More Dirty French People

When the plumbers were here earlier, they asked if it was just one person here taking showers. I said there were two of us and they responded so that's 2 showers per day. I corrected them saying that's 4 showers per day seeing we each take 2 showers, one in the morning and one in the evening. You should have seen the shock on their faces. Like only complete lunatics would take 2 showers per day.

They guy we stayed with in Italy only takes one shower per day and I read that this is fairly common but I can't understand it at all. You've got to have a shower in the morning, you just have to. There is no way I would leave the house without having had a shower, not even just to go to the boulangerie.

Obviously if I go to the gym I'm going to have a second shower but even if I haven't been sweating like a pig doing cardio, I would feel so dirty if I didn't shower. How could you spend time in the filthy, disgusting metro and not shower afterwards. Even just being out in this highly polluted city, I'd want to shower before bed.

Of course I wasn't surprised when these guys were shocked as I know very well that the French rarely wash their hands, let alone shower often. I wash my hand on arriving at the gym, because I've been in the metro, and I wash my hands before I leave, because I've been touching the machines. While I'm in there, washing with soap, I generally see 2 or 3 women leave the toilets without even getting close to the hand basins. So they go to the toilet, don't wash their hands, and then use the gym machines and whatever else. Ferbent confirms the men are the same. What's wrong with these people?

I was very pleased to see that wasn't the case during my recent trip to London. I used the very busy public toilets in one of the department stores and saw every single person wash their hands afterwards. I never would have thought the English were so much cleaner than the French but there you go!

When Will The Nouvelle Star End?

I spent last week in Italy so missed the last episode of the Nouvelle Star. The only reason I'm following it is due to the project I'm working on and while I am making money (not much), it is so boring, it's killing me.

I've been blogging about all the shows, putting up YouTube vidoes on each of the blogs, commenting on other blogs, participating in forums, all for less than $100 so far. My hourly rate is extremely low on this project. Unless things really pick up in the next couple of weeks, I won't be taking on something like this next year.

At least I'm ranking number 1 in google.com for Julien Dore although I'm not doing quite so well in google.fr. My only hope of making a decent amount of money is if Julien wins as I'm not ranking that well for the other contestants. I'm generally on the second or thrid page of the SERPS.

I just hope the show will end soon so I can go back to my regular work. I think there's only a couple of weeks to go. Fingers crossed Julien wins and I rake in the money!

More Stupid French People

Seven or 8 months ago, our downstairs neighbour knocked on our door complaining of water leaking through their bathroom light fitting. They seemed to think the water was coming from our bathroom and with a little investigation we agreed they were right. We got a plumber in and he 'fixed' the problem. A few weeks later it was leaking again.

Since then we've had numerous plumbers and architects and engineers and building officials come by to look at the problem. After many, many discussions they determined the water was coming from our shower. Really? That took us 5 minutes to work out.

Next came the endless discussions about who should pay to fix the problem. In Australia, structural or building maintenance is taken care of by the landlord (as far as I'm aware) and I would think that would be the case here but my landlord insisted that I should have to pay. I gave him my 'that's bloody ridiculous' argument and eventually he saw it my way and he paid for all the plumbers, who did nothing anyway.

A few months passed and they poor sucker who lives below me brought me a billion documents to sign so my insurance company would pay for the damages. I still think it shouldn't be my insurance who pays but whatever, the insurance companies can fight it out amongst themselves.

More months pass and today 6 more people came to look at the problem. They want to pull the shower apart to find the leak. Of course, I agreed to the work because I know it's coming from the shower. They'll be back next week to pull it apart and check it out.

The stupid architect guy thinks the problem stems from the fact that there isn't enough ventilation in the bathroom. Now while there may not be enough air passing through, it's pretty obvious that is not the cause of water gushing into my neighbours apartment. He insists it is and we need to cut of 3cm at the bottom of the bathroom door. What an idiot. Does he have a brain or what? I keep the bathroom door open 99% of the time anyway, including when I have a shower, so making a huge gap in the door won't solve anything.

