KLM

I love these KLM people. Their customer service is so NOT customer friendly. After the now infamous Your first flight says the return is changeable, the return says it is not:



They came up with this magnificently transparent statement when I tried to change a ticket this morning:



"Changes are not facilitated on KLM.com"

At least it's honest. They aren't here to help.

Mickey News: Disney gobbles up Pixar

Steve jobs add another couple of billions to his bank account

I want to be a YGL!

"Jon S. von Tetzchner is a Young Global Leader", did they hire some of my ex-colleagues to find titles that rock like its 1990 all over again?

It seems that as soon as you call someone Youg Global Leader this person immediately looses all her/his credibility almost instantly.

Flying car captured on Google Earth

The Register

Album Art Finder

Artie is a service that utilizes Amazon.com's public database of images to retrieve any missing cover art for your iTune's library. Just upload your easy-to-find iTunes Music Library.xml file, wait a second while it analyzes everything, and drag the artwork straight into your running iTunes program.

Cost of the war in Iraq

Full article here.

Bohellz ad report

4 months into the adsense experiment, we have made 23 dollars and 1% of visitors click on the ads (and I probably account for 25% of the clicks, these ads are soooo interesting and well targeted I always check them *g*)

Page impressions: 9801
Clicks: 96
% of clicks: 1.0%
Revenues: 23.02$

At least we will soon have enough to pay a beer for everybody.

Mobilize an URL

A new service from Google.

BillMonk

BillMonk is a new service that allows people to easily keep track of financial debts among friends. It’s a simple idea and they’ve executed well. (via)

Mobile phones don't cause brain tumours

Using a mobile phone will not increase your chances of contracting cerebral cancer, a four-year study conducted in the UK has concluded.

The results of the study, published today in the British Medical Journal, indicate that no matter how long you have used a phone for, or how frequently you make and take calls, your risk of developing a brain tumour remains the same.

Link

Figures

45'588 cars were burnt in France in 2005.
10'346 during the recent riots.
That's 35'242 during the rest of the year.

Fame

I'm on the radio, radio-ohhh.

Welcome Louis de Vos to the world.

HTTP/1.0 Room 404 Object Not Found

Before the beginning of time, when the Internet was still very much under the spell of bare Unix shells and Gopher, before SLIP or PPP became widely used, an ambitious group of young scientists at CERN started working on what was to become the media revolution of the nineties: the World Wide Web [...] In an office on the fourth floor (room 404), they placed the World Wide Web's central database: any request for a file was routed to that office, where two or three people would manually locate the requested files and transfer them, over the network, to the person who made that request.
The story of the 404 here.

Petistic

A good blog from mister sapin and régine: Petistic. Nico the fur and Lala will especially like some of the posts about fat cats winning slimmers of the year and hamsters in fur mercedes pet beds.

file-swap.com

Super stupid, super fun.

(thx marc)

The Inside Dope on Steve Jobs' Weird Keynote

My source said there was some stuff, "some very, very cool stuff," that Jobs couldn't unveil because of "supply issues."
"They can't get enough Core Duo (chips)," said my source.
He also said that if he were me, he probably wouldn't order one of the new MacBook Pros.

The cult of Mac (thx niho)

Was the MacBook launched too soon?

But most mysterious of all is the disappearing battery performance quote. Apple quotes 5.5 hours for today's 15" 1.67Mhz G4 PowerBook. But the MacBook has no such accompanying claim, and it was conspicuously absent from the slides during Steve Jobs' keynote. Apple simply describes the battery capacity. The MacBook has a "60-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery", we're told.

Link

Bohellz 5 ans

Cinq ans! J'ai complètement oublié de signaler l'anniversaire du petit qui est passé lundi. Alors bon anni!

Importations frauduleuses et la contrebande de viande entre la France et la Suisse

Via france 3:

France 3
Zoom sur les importations frauduleuses et la contrebande de viande entre la France et la Suisse.

Concernant la contrebande entre la France et la Suisse, on parle souvent de stupéfiants ou de bijoux. Mais la fraude concerne aussi les steaks, filets et autres entrecôtes... En Suisse, la viande est d'ailleurs le produit le plus importé frauduleusement. Pour cause, les prix sont 30 à 40% plus élevés dans la Confédération Helvétique.

