Amat victoria curam!

Rain and Sunshine were alternating today - which gave strange and beautiful skies (and sometimes a wet suit). We had a very short ride to Moulins - but we absolutely wanted to see the triptych of the "Maitre de Moulins" in the Gothic Cathedral. You can only see it on request and it is a private showing in which the guard will open the triptych especially for you. It was stunning how well it is preserved with stunning colors and an immense detail.

Le Negus caramel toffees from Negus De Nevers.

Slowly we are riding down the N7 south and we take ample of time to see the many things around us. As the 7 locks of the canal between the Loire and the Seine at Rogny Les Sept Ecluses and the Castle of Saint Fargeau.
We stayed at the Auberge Des Templiers in and had our first "proper" gourmand meal Foie Gras with rhubarbe. Yummy!

Chocolate almonds (Praslines) from Mazet De Montargis.

At the Notre Dame De La Route - the special chapel for the N7 we asked for a guidance and as the sun broke through the clouds at that moment, I guess we got it :-)

As we couldn't stay at the Chateau, we stayed in the next best thing across it: the Aigle Noir ;-) AS usual parking the motor bikes was easy - in front of the entrance...
Because it is still early in the holiday season, it was very quiet while visiting the Chateau, which was nice because we had a good chance to see everything at our own convenience. I liked especially the Diane Gallery with its library and globes. The garden park was immaculate and looked very fresh - the weather nice. So a perfect beginning our our trip in France.

On our way we stopped at Reims - always nice to see the Cathedral. It has been renovated as long as I can remember - but they are making progress (at last!).

We started our holiday today! We will follow the old Route Imperiales no 1 which later became the Route Nationale 7 (the old Route the Soleil) to the Italian Border and then ride through Switzerland and Germany back to home.
There is a lot of (Roman)history, chateaux, castles, old villages along the road and of course many, many 2 and 3 star Michelin Restaurants ;-))

Ban Ki-moon ordered the president of Malawi (Mr Mutharika) the release the gay couple that was convicted of"of gross indecency and unnatural acts". "This outdated penal code should be reformed wherever it may exist," he said. Hurray! and thank you Ban :-)

Steven Monjeza(26) and Tiwonge Chimbalanga(20) were given 14-year jail after celebrating their engagement late December. The two men were convicted under a law dating back to colonial rule by Britain. Main while Uganda is thinking of strengthen the laws to include the death penalty for gay people... No holiday to Uganda this year...

Our first stop is Dinant in the Belgian Ardennes at the Meusse.

Although it has been 26 years since To The Manor Born aired on the BBC, it has been selected to be our official holiday TV series. I still have fond memories of Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles and we will follow their story right trough Europe. A special mention for Brabinger of course: It was he whom gave name to Eddies Brabinger BV...

With two wealthy Silicon Valley GOP candidates for CA governor — Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner — spending more than $100 million just to win the right to spend tens of millions more in the fall the California primary is getting out of hand. An (even for Republicans) unusual amount of negative political ads accusing candidates of doing everything short of sleeping with a rent boy.

The main theme of Whitman ads is that Poizner is not to be trusted because his political track record reveals that he's a secret liberal.

Meanwhile Poizner is hitting back: His main theme is that Whitman is — you guessed it — a secret liberal...

Maybe we better make this GOP primary an EBAY auction...

Some new exiting media apps came to the iPad these last days:
The PressReader app (free, paid-for content) offers digital editions of newspapers and magazines from around the world. You can flick through pages, zoom in to read them as they were printed, or bring up easier-on-the-eyes text versions of stories. For now you can even enjoy the content for free!

Zinio (free, paid-for content) similarly displays glossy magazines and has much the same functionality but with a slicker interface; crucially, it turns printed weblinks into interactive ones. A simple kind of app - but they have a very extensive magazine collection and even better: they will make my Zinio back catalog available on the iPad!

I loved the Wired app (£2.99), which adds iPad-only content to the magazine. Funny thing only is that some advertisers don't seem to get it and don't have interactive ads... (By The Way: ads... In a magazine you can easier skip those then on an iPad ;-) )

The Financial Times' app is an excellent way to access (free for now) FT content.

To make our upcoming motor trip even more convenient and efficient we bought inner bags for our panniers. It will save dismounting the boxes every time.

French Yogurt, Quaker Full Fiber Granola, Wall nuts, Strawberries, Pistachio, Raisins, Oranges (Squeezed) and Banana (blended). Oh: and Fish Oil, Multi Vitamin and such of course...

