Pakistani goatskins and a long-haired camel

From time to time, I receive a genuine but hilarious e-mail. This morning, a Pakistani guy contacted me, stating: "I have heard from reliable sources that you import musical instruments from my country. Please take a look at my offer of low-priced goatskins to make bongo drums." It's possible that this e-mail owed its origin to my former association (in the '70s) with the concrete-music research group known as the GRM in Paris. Or it could be just run-of-the-mill spam.

Thinking that my son would appreciate this trivial story, I phoned him in Brittany. As often happens, he reacted with a far funnier tale. Recently, he found a message on his mobile phone: "This is the director of the zoo in Paris. Your long-haired camel has escaped, and we've just learned that he's wandering around at a busy traffic intersection on the edge of the city. Would you please contact me urgently to tell me what we should do." The caller left a phone number. Amused and intrigued by this unexpected tale, my son decided to contact the phone number. He was amazed to find himself talking with the zoo director, who informed my son that the incident concerning the escape of the long-haired camel was perfectly true, but that the stray animal had soon been captured, and that all was now well. The director thanked my son for having been sufficiently concerned about the fate of the long-haired camel to phone him up. So, it was not a hoax call. The director had been trying to contact the circus owner who had donated the long-haired camel to the zoo, and he had merely used a wrong number, which happened to be that of my son.

The moral of my post. We should never brush aside messages about Pakistani goatskins and long-haired camels, because there might well be an element of truth in them. Put differently: Life is surely more than a drawn-out April Fool's Day joke. We must persist in believing that there might indeed be more to human existence than spam and hoaxes.

Successful switch to Free

A few weeks ago, I was uncertain about the best timing for my switch of ISPs [Internet service providers] from Orange to Free. Friends had warned me that I might run into unexpected problems, and I was worried that technical hitches or delays might leave me with no broadband Internet access at all for several days or even weeks.

In reality, everything has worked out perfectly. I've been using my new e-mail address, sky.william@free.fr, for the last week, and my Internet-based telephone is fully operational.

Today, a woman at Orange phoned me to say that they had received my registered letter stating that I wished to terminate my association with them. She asked me to tell her the reasons behind my decision. There were several reasons, including the fact that Free is less expensive than Orange, and that Free enables me to phone Australia. She couldn't really put up a case against such arguments, so she simply asked me the date at which I wished to cut my ties with Orange. I said today, and she replied OK. So, my old e-mail address, sky.william@wanadoo.fr, is no longer operational.

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.

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.

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.

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.