The road from Paris to the Cote-d’Azur is called “La Route du Soleil” – the Road of the Sun. This happy name for a highway is further validated by a single sign, “Le Porte du Soleil.” Julien explained this all to me Sunday, as we found a hotel for the night before passing through the door of the sun today. The are “conceptual, not literal”, he said.

Apparently the doors of the sun belong to each vehicle parked on a searing tarmac when holiday traffic turns into a traffic jam. The French call it a “bouchon” – a cork – naturally. Ten kilometers of halted highway must look about the same throughout the West. The cars stop. Five or ten minutes pass without lifting off the brakes, then you pull the handbrake and give your legs a rest. A former lane-jockey next to you opens his door, puts his foot on the runningboard, pops up to survey the queue, and demounts, shaking his head. You cut your engine as soon as he lights a cigarette, and get out.

The car in front of you is driven by someone from your hometown. You compare the same story you just heard on traffic radio. It’s backed 3 km, or 12. Forty minutes, or fifteen. There is an accident. There are casualties. There will be a wreckage on the way. Down the dotted line, would-be vacationers precipitate from their cars. Motorcycles slalom through the doors. Just when you want to call it a picnic and see who’s packing rosettes and a cold rosé, the doors ahead close like a zipper, brakelights flare as the clutch is punched, and the long crawl continues.

Thankfully, our bottleneck was uncorked quickly. Minutes later we passed the “Porte du Soleil”, and soon discovered that is had another analogy, also desiring “portes” in the plural: turnpikes. Again, Julien explained. “Provence has more tolls than anywhere in France.” Why? “Because everyone wants to go there, especially the Dutch and the Germans,” he said, nodding to two caravans. In the homestretch from Paris, through the Bouche du Rhone and into Provence, tollbooths are not the guarantee of uninterrupted turnpike, but more like flaming hoops of consumer extortion. Exit towns on the way congratulate your arrival on the exit ramps with signs, “See you soon on the ESCOTA network!” If they won’t be destinations, at least they can extract a transit tax.

While the municipal beneficence gives us overpass restaurants, inflated gas prices, and smooth pavement every five miles between a chunk of change, at least it delivers us to where we want to be, past the doors of the sun. At half past one, smooth sailing on the hip of a hill, we finally broke through the promise of the parched landscape and found its end: the sea beyond the town of Cassis below, pointed to by the anvil of the stone, above. I have never been much of beach bum, but at this first sight of the Mediterranean coast iI heaved with a sense of grace and respite. “Thalatta! Thalatta!” cried the 10,000 Greeks when they saw the Black Sea from the mountaintop. They knew it was the way home. For me, it presented a different salvation – one ten hours from work and Paris, and a world apart for the next two weeks.

In preparation for my new job I’ve been signing up with a bunch of video-sharing sites. Thing is: I got no video camera. The video on my Fuji F10 is busted, and my iBook predates those with pinholes. One thing I do have plenty of is old-fashioned digital photos. The question, then: how to turn my photos into video slideshows?

Enter Slideroll.com, top hit for Google string “flickr photo video slideshow”. It looked like a legit, layman’s tool perfectly suited to the task. “Free Slideshow Videomaker!” says a button on their site. Fair enough. I poked around a bit, and decided to spring $7.50 for a two month test run.

Unfortunately, I didn’t poke around enough, and overlooked that the “Free Slideshow Videomaker” is, for now at least, only a Windows app. No slideshow videos today. Even so, the service seems very promising so I don’t regret the purchase. It’s been around since 2004 (ample time to develop a Mac version, eh?), and while the coup de grace feature remains out of Mac users’ reach, everything leading up to it feels solid.

The site is logically setup and UI behaves smoothly. In no time I had given it Flickr API access and had all my sets available for upload in a dropdown menu. While I admit I made no effort to explore any deeper features or editing functions, within 10 minutes I had uploaded a thick set of pics from SONAR in Barcelona, picked some music from Sonific (meh), saved and downloaded the whole thing. Not bad. Of course, this “download” is not a video, but a folder that can be processed into video…on a PC…and, let’s hope, eventually on a Mac.

As it stands, Slideroll does offer a somewhat compelling service. Unlike the embedded Flickr slideshows used below, an embedded Slideroll occupies less page real estate. It also takes a little less time to load, assumingly because it’s calling a prefab slideshow from Slideroll, rather than loading a raw Flickr Flash slideshow. Converting Sliderolls to videos, I hope, will make the result even more discrete, useful, and fast-loading when embedded from a videosharing site.

I am not particularly concerned by the 5000-photo upload limit. It’s generous to begin with, and it becomes irrelevant once I can depend upon Slideroll as a photo-to-video production tool – and you can just download, save, and repost the video – rather than a slideshow creation and hosting service. Of course, this imposes a different calculus on the whole situation: $7.50 bimonthly is $45 a year. Considering current freeware and webapp trends, not to mention a market of indie programs that can be had for a song, that’s a stupid expensive proposition for any application, much less an interdependent web-desktop tool. Make it a flat $25 or $30 for the 5000 photo ceiling and the (Mac, please) videomaker and it’s sold.

One thing I must note is that, at its default 360×240 setting, Slideroll is landscape oriented and crops photos rotated to portrait. There are both pan and zoom options, but I haven’t tested them. Increasing the aspect ratio to 360×360 appears to be a satisfactory, even pleasing band-aid, but I have no idea how that plays when converting to, and uploading as, video. Oh yeah, Web 2.0 brownie points for the (adjustable) rounded corners.

The jury is still out. Let’s hope Mr. Gaudreault can submit a Mac version of the Videomaker as additional evidence.

UPDATE: The first attempt at pasting code broke my site…insofar as it ruined my lovely center column layout by justifying to the page. I’m sure my own ignorance is responsible.

UPDATE 2: The “New MySpace Code” works just dany in Wordpress – though I don’t know why the lower corners are cropped.

UPDATE 3: Mr. Gaudreault was kind enough to comment (below). The prices above have been changed accordingly. Thank you, Mr. Gaudreault. I wait with bated breath for the Mac release!

Here are some pubs currently up in the Metro. They are for Cité de l’architecture et du patrimonie, a new museum in the Palais Chaillot dedicated to French architecture, monuments and cultural heritage from the 12th-century onward. It is slated to fully open in March 2007, and is to have 23,000 square meters of exhibition space. Apparently the permanent collections and auditorium are already open, and public programming has started. Will have to check it out.

Kudos to the design team behind the ad campaign. I’m not sure where the tower on the barge is from, but the airlifted building is one quarter of the Bibliothéque Francois Mitterand. I hope there will be more in the series.

Welcome to my blog.

I was born today, October 8th, in 1979.

I am writing this to know myself better.