Secrètes de Paris, and Naughty Paris (February 14, 2005)
Here's to two new blogs kicked off by fellow freelancer and current Paris resident Heather Stimmler-Hall:

• Secrètes de Paris is the blog version of her well-known, monthly "Secrets of Paris" newsletter, a compendium of interesting happenings, restaurant adventures, and more in Paris. It's an excellent resource to consult before visiting (or whenever you want a Paris fix).
• On the more mature front, Naughty Paris (A Good Girl's Guide to Being Bad in the City of Light), inhabits the City of Light at night. Until the (forthcoming) print guide is available, revel in the blog.

Crawling for Spyware (February 14, 2006)
Updated the site with links to two new security stories, including "Crawling the Internet to Find and Stop Spyware," which details University of Washington researchers' efforts to better understand where spyware lives on the Internet, and the likelihood of it infecting an average user. Unfortunately, they found, spyware is a significant threat to all users. Yet avoiding certain types of websites greatly lessons users' chances of infection.

Only the Green Die Young (February 1, 2006)

Still not Kansas: I’m only 10 years and one musical adaptation behind on this, but my in-flight Paris–Amsterdam–Boston reading, finished off since my Northwest A330’s entertainment system went black for my seat, was Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a subversive, thoroughly engaging re envisioning of Wizard of Oz. Everything you know—or thought you knew—about the well-known story (which I now remember more from the Technicolor film than Baum’s books) does connect in the end with the events in Wicked, but not before it all gets turned upside down. Dare I mention the saga of Oz college life, the animal-liberation agitators, or everything you ever wanted to know about making monkeys fly? A wonderful mind bend. Now on to the sequel, Son of a Witch.

You’re not in Paris anymore, either: While we’re on the same meme, I left the City of Lights yesterday in a cold, crisp dawn. First, however, I set the espresso pot on the stove, and procured one last pain au chocolat and roulade au chocolate (a filled custard and chocolate chip pastry sleeve, sometimes known as a pain au suisse) from the boulangerie next to the apartment I’d been inhabiting on rue Montmartre, in the 1st arrondissement. Outdoors, the early hour, street lights, fog and general lack of light—Paris is quite far west in the Central European time zone—made it look more like the Paris I know from the photographs of Robert Doisneau or Willy Ronis. Maybe what I thought were night photographs, were early morning snaps? Unfortunately for my photo work I wasn’t privy to such insights until the last day.

Riding the Silver Line: As always, leaving France means an abrupt change wherever else you go, though the transition was especially dramatic with a landing in a gray, icy fog at Boston’s Logan Airport, then getting pelted with sleet while waiting for the Silver Line bus pickup.

The Silver line is a relatively new part of the Boston transportation system—the T—which relies on buses and underground tunnels. It’s a vast, vast improvement over the previous method of reaching the airport via T, which inevitably involved about three different line changes, lots of waiting, and too many stairs, before ending up at the airport T station, and then catching a bus to your terminal.

By contrast, the Silver line is a bus that leaves from South Station, on the T’s red line (also where Amtrak and commuter rails arrive), and drops you directly at your terminal. The underground tunnels let it avoid almost all traffic. And that's all for the normal price of the T, which is currently $1.25. Which isn’t bad, though since it was 85¢ when I moved to France in mid–2003, it still surprises me.

Amoureux de la Colonne Bastille, Paris, 1957 (Willy Ronis)

Willy Ronis who? Yes, as mentioned above in the same sentence as Robert Doisneau, Ronis is a well-known photographer, at least in France. My photography history education being somewhat spotty (beyond the obvious Mathew Brady thing), I didn’t know about Ronis, and hadn’t heard anything about the exhibit or seen it profiled in Zurban. Over several days, however, I repeatedly noticed a long queue for the retrospective, held at the Hotel de Ville across the street from the BHV department store on Rivoli (where I perhaps made several trips).

