A year ago, I went along to a major store in Valence [the Fnac] to obtain information on a digital camera, and then I actually bought it through the Internet, at a price far below that of the store. I've just behaved in the same way for the purchase of a camcorder. I'm sure that many consumers must be using this same approach. It's a funny situation. It's reassuring to go along to the store, where you can meet up with real human beings and receive their expert evaluations of various products. But, once they've helped you to choose the product you need, you don't actually purchase it from the store. Instead, you return home and order it, at a much lower price, through the Internet. So, I conclude that the store only sells equipment to customers who haven't yet discovered the phenomenon of Internet shopping. In other words, these customers are in fact financing the expert assistance that people like me are receiving from the store. I often wonder how long this kind of situation can last. Maybe, one of these days, the store will decide to refuse to talk to would-be customers who in fact make purchases through the Internet. But how would they enforce such a rule?
Meanwhile, I'm amazed by the improved quality of Internet shopping. I only ordered the Sony camcorder and a Macintosh video software product a few days ago, and they were both delivered this morning.
Inevitably, when the morning silence is broken by two delivery trucks visiting Gamone, I have to reassure my neighbor Madeleine on the phone that no major upheaval is occurring at my place. She hears the vehicles moving up and down the steep road behind her house, and she's justified in imagining that it might be a gang of international bandits who are stealing my kitchen table and chairs, or maybe even my donkey and billy goat. Here in the Bourne valley between Choranche and Châtelus, the people in each house are reasonably well aware of any movements of vehicles [and animals, too] in the vicinity of neighboring houses, and the telephone is often used on such occasions to verify that all is in order.
Madeleine and I are capable of gossiping on the phone for half an hour. Well, jumping from one thing to another, and knowing that my neighbor is a fervent churchgoer, I took this opportunity of asking Madeleine what she thought of the pope's decision to authorize the Latin mass. Her reply was delightfully unexpected: "When I was a girl, I used to sing in the choir at Pont-en-Royans, and all the words of our chants were in Latin. Those are beautiful memories. After Vatican II, we were all shocked to hear the priest talking in everyday language. At first, it sounded silly, and it made us laugh, because we weren't used to hearing ordinary French in the church. But, since then, I've forgotten all my teenage Latin." In other words, it's an upside-down [Antipodean] situation. For Madeleine [and, no doubt, for countless other Catholics of her generation], the move from French back to Latin could never be as upsetting as the initial move from mysterious celestial Latin to everyday French.
Madeleine's explanations remind me of one of my favorite [true] anecdotes, which dates from the time that Christine and I were students in Paris. We had a group of French student friends who were musicians, and one of the girls told us this story: "We first met up with this American guy when he was playing the saxophone in front of a café in the Latin Quarter. He didn't speak a word of French, but we managed to communicate with him, and we ended up inviting him back to our place to play music together. We called him Big Joe. He became a member of our group, and we got on wonderfully well together. I think we communicated mainly through our music, because Big Joe still didn't understand a word of French, and none of us were very fluent in English. Sometimes we would ask him a question, and Big Joe would simply laugh and shrug his shoulders. So, we didn't really know whether he had understood us, or what he was replying. But that didn't really matter, because we were all convinced that Big Joe was a fabulous guy, a great friend. We didn't need words. Then the summer vacation arrived, and Big Joe went back to America for a couple of months. When he returned to Paris in September, Big Joe informed us that he had spent all his time in the States doing intensive French courses at the Alliance Française in Chicago. Sure, there was no doubt about it: we were all amazed to find that Big Joe was now speaking a primitive but acceptable kind of French. But the greatest shock of all, now that Big Joe could speak to us, concerned the things he started to tell us. It was pitiful. We discovered that he was a total asshole, not at all on the same wavelength as the people in our group. Everything he had to say—and Big Joe liked talking a lot—was pure uninteresting bullshit. At times, he would even get around to talking of politics as if he were a fascist bastard. Within a few weeks, we all started to dislike Big Joe intensely, and we ended up throwing him out of our group."
That brings me back to what I was saying, at the beginning of this post, about going along to a store in Valence for expert assistance and then making my purchases through the Internet. Maybe, like Big Joe, I should simply keep my mouth shut.
