Why not a plain old mailto: link?
Unfortunately, as we all know, to put one's email address in clear on the web is to ask for spam. Indeed, there are little crawlers, combing web pages on the net for loose email addresses. Thus, for those who want to contact me, I offer two ways of doing so. You can either conveniently use the form below, or copy my address to your favorite mail application:
bertrand <dot> molliniertoublet <at> enst-bretagne <dot> fr
tue 2003-10-28
Send me an email online
You are welcome to drop me an email via this web interface. If you want me to answer, make sure you specify your own mail address.
created: tue 2003-10-28
updated: fri 2005-07-28
What I look like
Some time ago, I read, likely on one of Jakob Nielsen's alertbox articles that when designing a web site, your readers want to know who you are. They are not really interested in what you are, but what you look like is of prime importance to reduce the impersonality of the web. So here you go, bmt, your faithful webmaster:
wed 2003-10-22
Getting on my nerves
Steph and I are just back from a birthday party at Manu's in Fremont. On the way back, I was reminded of something that really gets on my nerves. See, I have two driving licenses. One in France, which I have had since my 17th birthday (more or less) and which has a clean record, and one here in California, which has been valid for less than a year since autumn 2000, has been suspended for six months and has quite a full record (including two speedings and a red light...).
So, OK, I have been distracted, I ran that red light just in front of a cop. OK, I was driving a bit fast on that 35MPH-max four lanes boulevard, OK, I was totally speeding on Hwy 101 that day at one in the morning, but none of that would be known to the SJPD if there weren't so many friggin' cops in San Jose.
Now, what's really getting on my nerves is that those guys whose daily job is basically to pull you over and write you a ticket when you break a traffic law, do drives like assholes themselves! Case in point: tonight, patrol car #1092 was going an easy 50MPH on 10th street between 880 Gish Rd exit and Santa Clara Ave, accelerating hard at green lights, stopping way beyond the line at red lights, and changing lanes and turning left onto Santa Clara without using his blinker.
So, don't get me wrong, I do support our cops mission to enforce traffic laws and generally social laws in a peace maintenance duty. But I only support it insofar as the cops themselves do set an example and respect these laws themselves.
In order to promote the good behaviour of our cops, and to help them maintain their credibility, I have decided to start a public log of sightings of cops breaking traffic laws. I will not accept contributions (as I can't verify them), but will try to do a good job entering my own sightings. And I hope they will be few...
Update (2004-05-20): I have decided to take the public log offline as it was not filling up. Also, it made me feel like some loud-mouth pundit that I have grown to dislike. So, no more "bad cops" sightings for now...
updated: thu 2004-05-20
created: sun 2003-10-12
Steph's work
Steph's work is doing better. She managed to handle all the accumulated issues that had gathered as a result of the transition from the previous employee holding her position, combined with that employee visceral lack of respect for established processes and tendency to patch problems rather than solve them. It is no little feat that she went through and I am very proud of her.
However, things can't ever be too nice, now can they? Steph is fighting hard with that same person that used to hold her position, and who behaves like, pardon my words, a true bitch. Apparently, Steph is able to handle the bitching of someone close to her and that she cares about (let's say for example me), but unable to handle the bitching of a complete stranger... That sucks...
Business level rising
I am starting to be quite busy again. Proof is how little care I give to the blog. I am really supposed to work full time with nexB. I am not quite up there yet, but getting there. For example, last week, I had to "take a day off", in order to take care of the Jetta and its damaged trunk, and to take care of the little green Ninja who broke its clutch cable.
Regarding the Jetta, I am pretty amazed at how much the insurance system works in the US. The the only flaw of that gentleman who hit the car is that he gets distracted while driving big-ass pickups. Besides that, he has been a model of responsibility. After giving it some thought, he decided that it would be preferable for him to have his insurance cover for the price of the repair to the car, he informed them of the accident.
