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News and editorial on life from the south of France, a regular series on how to move here and some random musings too.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'commentary'
Where should we go on holiday?
That’s a question that’s even more difficult to answer this year as there’s not only the problem of the exchange rate making everywhere much more expensive but then there’s the oil price which can mean that your holiday increa...
Just how do you change your hosting service?
Unfortunately, we’re rapidly becoming experts at this but for those that think they’re locked in to their current hosting service no matter what, think again because you definitely aren’t locked in. Essentially, it’s fairly si...
The websites are on the move AGAIN!
It’s only been two weeks since we moved the websites on the American hosts from Powweb who couldn’t even manage to get the basic hosting account set up first time which says something about the poor quality of their support as they only o...
How can you keep the quality of your blog up?
One of the problems that you find when you’re blogging quite a lot is in keeping the quality of the posts up. Many bloggers seem not to bother with quality and end up producing a steady stream of short posts that are barely in English and often...
The tunnel out of Microsoft is nearly dug…
It took five and a half hours to download yesterday but finally I’ve got a DVD with Ubuntu (Linux) on it. Setting up the computer to run both Vista and Ubuntu turned out to be surprisingly simple. All that I needed to do was to shrink the parti...
What’s with all the Vista updates?
Is it just me, or does everyone out there think that Vista is rubbish? I’ve a nice new Vista ready computer that came with Vista Business installed yet it will only run for about two hours before it hangs up. Not only does it hang up, but it st...
Will our little American adventure be worth all the hassle?
Ah, now, that’s the question, isn’t it? The original idea for the plan was hatched when google started offering to let you label sites as being targeted at specific countries. As a trial, we popped the twins of some sites on either side o...
A busy weekend of shuffling websites
We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with. F...
What course next?
Somehow or other I seem to be about to run off the end of my modern languages degree and have started to think about what I’ll do next. I’m not quite sure how I got to this point as all I really wanted to do was to be able to speak French...
Powweb finally gets back to me
It’s taken three days and in the end I had to send an e-mail to their sales department saying that I wanted to cancel the hosting account to get any action. Now they’re saying that they are expediting the work on it. It’s still not ...
American hassles on the powweb hosting
I thought that I’d run with powweb as our main hosting platform in America on the basis that Brooke uses it and she always seems to know what she’s doing computer-wise. Not a good move as it turned out. Uploading the databases and HTML wa...
Will the interest rate drop help YOU?
Interest rate changes by central banks are peculiar affairs. For one thing, the banks aren’t actually obliged to respond by lowering interest rates although, usually, they do so by a similar amount. It’s usually a similar amount rather th...
Trying out American hosting
Several years ago I made the move from US based hosting to UK based hosting because of the extra traffic that you tend to get when your site is hosted in the same location as your main customer base. That particular move worked really well in that I ...
Developing a series blog
After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series. So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on. However, I’ve been ...
A new washing machine
Yeah, I know, boring. However, interestingly our strategy of simply buying the cheapest available machine nearly four years back and replacing it when it was at the end of its life does appear to have been the correct one. The original one cost us ar...
You’ve moved abroad and need a bank. Which one should you choose?
It’s obviously impossible to name a single bank which you can choose simply because no single bank operates in every country of the world. There are some general pointers as to how to go about choosing your bank though. One school of thought is...
How valid is google’s algorithm?
Reading the original research presentation of google highlights a number of points where the weakness of the algorithm can still be exploited and those cracks are starting to become very obvious. One thing that they never allowed for was that once mo...
Almost at the opening night!
James’ nursery school is in the throes of producing a film based on the Arabian nights tales. Well, we think it’s on that as James is less than forthcoming about his role in the production beyond mentioning the other day that he had to ha...
Can the post office really consider itself a bank?
Post offices in many countries around the world offer a range of banking services these days, but are they really up to it? Typically a small post office will have one counter to do everything. That works well when “everything” is mainly ...
