Paris

Colette Ballou, the CEO of Ballou PR , is hosting a party in honor of me in Paris on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 from 6pm to 8pm. I put this in the category of “go have a nice hang out on a bridge in Paris and drink wine with tech people” category, which sounds like a lot of fun to me. The details, according to the invitation, follow. When: Wednesday, July 27th, 2011, 6pm to 8pm Where: Pont Solferino, otherwise known as Passerelle Léopold Sédhar Senghor — the pedestrian bridge between Musee d’Orsay and Tuileries. 4th & 5th bench on south side, facing west. Metro: Solferino,Tuileries, RER: Musée d’OrsayIf it rains, we will provide you with a new place/address. Who: You, bring friends!What to bring: you know the drill, it has served us well over the years — each invitee brings a bottle of wine, Ballou PR provides the cups and bottle openers Come join us!

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.

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. ...