Laura was forty.

I was nineteen.

 

She lied

and she was.

Kim

Barcelona and Madrid are regular stops in my business travels and each time I come in the last couple of years the country has become visibly more desperate. Twenty-five percent unemployment is not pretty. The prevailing humor is of the gallows variety.
Wednesday I had dinner with a woman who was seeking work. She and her husband had recently closed the small business that they had nurtured for seventeen years. Now they were living on savings and hustling for any work they can get. If the situation were reversed, I hope I can summons her spunk, but alas the best I can do is put her on my list of potential contractors.
Kim

Business Insider has an interesting analysis of the Facebook IPO debacle. It appears that the offering was rife with preferential distribution of information and a lack of transparency during the "road show." In truth this is the big news regarding the IPO, not the tanking of the stock's value.
Facebook's corporate governance rules effectively deny the company's owners, i.e. the stockholders, control of the company and vesting all control with Mark Zuckerberg and his management team. For an investor, such corporate governance is difficult to stomach even when management has proven worthy of trust. Zuckerburg and Facebook are not trust worthy. Why would you want to invest in a company with an unclear business strategy, untrustworthy management and unfair corporate governance? I won't be.
Kim

Sunday I flew to Milan for a meeting on Monday, took the train to Rome for a Tuesday meeting and then it was off to Madrid for meetings on Wednesday.  My luggage, a computer bag and a carry-on.

There was a time when any trip longer than an overnight had me dragging around a Tumi Fortnight or at least a carry on and a duffle.  When I escorted, I read with envy and disbelief, blog posts of other companions who claimed to go on tour for two weeks carry nothing more than a bag that would fit in the overhead. The only place I could go for two weeks with only a carry-on would be Cap d'Adge. Mostly I looked like Wallis Simpson on holiday in Miami.

Now friends ask me for travel tips, mostly how to pack, negotiate airport security, deal with airlines, customs etc. I have no secrets on packing or the rest, but I always start by saying take the train.  If you must fly then I'd suggest air prive, first class, business class…I know we mostly end up in coach. If it is coach then do whatever you can to avoid Delta. Mostly I fly Air France and have access to the clubs and lounges, which makes the in airport time less arduous.

Tricks for dealing with security and customs are all based on being organized. Keep papers together and accessible. All liquids and makeup in one plastic bag that is stored in an outer pocket of you bag. Don't wear jewelry and dress simply, I'm the woman wearing leggings and t-shirt with slip on shoes. I also believe that the way I dress for air travel helps me avoid the body image machine or being patted down. When your clothing fits like a second skin it is hard to hide anything under your shirt.

Kim

Schadenfreude alert

Facebook's IPO was a dud. The stock's price at issuance was 38.00 USD a share, it closed at 38.23. Generally a successful IPO for a tech company will show a 10%-15% gain on the first day of trading.

A couple of reports that I've seen, blame the tepid market for Facebook on insiders selling and institutional buyers being over subscribed. Both reports are troubling if you hope that the value of this company will grow.

Kim

Given that I'm glad Sarko is going, I wish I could be enthusiastic about Hollande's victory, but I'm not.

The good news is that a focus on short term austerity will be replaced, hopefully with one promoting economic growth.  Though I'm not sure as Hollande's rational for asking for votes, was the he was not Sarkozy. 

Sarko did get two things right; France needs to reduce the country's long term debt and France needs to liberalize its economic system.  Though I expect the bond market to get his attention.

Kim

Over the weekend I learned that two former (companionship) clients had died. One was not a surprise as he had been ill for several years, but the other was a shock.

Rest in Peace.

Kim

What a wonderful story.

Anyone who contacts me via the email address mcgirl_paris@hushmail.me, don't Hushmail closed that account. Please us the yahoo.fr address on the sidebar.

Having the prerogatives of a business owner, I'm clearing my calendar for the middle of the week. Surf's up.

Kim

“He’s become obsessed with this app. It’s creepy.”

I sputtered, I nevered, and I denied it, but it was true. I had become obsessed with Girls Around Me, an app that perfectly distills many of the most worrying issues related to social networking, privacy and the rise of the smartphone into a perfect case study that anyone can understand.


Girls Around Me is a standard geolocation based maps app, similar to any other app that attempts to alert you to things of interest in your immediate vicinity…


Girls Around Me went into radar mode, and after just a few seconds, the map around us was filled with pictures of girls who were in the neighborhood.

“How does it know where these girls are? Do you know all these girls? Is it plucking data from your address book or something?” another friend asked.

“Not at all. These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.”

It has been a while since I’ve had a Facebook rant. Mostly because my own Facebook profile is effectively sealed, never updated and I never accept friend requests. Anyone who would like to connect and who knows or knew me can do so via LinkedIn.

But this article has set me off. Social media is great for many things, but what every user needs to understand is that these companies are not only using your personal information to sell you stuff, they are selling or giving it away to anyone who downloads the API for the purpose of developing and applications that linked to the social media site.

Girls Around Me is gone for now, but any technically adept and twisted stalker could create his own.

Kim

That's fair warning.
Though sometimes it is only a second.

Kim