Ceci n'est pas une blog.

The story so far...

The PC suddenly starts crashing every ten minutes, we move house, we send a change of address to France Telecom, I resuscitate the PC, we wait for ADSL to be switched on in the new place...

But of course, depressingly predictable though it is, FT did *NOT* do the change of address properly... so after waiting the specified time I called them this morning and, SURPRISE SURPRISE (not): "they changed your address in the administration but forgot to request ADSL at the new place. That will now take another week."

Yay.

So they manage to do exactly the same f*ck up two times in a row for me. Let's hope it doesn't descend into the same month-long farce of three years ago (engineers who never turned up for appointments while I took time off work (at least five working afternoons wasted), phone on - ADSL off, then ADSL on - phone off, then all off... and all this while I was racking up a several-hundred-euro bill keeping contact with Jazz on my Dutch mobile).

I should also mention that this all started with the woman in the agency convincing Jazz that we should take up digital TV (only French, of course) and VOIP for an extra three euros a month, only to call back the next day to say sorry - they don't actually provide that service in our new neighbourhood - would we mind bringing all the equipment back again? And I had to go online to re-activate Caller-ID since she obviously didn't transfer that to the new address either.

Sigh. Same ol' same ol'.


Anyway, the PC is still sick. The power-pack had a failed fan, and when I replaced it the new fan wouldn't run off the pack's internal power line... so it's probably the power-pack itself that's unstable and I'll replace it some time after our holiday. For now, the PC runs okay with the box opened up and the power-pack outside (its new fan is now connected to an external line) - but it still crashes a couple of times a day. Not that it matters too much when we have no internet, but at least we have a bit of home entertainment back.

France recently added streaming TV services to their mobile phone networks...

which seems like an interesting idea until you have to share your daily half-hour bus ride to/from work with a bunch of loud teenagers on their way to/from school!

A couple of them have just got new phones... and I think you can guess what this means.

Yep - music videos and cartoons have started to cut through the screaming and giggling that was already so annoying. If we're really lucky, there are two or three playing at once!

Not only are these annoying sounds in the best of circumstances, in a bus they're annoyingly loud and annoyingly distorted as well. Honestly... they sound like crap!

Maybe I'm an old fogey, but I have to say that I really would like this to get banned! This is just so much worse than people with headphones...