So, yes, in principle, you are supposed to have the freedom to take your car to the repair facility of your choice. Now, let's look at what happened with that guy's insurance: since none of the three body shops I went to to have estimates made belonged to their prefered network of body shops, they decided they didn't want to trust the estimates and that they had to send someone over to produce an estimate themselves. On the other hand, if we brought the car to one of their prefered facilities, the repair would be done no questions asked. It seems to me that my freedom of choice is seriously impaired by these proceedings...
bmt mechanics extraordinaire
And yes, as I was getting to my prefered grocery store, some 10 miles away from home, the stupid clutch cable broke. On that respect, a motorcycle is easier to handle than a car, in that you can still go up and down gears pretty easily. Still, it is not good for the gearbox, and I really did not want to force the bike back home in that state. Corollary was that I would have to repair it myself, as it was also out of the question to go borrow a pickup and ramp to bring it back to the mechanics.
Admittedly, I am pretty proud of myself for changing the cable. Not that it was extremely difficult, but I still had to do some heavy unmounting to extract the broken one and insert the new one. Indeed, the cable runs from the left handle through the body of the bike, right under the gas tank, to the right of the engine. Thus, I had to unbolt the tank, finding out by the way that one of the support rubber pieces for it was missing, which might explain why some of those bolts were so hard to unscrew, as the askew tank was pressing on them.
sun 2003-10-12
A busy week for a busy bee
Oops, guess I am in trouble. Said I would write my blog on a regular basis, and look at that. I haven't touched it for more than a week... So, let's sum up. What happened last week?
On saturday last weekend (yes, that was before last entry), some, er, distracted driver hit Stephanie's little baby car in the rear bumper. The guy, David, was nice and honest, but this is still a bummer... Estimates show a $1500 to $2000 bill. After a week or so of thinking and estimating and communicating, we ended up agreeing to go through the insurance, as David originally thought about covering for the damage by himself. Now stuff needs to get done. However, this month, the car is proving to be a major budget hole. There's that little body shop bill. Further, the other day, I brought it in to change oil, ending up changing the rear brake pads and disks. I feel I was somewhat pushed into that by the dealership and am really considering moving to a more reasonable mechanics to further service to the car, especially now that the free maintenance deal is over (already... yes, that little baby is getting older... 40000 miles already...) Finally, the dealership reminded us that the big 40k tune up was coming up and that we should make an appointment for that and that, gulp, the bill would reach the $700. Talk about sucking, goddammit.
I was pretty sad the whole week, as my friend and co-rider Manu was gone on vacation to New York. Who to ride with? Who to ride with? Fortunately enough, he came back from vacation on Saturday night, which means that.. yes! Of course! We rode on sunday, yay! We are getting further into our exploration of the hills south of San Jose. Saturday, we rode all the way to Palo Alto, and basically did the little triangle 280 to Sand Hill Road to Alpine Road, back to 280, through Portola. Admittedly, I had no idea there were so many cute places in the valley. Next time, though, I really want to go through the mountains to the Skyline Blvd.
My work load with nexB is steadily increasing. I have actually started to work on code, and it is Wiki code. For those who have no idea what this is, check out the father of all Wikis. I started hearing about the concept a while ago, then heard somehow about the Wikipedia, a very interesting project if you ask me. Now I get to see a Wiki from inside. The implementation we chose to work on and develop is certainly not of the best quality, but in the end, it is only the principle that matters. As I might have mentioned before, Philippe who brought me in at nexB, wants to work XP [1] style, which, among other things, requires programmers to work in pairs. Today, though, I did not really want to go to San Carlos (I am trying not to go everyday, as the 25 miles commute is a bit much), so that Philippe and I ended up working remotely. Man, I had no idea a phone and a PC-Anywhere kind of software could be so efficient. We basically spent the day working together, as if we had be side-by-side on the same computer, while we were actually on the phone, sharing my computer through TightVNC.
tue 2003-10-07
[1] and for those who really are out there, no, XP is not some version of Windows, but eXtreme Programming, a technique of programming for small teams.
