Comme chaque année, l’excellent Bon pour les oreilles, blog musical helvète et pointu de Christophe Schenk, a invité ses lecteurs à s’adonner au jeu de l’album préféré de l’année. Des coups de coeur à découvrir, auquel j’ai modestement participé avec
ma critique du délicieux album Parallax Error Beheads You de Max Tundra.
De quoi faire le plein [...]

The Hype Machine challenged bloggers to post their Top 10 music albums from 2008, and I thought it’d be a fun ride to comply, going through all I’ve been listening this year to pick what I most preferred, or expect to come back to in the future…
10. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours (Modular)
An uptempo [...]

Having finished my crazy gonzo travel blog saga about my last trip to Japan, I have decided to split my blog in two. The idea is to start posting more technical articles without scaring the hell out of friends/relatives who don’t care about Git merging strategies, reading their mail in Emacs or experimental Ruby prototypes [...]

It is largely impossible to convey the stimulating feeling I sense as I wander in Shibuya. It isn’t merely an ubiquitous cognitive overload, but also a cultural one: guys and gals wearing impossible clothes, displaying impossible haircuts, posing under the ever-lit neon lights and brand signs in Center Gai, right in front of the [...]

As the shinkansen arrives in Tokyo, I feel its mood again.
Streets irradiated by a kaleidoscope of neon-lit brand signs, giant screens masking facades to boast loud video clips or advertisements, while elsewhere jazz is playing on the streets through benevolent loudspeakers; forest of ads hanging in metro wagons, invasion of signs for discounts, directions, special [...]

The very first taste of Sapporo I get is the corn-butter-miso-ramen I order in a tiny restaurant in the “ramen alley” next to the neon-light festival of Susukino.
This variant, specific to the northern island of Hokkaido, could be described as the final boss of the noodle soup family, the Mother of all Ramen. Delicious though [...]