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Saturday, June 23, 2007
BigPond story (continued)
In yesterday's message entitled BigPond deserves a big kick in the pants [display], I didn't go into details concerning the nature of the BigPond problem that has been annoying me for so long (well over a year). Furthermore, behind the visible part of my blog, I've been using email to instigate an investigation into BigPond's behavior, with the aim of forcing this organization to abandon their French blacklisting.First, let me point out that my use of the expression "French blacklisting" is eloquent (people understand that image) but slightly approximative. A more precise way of describing the situation in technical terms consists of saying that certain BigPond mail servers (not necessarily all of them, because some of my emails to BigPond do get delivered) have placed the names of certain French ISPs (Wanadoo/Orange and Free) on what is known as a DNS block list.
Why? If I understand correctly, BigPond calls upon an outside firm to help them combat spam... which is a noble intention. Apparently, this outside firm (maybe TrendMicro) considers that Wanadoo/Orange and Free "continue to allow spam to be generated by their customers"... that's to say, by ordinary people like me. Consequently, BigPond has taken the decision to include the names Wanadoo/Orange and Free in DNS block lists on their servers.
To use a famous image (popular in French), it's like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Since BigPond believes that lots of spammers operate from Wanadoo/Orange and Free (which may or may not be true), they've decided to punish everybody, globally, by refusing to deliver any email emanating from these two French ISPs.
This morning, I was happy to receive an email from my old schoolmate Ron Willard who reminded me of the existence of an excellent technical website [display] on the subject of DNS block lists. It includes a more powerful image than my metaphor about the baby's bath. A US army officer is quoted as saying (no doubt in a Vietnam setting): We had to destroy the village in order to save it. BigPond has decided to destroy the possibility of emails from France in order to save their Australian customers from spam.
Friday, June 22, 2007
BigPond deserves a big kick in the pants
The behavior of this Australian ISP [Internet service provider] with respect to French users is outrageous. Over the last few years, when my email address was sky.william@orange.fr, BigPond refused to deliver my emails to any of their customers. Since then I've changed my address to sky.william@free.fr, and I've just found that BigPond still refuses to deliver my emails to their customers. These French ISPs, Orange and Free, are two of the largest and most respected organizations in this domain, and BigPond's crazy idea of blacklisting all French customers is scandalous. It would be interesting to identify the BigPond employee who's behind this strategy.I intend to lodge a formal complaint with the international email authorities concerning this curious BigPond behavior, which is not in keeping with the spirit of the Internet.
Here's the precise technical data [in which I've obliterated part of the email address of my intended receiver] confirming the blacklisting:
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: EE6C213E75DF
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; sky.william@free.fr
Arrival-Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:45:37 +0200 (CEST)
Final-Recipient: rfc822; s***y@bigpond.com
Action: failed
Status: 4.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host extmail.bigpond.com[144.140.90.13] said: 451 Mail from this IP address blocked due to DNS block list. (in reply to MAIL FROM command)
Friday, June 8, 2007
No trespassing
While surfing on the web, looking for information about recent Australian movies, I ran into the following site:
This is the first time I've ever seen a case of explicit geographical discrimination on the Internet. In fact, I didn't even know it was technically feasible.
This is the first time I've ever seen a case of explicit geographical discrimination on the Internet. In fact, I didn't even know it was technically feasible.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Internet outlaws?
Tomorrow evening, the tradition of election-night parties will be in full swing from one end of France to the other. The general idea, to avoid boredom, is that you invite along friends from several points on the voting spectrum. This means that the party is sure to be neither wholly joyous nor totally sad. While one party-goer is lamenting in tears, another is exploding in joy.
Not surprisingly, an interesting party-guest, tomorrow afternoon, will be the Internet, whose Googlistic websites have the habit of behaving from time to time like oracles in Ancient Greece, as if they knew everything... even before it happened. In other words, the Internet should normally be able to tell us who's won the election long before any kind of formal decision has been established. Worse still, tomorrow afternoon, a theoretical French voter, knowing already who has won and who has lost, should be able to wander along to the booths and cast his meaningless vote. Now, Napoléon never reckoned on this kind of technology. And the present-day French Republic doesn't like this scandalous logic at all. One doesn't need to beat around the bush. It's against the law of the republic.
