Thu:30.Jan.20 Bordeaux.fr

Back in Bordeaux, where I arrived a little over 15 years ago to start my time in France. Different times, simillarly beautiful city. I'm spending two days at the cosy Deezer office in the heart of the city, close to la flêche Saint Michel, and then two more days at Charlie's chocolate factory in Mérignac, pretty close to infamous Rue du Tondu. The always rainy city is now less than 2 hours away from Paris, still south west but brimful of people who ran away from Paris. Still nice, still relaxed (compared to Paris), and still a place to be. That's at least the plan for the next days!

Wed:22.Jan.20 Pantin.fr

Freunde es ist soweit: I'm currently going through this list and replace one by one every  ̶e̶v̶i̶l̶ Google service I am using. It's been over 5 weeks that I am locked out of my Google universe, my trust in them has been consumed and now reaches well into negative. I will make a formal GDPR-compliant data recovery request by snail mail to Google France, and probably never hear back from them anyway. Google is above any jurisdiction, it is time for me to stop feeding them.

Sat:18.Jan.20 Pantin.fr

I just returned from my second ride with my new club Pantin Cyclo Sport. With my new Silberpfeil, obviously. I finally managed to get rid of the nasty Vittoria Rubino tubeless ready tyres, which caused already much distress during my first CSP ride (where I got a puncture and spent 40 minutes fixing it with the help of two others). I spent two full hours on getting them off the wheel, with scissors and every other imaginable tool. Focus built a nice racer, but their choice of the tyres was a total fail. All seems to be good now, the machine is ready for more routine and rides.

And yes, la grève is still ongoing. It's probably a campaign to get more people to commute by bicycle, ever since December 5 the volume of cyclists has exploded (unfortunately the number of totally jammed streets as well, there are still those dumb cars and scooters).

Fri:03.Jan.20 Paris.fr

New year, new decade. Welcome! Google decided to disable my account on Christmas Day, apparently I haven't been a good kid recently. With this dictatorlike action comes a ton of annoyment, like no more geolocation of my blog posts like this one (and hence a more lenghty process to publish an article... which I will use as the excuse for my late happy new year post), no more emails, no more files on Google Drive, no more pins on Google Map, no more bookmarks, no more shared contacts, no more videos from Max. Google's reach into our lives is big, and although I have some backup accounts in place I'm really not happy that my immediate appeal didn't result in the promised answer within 48 hours. It's been now almost 10 days without all this, and every day chances are increasing that I'll never get my access back. Wouldn't be a drama, but still very unpleasant... especially all the lost documents and videos will be impossible to replace. Anyway, it's Friday again, then Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Time to hit the weekend!

Thu:26.Dec.19 Mailly-le-Château.fr

Working remotely from our cottage, after having spent a great and prolonged Christmas weekend in the house. Jacek and Kasia are here, so are Grand-Père-Alain, Małgosia and Rebecca. Full house, or almost. Fine food, fine company and some fine work (replacing two dried up trees, and adding more plaster to the new unit upstairs). My Google account has been disabled over Christmas, for having violated their policy, which is all the information I have.