson, @kimbal, @jason, @johnmaloney, and Cliff Shaw. FNAC is not the train station (something I’ll be able to tease Amy about for a long time.) There are a lot of paid porn channels on the TV which I may have accidentally subscribed to while trying to get the Wimbledon final on TV. There is less dog poop on the street than a few years ago. Everyone here smokes at night and outside. They are about a decade behind the US on this front. 16 degrees C is the right temperature for me at night in the bedroom. I kind of like walking up six flights of stairs several times each day. Two glasses of wine at lunch is too much for me but a bottle at dinner is just right. Google Voice doesn’t work in France. But who needs a phone anyway. It’s smart to bring backup glasses with you if you can’t see very well for when your glasses break. French is a hard. I give you poison and poisson as an example. Lunch takes two hours here. That’s a good thing. Overall we’ve spent of our time in the 8th and 17th – just hanging out, getting acclimated, writing, and living our life. I expect we’ll explore next week. And no, I am no longer carrying around my cell phone because who fucking a needs a cell phone that costs $17 a minute to use.

Trada is no longer doing Codespace – they’ve filled up the area with other companies. However, if you are looking for office space in Boulder for your startup, take a look at PivotDesk and give it a try . When developers come through Boulder, I regularly get asked if I know a place for them to camp out and work for the day. There’s now a great solution – Codespace – hosted by Trada. ...

Finally I solved my Paris Internet Mobile 3G SIM cell phone nightmare poke my eyes out scream at my phone problem. It was remarkably easy, once I knew the magic trick, which I found on the site Pay as you go sim with data wiki (thanks Toby Ruckert – lunch is on me tomorrow.) Here are the steps (as of 7/6/11) for an unlocked Android phone and a Gmail user. ...

And then our hero’s glasses broke. At this point the meltdown was complete, and our hero crawled into bed for a two hour nap in an effort to let his soul catch up with him. I’m on day three of trying to get my Google Nexus S to work with 3G without costing me $17 / minute. Since I use Google Voice for my phone number (and I make almost all of my phone calls on my laptop using Google Voice or Skype) I only need data service. Based on all the feedback I got when I was in the US, this seemed easy. “Just get a pre-paid SIM card from any of the telecom providers when you get there, slap it in, and it’ll work fine” or some varient of that was the suggestion. ...

For much of the last decade, Amy and I have spent the month of July at our house in Homer, Alaska. Amy grew up in Alaska and I have a great love of the place. We’ve built one month away each year in a different location into our annual rhythm which we’ve come to treasure as a key part of our lives. We are trying something different this year. Instead of going to Homer, we’ve rented an apartment in Paris for the month of July. We are in the 8th Arrondissement near the Arc de Triomphe on the top floor of a wonderful building. ...

I’m opposed to opening up Eldorado Canyon Trail to Mountain Bikes. However, when I read the article titled “Boulder open space official: Return to civility in West TSA mountain bike debate ” I was infuriated by the tone of some of the people opposed to mountain bikes on these trails. My partner Seth Levine is a huge mountain biker. He and I had a thoughtful exchange about the issue of MTBs on the Eldorado Canyon Trail. We disagree on this issue but it was a substantive exchange. As a long distance runner, I explained that while most MTBs were good actors, a small percentage weren’t. Even on reasonably well shared trails, I’ve been run off the road numerous times by MTBs careening around a blind corner on a downhill or when someone somewhat out of control flies by me. Single tracks are tough to share and I spent much of my time on them paying attention to traffic if I run mid-day, but I’ve had this problem on all shared trails. Worst of all, I’ve been hit several times by MTBs and I can only think of one case where the person stopped and checked to see if I was ok (I was, but pretty sore the next day.) Seth and I ended our discussion with agreement that we’d go hike Eldorado Canyon Trail together and discuss this further, which will be fun regardless of whether we end up agreeing on a position on the issue. ...

I had never heard of the organization called Downtown Boulder, Inc. until I was asked to keynote at the annual meeting which I did a few weeks ago where I talked about “entrepreneurial communities and why Boulder is such an awesome one.” I got plenty of positive feedback and met a number of owners of businesses – most of them retail – based in downtown Boulder. A week or so later Dave Jilk, the CEO of Standing Cloud , forwarded me a newsletter where Downtown Boulder was endorsing HR 5660 – Main Street Fairness Act which is yet another poorly thought out Internet-related tax aimed at online retailers not operating within the state asserting the tax. I’ve written about the stupidity of these types of taxes before in posts like Amazon Fires Its Affiliates in Colorado Because of Colorado HB 10-1193 . I blew this off (incorrectly, I might add) because I’m just so annoyed by all of this sort of stuff since it’s just evidence that organizations like Downtown Boulder, Inc. don’t really understand the actual business economics of having a vibrant entrepreneurial community in their downtown. ...

There are tons of startup events in Boulder. I get asked almost daily by folks what they should attend to get involved in the local Boulder startup scene. Fortunately, Tom Markiewicz (founder / CEO of StatsMix , a TechStars Boulder 2010 company) is now curating the Boulder Edition of StartupDigest . It’s a great resource for anyone that wants to know what is going on in the Boulder startup scene. Thanks Tom!

When I opened my daily folder, a beautiful picture of an Aurora Over Alaska graced the front page of APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). Just another reason to love Alaska.

There are many things I love about Boulder. One of them is the powerful sense of community that exists. Talking about this is fine, but examples are better. Here’s one: On the first Tuesday of every month is the Boulder New Tech Meetup . It’s one of the largest regular tech meetups in the world and is orchestrated by a bunch of folks, most notably Robert Reich of OneRiot who is the founder and ringleader. Given my travel, I can’t make it regularly but I try to go a couple of times a year. Each time is fascinating – I’ve always learned something, met some interesting folks, and had fun. ...