Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Fabulous Google offer

I've been saying so many nice things about Google that readers will end up believing that I work for this company, or that I own shares in Google. But here I go again. Their offer named Google TiSP, which enables users to install a totally free broadband Internet connection in their own bathroom, is ingenious, indeed fabulous. [Click on the image to see their website.] I'm annoyed in that I've just signed up for a broadband contract with the French Free organization (as I explained in this blog already). Today, I learn that, with Google TiSP, I could have obtained a higher-quality service, of an optimally fluid nature, for a financial outlay of zero. I'm infuriated. A positive aspect of this affair is that, in suburban Australia, I'm pleased to think that this free Google service will no doubt persuade many users to abandon their existing costly and inefficient ISP [Internet service provider] and move to Google TiSP.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Switch from Wanadoo/Orange to Free

This morning, as planned, I switched abruptly from Wanadoo/Orange to Free. The Internet connection worked immediately, with no need to reconfigure anything whatsoever. I now have a new basic e-mail address [which I invite you to use instead of sky.william@wanadoo.fr]:

sky.william@free.fr

[Normally you should be able to click that address to e-mail me.]

Funnily enough, my telephone is not working yet. That's a really antipodean (upside-down world) situation. Normally, the old-fashioned phone works perfectly, but the Internet connection is screwed up for mysterious reasons. For the moment, at Gamone, it's exactly the opposite. My Free connection to the Internet seems to work perfectly, but my phone is not yet operational. Patience! I have confidence in Free. They're the highly-professional people who've been giving me free webspaces for years, along with all the state-of-the-art bells and whistles in the way of PHP and MySQL.

I'm reminded of desert island questions such as: If you were stranded on a desert island with either the works of Shakespeare or the Bible, which would you choose? [Personally, I would choose WS.] Here, the decision is more high-tech: If you were stranded on a desert island with either the Internet or the telephone, which would you choose? The fact that the present message in a bottle is reaching you is an indication of my obvious choice.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Turbulence ahead

I'm about to change my ISP (Internet service provider). After many years with the French national provider named Orange (formerly Wanadoo), I'll be moving to Free, mainly because it's cheaper and their phone service is wider. Above all, most Macintosh users in France swear by Free.

As soon as I change ISPs, my old e-mail address will become obsolete. So, from now on, please use one or other of the following addresses:

william.skyvington@free.fr

william.skyvington@gmail.com

If all goes well, I'll be able to use Free in the next few days. However, I prefer to be cautious, since anything could happen. If the worst came to the worst, I could even enter a blackout zone (as they say in the astronautical domain) in which my blog and e-mail would go into temporary hibernation. So, if ever I seemed to disappear from the Internet and/or phone world over the coming days, don't be worried. Naturally, if the blackout were to persist for longer than expected, I would get around to sending out lovely handwritten postcards with photos of Pont-en-Royans and nice French postage stamps.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Reading

Over the last six months, my acquisition of English-language books has increased considerably because of the ease of getting them through the local branch of Amazon. Meanwhile, for old stuff of a historical or genealogical nature, the Gallica service of the BnF (bibliothèque nationale de France) has been useful at times, but not as much as I would have hoped. [Click here to see this service.]









A new system named Europeana has just gone into action. It is the French contribution to a future European digital library with an ugly but logical name: BnuE (bibliothèque numérique européenne). It goes without saying that this European initiative aims explicitly to counteract the dominance of Google Book Search in this domain. If you want to read, not only Racine and Hugo, but also Shakespeare, Dickens and Dante, then Europeana is the place to go. [Click here or on the banner to visit the website, whose interface is only in French for the moment.] For the moment, the catalog of Europeana is not very rich, compared with Google's present achievement of a million scanned books. [Click here to visit Google Book Search.]

If everything goes as planned, the great advantage of Europeana, compared with Google Books, will be the possibility of downloading fragments of a book in text format, so that they can be pasted into the user's work.

For me, the subject of books reveals that I remain a very old-fashioned fellow. While I love to see stuff flashing up onto the screen of my Macintosh, I must admit that there's nothing better, on cold evenings, than to sit in front of my open fireplace, with my bare feet up on the hearth, and a good book in my hands.

I remember our potter friend Maurice Crignon pointing out that the "three eights" system applies, not only to ordinary folk (roughly: work, personal affairs and sleep), but also to monks (even more roughly: their daily schedule of prayers, worldly activities and sleep). Well, I've created a personal three-part breakdown for my daily existence. It's not an earthshaking invention. The early moments of the morning are for thinking. The main part of the day is for writing or working on my computer. And evenings are for reading, or watching a little TV. I'm convinced that the human brain functions in a way that encourages this particular time-based division of operations.