The latest Jerry Bruckheimer is Pirates of the Caribbean 4: just switch the water for sand and you have The Prince of Persia - great fun for a lazy afternoon.

Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer is excellent (when I saw him in "I Love you Philip Morris - I thought otherwise...). The story is full of suspense and nice twists - Pierce Brosnan is OK (and better then Mama Mia, but who isn't?) and Kim Cattral very convincing. Overall a very good movie and a stunning house on the dunes of an island off of Cape Cod. (Which is actually a house on the island of Sylt in Germany... the appliances in the kitchen give it away). If I was Roman Polanski I wouldn't mind having house arrest there... :-)

Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. Performed by Xavier Palacios on Muzibook.

I Downloaded the iPad app of the very nice comic of Tom Bouden "The Importance of Being Earnest" based of course on the story of Oscar Wilde. It seems that after more then 100 years after the ridiculous and outrageous trial of Wilde, Apple Inc. is still using censorship - all the "fun parts" of the comic are blacked out in the app... What's wrong with these people?

We had to wait years and years but finally Spotify is (legally) available in the Netherlands. I used it for some time now via an unofficial route, but it was a hassle and a premium account was not possbile. Now it is and I discovered tons of new music. Have a look at my playlists and try to listen to some Swedish Favorites e.g.!

Have a look at my Hollywood debut - and make your own...

Det är 30 dagar kvar till bröllopet från Victoria och Daniel. Engagemang tillkännagivanden av Kung var lite stel men han tala mycket korrekt svenska...
PS: Jag hoppas att de också har ett större bord i palatset :-)

Alexander McCall Smith wrote (probably...) the first opera about baboons. In his "The Okavango Macbeth" the Shakespeare’s classic Macbeth characters are played by baboons. Not so strange as it seems at first glance because in a troupe of baboons there could be an ambitious female baboon who wants her mate to be more of an alpha male than he is, which is really the story of Macbeth...
See the preproduction of the Botswana performance video here

Archie Comics, home of the famous Riverdale High students Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie and Jughead, and maker of a cute comic iPad app is about to welcome a new classmate this fall! On September 1^st, Kevin Keller, Archie Comics' first openly gay character, will be welcomed into the town of Riverdale. Now we only have to wait for our first Gay Marvel super hero: SuperGay, SpiderGay or IronGay?

Air Video streams video from your iMac to your iPad (and iPhone). You don't need to copy your videos to the device just to watch them. The amazing thing is that you don't have to convert them to mp4, air video will convert them on the fly and the video will start almost immediately. Stremaning is done in a 2400 bit rate so you really get good quality. At only $2.99 for the pro version it is a bargain.
This is awesome!

I think I"ll go with Portugal this year...

Courtesy of iStockphoto at the WEB2.0 Expo last week in SF. A professional photographer made this nice head shot to use as a profile picture. She used a CANON EOS 7D with an EF 50mm F1.2L USM objective - which explains probably why the picture is as good (without any flash mind you).

During the last week the several speakers showed us how we could contact them by email (which is almost always made up by their name plus organisation .com) and their twitter adress. What strikes me as really funny that almost everybody has a funny or creative twitter username. My friends as well Eddie has EPFAP, Marijn is rain, Eric is Cyberic and I am Mareku (which actually translates as little mark in Czech) I guess that nobody took twitter really serious when they invented their username. Now that is is a major force will we see some changes? I hope not - I really do like creative names!

Don Reisinger on Cnet came up with a couple of suggestions:
1. Don't be afraid to use your real name.
2. Don't use curse words or obscenity in your username.
3. Do tell us about your profession or your interests.
4. Do be creative.
5. Do distinguish yourself.
6. Don't look like a bot.
7. Don't use a celebrity's name unless it's your name too.
8. Do consider its impact.

If you need to you can change your username here
@mareku

Cabsense uses GPS data of New York taxis to locate them and so to direct you to the nearest available taxi. It has a cool RADAR interface and even predicts future possible free taxis...

We used our lat day in SF to evaluate all that we have learned this week and we thought that Tiburon was the place to do that. (It's a 30m ferry trip from pier 41). As we made our Keynote Slides on our iPads in sunny Tilburon (one way or the other it seems that we always need keynote to structure our thoughts), the iPad got overheated! Normally one of the nice things of the iPad vs. a laptop that it will not heat up - but it DOES overheat. After minute or so - things went back to normal.

On the way back I couldn't resist taking yest an other picture of the GG bridge (I must have a zillion by now). Every time it looks magical spanning to two hills across the bay.

On pier 39 I showed a street dancer some new moves - hope he"ll have success with them...

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