I came across that stuff surfing the web: http://pasta.e-rcps.com/gripes/
This is a booklet first published in 1944 for issue to American troops. It tries to explain the cultural differences between France and USA to GIs... The book consists of a list of complaints, each accompanied by a patient explanation of why the French are as they are and whether or not the complaint is valid.
This booklet was recently republished in France under the name "Nos amis les français" ("Our Friends the French") and it was last summer best-seller in France. I put it on top of my christmas wish list, a must-have for a french immigrant like me!

I have to agree with some of them:

• 42. "Their toilets are appalling." Let's face it, French toilets are not appalling like they were probably in 1945 but in general are still less clean than American ones.
• 29. "The French are always criticizing... That is sooooooooooo true, I would also have added complaining. But if you know the french culture, you know that most of the time it is just for the pleasure of it, we don't really mean it ;-)

Some of them were probably true but are not anymore:

• 45. "The French don't bathe.", the author rectifies the complaint: "They don't bathe often enough." :-) I can tell you I definitively wash more than the average Riverside inhabitant ;-) (Riverside, California, where I live)

Interestingly enough, you can even find some complaints that are now reversed, French would say that about American nowadays:

• 30. "All the French want is a good time. That's all they think about in Paris." (Replace Paris by L.A., Vegas, New Orleans, Miami, etc...)
• 67. "French railroads are a mess." (you could also add electrical grid I guess on this one...)

My personal favorite:

• 48. "I'd like the French a lot better if they were cleaner." Followed by the comment "That's perfectly understandable." :-)

Anyways there are 112 of them. It is kind of sad that 60 years later, it is still almost the same misunderstandings...

I just installed SpamBayes and I was quite impressed by the results. This spam filter tackles the problem using a statistical approach, based on the Bayes theory.
When a new email is received, it is scanned into tokens, words or groups of words. Depending of each of these tokens spam probability found in the local database, the total email spam probability is computed and the email is filtered accordingly.

The beauty of the algorithm is that the database is created by you, when you indicate to SpamBayes which messages are spam and which are not. Basically you must train it initially so that it performs well and the filter adapts itself depending of the kind of messages you are interested in or not... The more you have received messages and correctly filtered them, the better the filter becomes and the less you have to interact with it.

Few links on this topic:

• Very interesting article from Paul Graham, the author of the Bayesian filtering algorithm.
• SpamBayes, an open source implementation of Paul Graham algorithm in Python. Project hosted by sourceforge. Spambayes can run with most email clients and platforms using a pop proxy, can also be integrated in MS outlook as a pluggin.
• Popfile, other implementation (in perl), also hosted at sourceforge.
• Interesting comparison of SpamBayes and Popfile.

Alternative sources of energy in California. This is the famous "Wind farm" on the San Gorgonio Mountain Pass, the third largest concentration of windmills in California. 4000 windmills of various power, between 20kW and 300kW each, that provides enough electricity for the city of Palm Springs and the whole Coachella valley (about 250,000 people).
Click here for more pictures of the farm.

Related information:
   Palm Springs wind energy web site.
   Wind farms of the world.

Back from my extended week-end in Vancouver. I spent most of my time there waiting in the US consulate (immigration appointment, the original purpose of my trip), looking at the rain falling (almost all the time) but I did manage to do some sightseeing.
The city is nice, very clean but the downtown is kind of crowded for a city this size, only 2.5 millions people after all.
The bay is surrounded by nice mountains but I found it a little too industrialized compared to San Francisco for instance...
People are nice and relaxed especially compared to L.A. (that's true for so many cities anyways:-) !) but Vancouver feels sleepy and boring and not only because it is already night at 4pm...
This is the only photo I took I am not completely ashamed of, totem poles in Stanley Park, the Vancouver downtown urban forest. Always look at the camera settings before shouting, especially in manual mode...

It rained last night. So what?
If you are asking that, obviously you don't live in Los Angeles. Last time it rained here was May 4th, that's almost 6 months without rain! It means the rain season just started.
It is amazing, water that fells down from the sky, like a huge sprinkler:-) After such a long time without rain, it is kind of scary too but hey, it was Halloween!