He wouldn't listen to me and is going to send someone to chop off the bottom of the door. I'm pretty sure my landlord won't approve of that and neither will I so I won't be letting that guy inside my house. They can do that after I leave if they want but not while I'm here.

We'll see what happens next Monday when they come back and if they ever decide to actually fix the bloody pipe. I just feel sorry for my neighbour. He's been so patient. I would have moved out already if it had been me.

Qumana vs Live Writer

I've been using Qumana to write my blog posts for the last 9 months or so and it has been fantastic. It saves me so much time when blogging, especially seeing I have more than one blog. I can create posts offline and then publish and then start writing the next post for the next blog without having to login to each site. It has been a real time saver. Plus it's free!

It does have a few bugs though. I would find that if I closed Qumana and then later tried to open it again, it wouldn't open. I'd have to go into the Task Manager and stop the process, which would still be running. This was a small problem which was overcome by not closing the program!

After getting my new computer a couple of weeks ago, which runs on the Windows Vista operating system, I installed Qumana and it was working perfectly. Then 2 days ago it crashed and it wouldn't open again. I tried rebooting, uninstalling, reinstalling but no luck. I suspect it's a Java related problem. It just won't start up. So I had to find an alternative.

I looked at quite a few editors and BlogJet was looking like the way to go but $40 seems a little pricey when there are so many other free blog editors. Then I came across MS Live Writer. Live Writer is free and gets good reviews and so here I am writing my first blog post with my new blogging editor.

Setting up a blog is easy, as with Qumana, and was ready to write within minutes. The best thing so far is that it uses the blogs CSS file so I can see exactly how the post will look. Plus it is faster. I had problems with Qumana where I would type faster than it would recognise what I had done and I'd have to wait for it to catch up to me. That was kind of strange. I don't have that problem now.

Another little thing I like about Live Writer is when highlighting something to create a link. If you try to highlight a word in Qumana by double clicking it it would also pick up the comma or full stop which followed it. That constantly bugged me. That's not an issue with Live Writer.

One negative with Live Writer is that it doesn't detect when I have copied a link. So when I go to insert a link I have to paste it into the dialog box whereas with Qumana it would automatically insert it, making linking easy.

Let's hope all goes well when I publish. Fingers crossed...

Update: Success, it posted, yay!

Another thing worth mentioning is that Qumana used to put an extra line between paragraphs with Blogger. I couldn't figure out why. That problem is no longer, yay again!

Open Office

I wrote yesterday about how I couldn't get the spell checker to work after installing Open Office on my new computer. Obviously, with it being open source software it doesn't come with everything pre-installed so I had to download the relevant files and install them myself. This took virtually no time and now there is no chance of me posting articles with misspellings in them. Not that I would ever spell words like colour or organise as color or organize but typos can happen (fairly regularly with me!).

So special thanks to the very kind people who pointed me to the Australian English (Kelvin version) dictionary files.

Soma Out of the Nouvelle Star

Finally Soma got voted out of the Nouvelle Star. I thought he was going to be one of the best performers when I saw him at the auditions but it was all downhill from there. I can't believe he got as far as he did.

So I did the weekly wrap up over at my Nouvelle Star blog or you can visit the individual blogs to see the performances of each of the contestants.

So you can watch and listen to Tigane sing Elton John's Your Song, Raphaelle singing Hurt by Christina Aguilera, Julie singing some boring French crap, Soma singing completely off key to Walking Away by Craig David, Pierre in an unusal performance of Grace Kelly, Gaetane attempting to sing Ironic by Alanis Morissette, and Julien in another great performance with Moi Lolita.

New Laptop

I spent last weekend in London. I desperately needed to buy a new computer and seeing I couldn't stand the thought of using a French keyboard, I headed north to pick up a middle of the range laptop. Not that I really like the English keyboard either but at least it's similar to the one I'm used to. I set it to the international keyboard setting anyway so I think it's ok.

I really wanted to get the latest and greatest computer but at 2000 pounds, that was a bit over my budget. In the end I went with an Acer laptop with 17 inch screen, 1.6 GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, and who knows what else, for 700 pounds. It's not the best on the market, by any means, but it is significantly better than what I was using. The increase in speed in incredible and so is the LCD screen.