Conclusions. Tomorrow evening, a team of competent French Internet cops will be looking out for offenders: that's to say, webmasters who would dare to announce the election results before 8 o'clock in the evening. I'm alarmed at a personal level in that my journalist daughter would appear to have received a mission from her boss that consists of trying to break the law in this domain... so that she'll be able to write an article from the jailhouse on Monday morning claiming: "Your favorite TV magazine knew who won and who lost at least an hour before the rest of you... which explains why I'm dispatching this article from a prison cell." With friends, I'll bring her oranges.
French jails, tomorrow evening, should theoretically be brimming over with Internet outlaws. A positive note: the future president might be prepared to announce an amnesty, to rid over-burdened French prisons of all these inoffensive orange-eating electronic outlaws.
Not surprisingly, an interesting party-guest, tomorrow afternoon, will be the Internet, whose Googlistic websites have the habit of behaving from time to time like oracles in Ancient Greece, as if they knew everything... even before it happened. In other words, the Internet should normally be able to tell us who's won the election long before any kind of formal decision has been established. Worse still, tomorrow afternoon, a theoretical French voter, knowing already who has won and who has lost, should be able to wander along to the booths and cast his meaningless vote. Now, Napoléon never reckoned on this kind of technology. And the present-day French Republic doesn't like this scandalous logic at all. One doesn't need to beat around the bush. It's against the law of the republic.
Conclusions. Tomorrow evening, a team of competent French Internet cops will be looking out for offenders: that's to say, webmasters who would dare to announce the election results before 8 o'clock in the evening. I'm alarmed at a personal level in that my journalist daughter would appear to have received a mission from her boss that consists of trying to break the law in this domain... so that she'll be able to write an article from the jailhouse on Monday morning claiming: "Your favorite TV magazine knew who won and who lost at least an hour before the rest of you... which explains why I'm dispatching this article from a prison cell." With friends, I'll bring her oranges.
French jails, tomorrow evening, should theoretically be brimming over with Internet outlaws. A positive note: the future president might be prepared to announce an amnesty, to rid over-burdened French prisons of all these inoffensive orange-eating electronic outlaws.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Blog readership
It goes without saying that I'm writing this blog primarily for myself, like a personal diary. Over the last few months, since deciding to start Antipodes, I've grown accustomed to the daily challenge of recording an almost insignificant Internet record of the way I see things... which might or might not interest other individuals in the universe.
In the beginning, I looked upon this style of communication as an optimal solution for my communications with Australian relatives, since some of them relied upon local ISPs [Internet service providers] such as BigPond who had concocted the convenient conclusion that everything emanating from France was necessarily shit... not to be delivered. Normally I'm neither aggressive nor revengeful, but I've often felt like telling those ISPs to get screwed. But what the hell does it matter? If there are folk in Australia who imagine that the state-owned ISP in France tolerates spam, all I can say is that they're fuckwits.
Apart from that, I'm discovering with joy that a lot of people, in many places, are in fact reading my daily words. This makes me immensely happy, and encourages me to carry on with my modest blog.
Today, halfway through April, here's the readership breakdown:
It's normal that about half my readers are French, and the other half Australian. That, as planned, is my personal family of readers. I can understand, too, the Canadian one percent. That's probably Patiti. But I marvel before the huge twelve-percent of American readers, followed by minority scores for Chinese, Japanese and Germans. It's a fine feeling to be read, even if I'm not quite sure who's doing the reading.
In the beginning, I looked upon this style of communication as an optimal solution for my communications with Australian relatives, since some of them relied upon local ISPs [Internet service providers] such as BigPond who had concocted the convenient conclusion that everything emanating from France was necessarily shit... not to be delivered. Normally I'm neither aggressive nor revengeful, but I've often felt like telling those ISPs to get screwed. But what the hell does it matter? If there are folk in Australia who imagine that the state-owned ISP in France tolerates spam, all I can say is that they're fuckwits.
Apart from that, I'm discovering with joy that a lot of people, in many places, are in fact reading my daily words. This makes me immensely happy, and encourages me to carry on with my modest blog.
Today, halfway through April, here's the readership breakdown:
It's normal that about half my readers are French, and the other half Australian. That, as planned, is my personal family of readers. I can understand, too, the Canadian one percent. That's probably Patiti. But I marvel before the huge twelve-percent of American readers, followed by minority scores for Chinese, Japanese and Germans. It's a fine feeling to be read, even if I'm not quite sure who's doing the reading.
Friday, April 6, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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