Outre les particuliers qui n'hésitent pas à traverser la frontière pour ramener quelques kilos de boeuf, des réseaux s'organisent. Leurs "clients" : des restaurants et des boucheries. En 2005, les douaniers suisses ont relevé 2000 cas d'infractions liées aux importations frauduleuses de viande. Neuf tonnes auraient franchi la frontière franco-suisse.Or la loi autorise 500 grammes de viande fraîche par personne. Au delà de cette quantité, il faut s'acquitter d'une somme de 20 francs suisse, soit 12 euros, par kilo excédentaire.

Geo-intelligence

JM Billaut:
Michel Bon me disait l'autre jour, que lorsqu'il était patron de Carrefour, les études d'implantation d'un nouveau magasin étaient faites en une aprés-midi... Le staff se baladait dans la zone d'implantation prévue. Il regardait les voitures en stationnement (année, cylindrée pour apprécier la qualité du parc automobile...). Et faisait quelques poubelles pour voir ce que les locaux consommaient...

Now for mac

MacBook Pro

MacBooks are out

Bird flu spread

Interactive map. Scary shit, but Switzerland is just outside the migration zone ;-)

SkyScout

(via Scoble)

Gaymobile

"CBB Mobil, a mobile virtual network operator that's targeting Denmark's approximately 250,000 gay consumers with its GAYMobile service ('a service that's gay all the way'). Besides telephony, think Village People or ABBA ringtones, and wireless same-sex dating. Nice touch: 25% of profits will be channeled back to the gay community."

Link

Only a three hour trip to Mars

"AN EXTRAORDINARY 'hyperspace' engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government."

Link

Social Porn

"it was only a matter of time before someone created a Digg-like site for porn. Well, that’s exactly what Socialporn is - a pornography site with web 2.0 features such as user submission, voting and RSS feeds."

This is not work-safe and will probably offend you. Link (vie Techcrunch)

Windows Vista Home Page

Site revamped. Reminds me a certain "fruity" look and feel and communication....

Cloning

The Myth of the creative director with a black turtleneck is, well, not just a myth...



Taxi.ca

nice agency

Taxi from ze canada

Movies

Some really different trends seem to be in Hot these days:

Saw (2) & Hostel take a peek at the dark side, perversions, sadistic behaviors and torture...

and on the other side two movies seem to be worth the look:
Syriana takes a look at our dependance on oil
and
Lord of war that everybody talks about these days... what it's like being a weapon dealer and the implications of the governments... Mazingly this one didn't manage to find a US funding...

My prefernce goes to the second set, and yes...
I'm becoming a conspiracy theory expert ;)

Sports and predictability

Eli Ben-Naim, Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico decided to look at unpredictability of results - how often a team with a worse record overcomes an apparently superior one - as the best measure of how exciting a league is. "If there are no upsets, then every game is predictable and hence boring," says Ben-Naim.

Their results showed that the "upset frequency" was highest for soccer, followed by baseball, hockey, basketball and finally American football.

Link

Speculations

iBook and PowerBook Reliability

Summary:
* Overall average: 41% repaired (lifetime)
* Overall standard deviation: 0.17 (large variation between models)

Fewest Repairs
* original (colored) iBooks
* PowerBook G3
* 12" PowerBook G4 (2005)
* 12" iBook G4 (recent models)

Most Repairs:
* iBook G3 (esp. in 2003, motherboard defects)
* 15" titanium PowerBook G4 (esp. in 2003, optical drive, case/latch/hinge)
* 15" aluminum PowerBook G4 (first version, screen defects)

Link

Generateur Interactif de Bonnes Résolutions 2006

>>Cesser inconsciemment de sucer son pouce sur une chaise <

Bonne année!

We rocked all night. Wicked!


Happy new year 2006!

Dodgy kebab pain turns out to be baby

A woman who went to hospital fearing she had eaten a dodgy kebab was stunned when she gave birth.

Helen Smitham from Distington, Cumbria, had no idea she was pregnant when she felt stomach pain. Her mum took her to hospital - and 60 seconds later shocked Helen gave birth to a 4lb 11oz boy.

According to The Sun Helen said: "I had absolutely no idea. When I had stomach pains I thought it was the kebab. At the hospital there was no time for the doctors to see me before it all happened."

Deaton is in the premature baby unit at West Cumberland Hospital, Whitehaven.
Helen's boyfriend Mark Askew, 41, said: "She was at work until the Friday before Christmas and we'd gone out doing the normal things, like going for a drink, Christmas parties and socialising.

"When I got a call to say we had a baby boy it was amazing."

Via Ananova

Charamel

?