The first thing I had to do was set up a network so Ferbent can use the old computer at the same time as I use mine. It took me ages to figure out how to do but in the end it was very simple. Here are the steps for adding a computer to an existing network using the Livebox and internal Wi-Fi. This is really just for my reference because I think I'll buy another computer in the next month or so for Ferbent. The old has so many problems and he's helping me with my marketing efforts and he needs a new computer to be more productive.

Full instructions with screenshots can be found at Orange.

1. Push the little button on the bottom of the Livebox, next to the connection for the electricity. The opens up the network to allow you to connect the new computer.


2. On the new computer click Start - Connect.


3. Select the number of the Livebox (which is written on the bottom of the Livebox.


4. Enter the WEP password which can also be found on the bottom of the Livebox.


5. Wait a few seconds and the connection is made.

Yay, that was easy. Now if only I can figure out how to set up the wireless connection to the printer...

Oh, and it doesn't come with Microsoft Office so I downloaded the open source package Open Office. It was recommended by someone but the spell checker on the Word type program doesn't work :( That's the whole reason I wanted it. Don't tell me I'll actually have to fork out cash for Word and Excel? I wish Qumana came with a spell checker (with Australian English) then I could live with Open Writer. Although I prefer to check my grammar too before posting. Looks like Word it is.

Translate English to French

I created blogs for each of the contestants for this year's Nouvelle Star and so had no choice but to write them in French. I don't have the time or inclination to sit around trying to write in a language other than my own so I used Google Translate to translate what I wrote into French.

I have to say Google Translate works really well, much better than other free online translators which I've used. It wasn't perfect of course, it translated fan to ventilateur rather than, well, fan, and it changed Dove, the guy from the Nouvelle Star to la Colombe. At least I've learnt a new word in French. The bird, dove, is une colombe. Great, that should come in handy.

So next time I have to write a letter in French I'll just write it in English first and then throw it through the translator and cross my fingers.

Alex Out of La Nouvelle Star

Another episode of La Nouvelle Star is over. I quite enjoy blogging it live and I picked straight away that Alex would be the one to go out. I don't think there was much doubt about it - he was crap.

Julien and Pierre are still going strong, as is Gaetane. Soma was rubbish again, although marginally better than last week, but was pulled through by his numerous fans, again. Raphaelle and Julie only just made it through. I wasn't surprised about Julie, she should be out next week but I thought Raphaelle did alright. So that leaves Tigane who did a horrid version of U2's One.

My prediction for next week is either Julie or Raphaelle to be out.

Take the Tram in Paris

Today was a public holiday in France so, seeing the gym was closed, we decided to go for a long walk around Paris. We live around 30 minutes from Parc Andre Citroen so we headed there.

Just next to the park is the last stop of the new Paris Tramway so we thought we'd hop on that instead and see where it took us. Before we even headed off it was full and by the time we got to Cite Universite we were packed in like sardines. Thankfully most people got off there or at the Stade Charlety where there was a political event going on. Why am I not surprised that when Parisiens have the day off they choose to run around shouting things like 'Stop Sarko' and 'Les jeaunes pour Segolene'!

A few stops later we were at the end of the line in the 13th. Boy am I glad I don't live there! All you'll find there is row after row of massive apartment blocks or ghettos, as I prefer to call them. What a hell hole.

A fairly short walk, 20 minutes or so, took us to the Jardin des Plantes. I read recently that the Mayor of Paris had changed the law to allow people to sit on the grass areas in Paris' parks. That is clearly not the case because I saw at least 6 people working there running around with whistles telling people to get off the lawn. Nice.

After picking up some Greek food from my favourite Greek deli 'Le Piree' in the 6th we then ate what we bought in the park behind Notre Dame overlooking Ile St Louis.

I wasn't feeling too well due to the level of pollin around and the constant sneezing and eye watering finally got to me so we headed home - by metro. I never had allergy problems in Australia but both last year and this year it has been a serious problem.

I would add some photos to this post but I forgot to take my camera comme d'habitude.