Do people queue for anything that’s free? Perhaps, but the photograph used on the exhibition poster was so engaging, and I had time on my hands, so I eventually lined up too, despite the cold temperatures and bitter gusts. Guards let in small groups of people as others exited, and inside—after clearing the bag x-ray, and metal detectors (de rigueur for government buildings) was an excellent Ronis retrospective, commissioned on the occasion of his 90th birthday. He's especially good at Parisian street scenes, always a fun genre, and the photographs span quite a few years, from before World War II, to more recent work. (Ronis helped curate the exhibit, though after a final series of nudes, he's reportedly stopped shooting.)

River Seine and the City of Paris (Peter Turnley)

The shot on the exhibit poster that really caught my eye is taken from the top of the Colonne de Juillet monument in Bastille (which commemorates the revolutionary victims of the three-day 1830 uprising that overthrew Charles X's monarchy). I’d love to get access to the monument some day, camera in hand. I have my suspicions that’s where "River Seine and the City of Paris," a quite well-known Paris photograph (at right) by Peter Turnley—an American living in Paris who's also an expert in Parisian street photography—was taken, a question I’ve been pondering for some time. (Helicopter shot? Quite tall apartment building? Crane? The list of theoretical possibilities ran on, the more I got to know Paris.) On a related note, my most recent sighting of Turnley’s photograph was yesterday in a Charles De Gaulle airport terminal 2 departure lounge café.

(The Willy Ronis retrospective is open Monday–Saturday from 10am to 7pm at Salon d'accueil, Hotel de Ville, 29 rue de Rivoli, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, just until February 18, 2006.)

The Future of Endpoint Security (January 31, 2006)
Today, Enterprise Systems runs two security stories I wrote. The first, "The Shape of Endpoint Security to Come," covers the topic of, yes, endpoint security. There's a lot of hype around the movement, with seemingly everything information-security related getting the "endpoint security" label recently.

Meanwhile my second story, "Spinning Can-Spam," dissects the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM law (meant to stem spam). The Federal Trade Commission says the law is working. Many experts, however, disagree.

Ten Best Intranets of 2006 (January 23, 2006)
Released today, the "Ten Best Intranets of 2006" report from Nielsen Norman Group reviews the designs and usability of the world's ten best intranets for 2006. This year, we saw increased use of multimedia, e-learning, internal blogs, and mobile access. Winning companies also encouraged consistent design by emphasizing training for content contributors.

Here are the ten best-designed intranets for 2006:

• Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia
• ALTANA Pharma AG, Germany
• Bank of Ireland Group, Ireland
• Capital One, USA
• IBM, USA
• Merrill Lynch, USA
• METRO Group, Germany
• O2, UK
• Staples, USA
• Vodafone, UK

The report, which I co-authored with Kara Pernice Coyne and Jakob Nielsen, clocks in at 287 pages, and includes 193 screenshots. Jakob's current Alertbox rounds up more report findings, and you can also purchase a copy of the report.

Greetings from Paris (January 22, 2006)
It's good to be back. After moving from France to the Boston area four months ago, I'm back in Paris now through the end of January, watching my friends' flat in the first arrondissement while they're on their annual January ski vacation (a French tradition). Or at least that's a pretty good excuse for being here.

Since living day-to-day in this part of the city (smack dab in the center) is new to me, I have in hand a list of their favorite, local boulangeries, chocolatier, source for mâgret (duck breast) and chicken, wine store, vegetable markets, butcher, patisserie, fromâge, and so on. Half the fun of living here is not only the wonderful food you find in the restaurants, but also the ability to find and cook with such incredibly fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables.

Of course it being Sunday, just about everything is closed. Tomorrow too. So full marché shopping and cooking-at-home festivities commence Tuesday.

Happy New Year (January 10, 2006)
As 2006 starts, I have no radical changes to report for the site, though I do intend to get more updated photographs onto the site as soon as possible.

With a late-month trip back to Paris coming up, I'm also hoping to update my Paris photos and generate a few new stories from there.