And that means we get to spend an evening eating our way through the city, starting with jamon iberico on pan con tomate with a glass of vermouth!
Here is my wonderful friend Aurore, a deeply beautiful human running a maker space and co-working space in the tiny but painfully beautiful French village of Pernes-les-Fontaines in Provence. It's called La Bricothèque, Fablab de Pernes, and you should visit if you can. So far from Silicon Valley, she is one of us: a human engine of innovation and possibility. With her partner Olivier (I fucking love this guy), she is opening a door to a new generation of makers creating a better future for all of us.
We discovered this pretty-new winemaker, a father-and-son team. The dad was a French expat CIO in London who always dreamed of making wine. So he came back to Provence, bought a ruin of a chateau surrounded by grenache and syrah vineyards, and invested in reviving both house and vines. The winery is Domaine du Chat Blanc. They're new, but doing everything right -- organic vineyards, hand-harvesting (mostly) and lots of care in their wines.
(Also: I love grenache and syrah, the only varieties they grow.)
So nice to meet these winemakers, and to share a few moments about their wonderful new winery. Can't wait to visit them again next year and see how they've grown.
No matter how many times we live in Provence, we still aways discover new and wonderful places. Like this village of Le Barroux, which is old and beautiful and a still-active community. A family still lives in the castle and, if you look closely, you can see them having dinner on their balcony. Here comes the drone video!
Greetings from Provence! We couldn't wait to return to Europe. So we didn't wait. We landed in Spain early in the morning on the first day Spain allowed vaccinated Americans without pandemic restrictions. And then we flew to France early in the morning two days later on the first day France welcomed vaccinated Americans.
After a few weeks, I'm here to report what it's like traveling in Europe after the pandemic. (tl;dr: It's awesome!)
It's widely understood that 5G is set to transform business. But you can't talk about the coming 5G transformation without talking about 5G and big data. And you can't talk about 5G and big data without talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and multi-access edge computing (MEC). There's a ton of change coming. But don't be overwhelmed. Be prepared.
To oversimplify, 5G is needed to distribute AI to the edge and to devices. And AI is needed to bring intelligence to complex 5G networks. Widely distributed AI, edge computing and 5G all should drive very fast, very low-latency interactions throughout an organization.
Here's why the future of business IT depends on the symbiotic relationship between 5G, Big Data, AI and multi-access computing.
The only way to use My laptop via Google Fi is to have my phone outside on a chair with line-of-sight between laptop and phone. No signal can penetrate these walls.
This is an old fishing village East of Marseille. That speck swimming in the direction of Algeria is me.
We're staying for a month in a town in Provence called l'Isle Sur La Sorgue, which means "The Island on the Sorgue." The Sorgue river starts as a natural spring coming out of the ground. At some point, the river splits in two, then re-joins later down the river. The land between the split is this amazingly charming town, an "Island" on the Sorgue river. Over the centuries, local residents have built canals throughout the town to support various industries, and so there's water everywhere (it's basically the opposite of California).
The good news is that we're about to spend a month in Provence without tourists.
Amira pinned only the most excellent restaurants and bakeries in Paris for us to check out.
I couldn't stop myself from taking like 30 pictures of the Winged Victory of Samothrace sculpture in the Louvre today. It's got to be the most amazing sculpture ever made.
We are loving our apartment (for the next few days) in Central Paris -- it's in a very cool neighborhood, and the apartment itself is fantastic -- fiber optic internet, too. This is why we're nomads.
And vermouth. And cava. At the awesome bar and restaurant called El Xampanyet.
We got our covid test done for entry into France tomorrow. Now it’s tapa time.
