With all the visa and school troubles behind, I'm back to Santa Clara in the new appartment that Julie and I just started furnishing!

I did my internship presentation last tuesday in paris, it went well, the jury liked what I did apparently.

Julie and I took off the day after at 12pm. The flight went alright. The only problem was in Paris, the Subway/Train ride to the airport was really a pain... We had 3 heavy lugage and it took us two hours and 15 minutes to go from Ville d'Avray to Charles de Gaulle airport!

During these two weeks back home, I took the TGV to Lyon to visit my parents. I hadn't seen them since I left France in February. It was great to see them again!

Of course, I played with my GPS again. Here's the track of the TGV ride from Paris to Lyon.
I monitored the speed of the train. It went up to 300km/h only for a few minutes, the rest of the trip was below that... but still pretty fast! I'll try to find the time to generate a better kml with speed and altitude information so that we can see more stuff.

Today I went biking in my new neighborhood, I notices there were good bike trails in the area so I gave them a try. I saw to hares... these things sure run fast... Gps again... here's the track... The receiver was in my back pack so the track is a little messy...

I have a busy week end coming... Lots of stuff to do, and perhaps a little flying if I have the time :-)

Happy Landings!

I'm back to France for a couple of weeks and here's what I'm seeing out the window... Great weather !

It's a good thing I'm heading off to CA by the end of month... I already miss the nice weather :-P

Alright, back to work !

That's it, my last night in this apartment... I'm, going to spend my whole day tomorrow moving all the stuff I put in boxes today.

I can't believe how my stuff grew over the past 6 months here. I mean I came only with a backpack and a suitcase, and now I'm going to have to rent a truck tomorrow to move all my furniture, computers, clothes, kitchen stuff...

Well, all of it is not mine, a lot of it is leftovers from my room mate... He really over-bought when he came here... Some of the stuff I packed, I would have never bought... ever ! :-)
Say if you staying for 6 months, and didn't plan to buy a TV, would you buy a couch ? I wouldn't...

Anyways, it's not the time to be bitching... I'm glad I'll be leaving this complex for a better one, hopefully...
I think the only thing that I'll miss from here is the swimming pool. Okay, it was terrible when the weather was hot... I didn't like too much swimming in the hair, and usual pool debris :-/ And what was going on with these people bathing completely dressed up ?! No, what I liked is that it was deeper than most of the pools in the area, and that when the weather was perfect like today, not too hot nor too cold, I had the pool all for myself !

There's something I'll never understand about houses in California... I don't know if it's the same in all states, but all the apartments that I saw all had this ridiculously thick carpet... What's up with that ?! We are in a part of the world where it's relatively hot, why do you need a warm heavy carpet ?
When I was a kid, I wanted carpet in my room, my mum always told me it would not be a good thing... now I understand why... It's dirty as hell !
I'm pretty sure that if I vaccum the entire apartment now, and look in the dirt bag thing of the vaccum cleaner, I can find enough cookie-crums to re-construct about a thousand cookies !

That's what I don't like about carpets... it's morning, you are reading digg, eating cookies, and you drop a few crums on the floor... it's carpet... it's too late you can't pick them up, they are already too deep...
On the contrary, with tiles, it's no big deal, you just use a broom, or just toss the crums under the bed or something... okay, maybe not the last part...

So if anyone knows... why carpets ?

Alright, time to go to bed... :)

I tried uploading my first videos on youtube today. we'll see how it goes.

The process was pretty simple and they got online a few hours later.

Here we go, the NDA has been lifted... I was one of the lucky people who had the chance to participate in the beta of FSX.

My impressions on Flight Simulator X?
Well, it rocks ! Of course, it'll rock even more when I'll get a new DX10 video card with a brand new machine.


About the sim, I especially love the new multiplayer mode and the various shaders they have added such as the water reflections of the tarmac/runway reflections. There is also a brand new module to interact with the sim, and it includes a .NET interface !

We can expect a release within the next two months if I believe what I've read here and there.
It's been fun to be close to the development of FS, and all the folks at MS are really nice. I can't disclose anything about the beta process, but all I can say is that MS was very responsive. For example, I was pissed at something they removed, filed a bug, and that thing made its way back in the sim ;-) They should call it the "Matt" feature ! No, I won't tell what feature it is ;-)