Category: General

This is my first long haul flight during my time working in France. First thing I noticed is that there’s a check in queue when I arrived at Charles de Gaulle 2C. So far, within europe I could do an electronic checking on one of the kiosks, but international I have to queue up like everyone else. Then I overweighted the luggage. The usual economy flight limit is 20kg, but most airlines give a little extra before charging excess luggage. Singapore Airlines’ limit is 30kg. But Air France is only 22kg! I had to try and bring some items to Shanghai first before my next trip for good, so I had at least 26kg in the luggage.
No problem, small issue. Then when boarding the flight I had to take the bus, and it seems that in the last 2-3 trips out of France I’ve been using the bus and not the aerobridge directly. I think the Parisien airports are too small.

Once the Boeing 777 took off, I realised that my touchscreen LCD doesn’t work at all. Out of all the buttons that shows up one the screen (3×3 matrix) only the bottom right works, and on Air France its the button for “info” that has no information at all. So during the whole flight I had nothing to watch on the screen. Worse, the flight seems to be filled with very young chinese babies and their mothers, and they cry all the way from Paris to Shanghai.

In summary, I’ve had 2 out of the worst flights I’ve had ever in the last few months. The one to London before christmas included strikes by airport bus drivers and a heavy fog delaying all flights.

Just got the index.html up and running on nangka.org. Not that easy to sit around all day during the Paris winter sale to think of a design for the front page. The one that’s up right now (as in today) is an empty page with the permanent features up, and might be tweaked as time goes by. I consider this as a “beta” version. I’ve established a workflow where I can put pictures on the front page and get transparencies, etc etc. You’ll see it coming.. I think I will need to work on the bottom buttons since they look rather big today.

Managed to migrate the photo albums to the new installation of Gallery on my new web server last night. I had the option to make a complete move with the comments, etc but that would have meant that I will have to play around with the SQL database backups since my gallery paths were a little different this time. Finally decided to go on with the import of the previous gallery structure only and forgetting about a SQL migration.
Obviously no problem with the migration from Movable Type exported file into WordPress. Everything seems smooth. Did as well a compression of the number of categories in WordPress compared to my old MT site. WordPress has this nice feature where you can set the default category, and when you delete a certain category, it will mark all the posts affected with the default category, so that you dont have to go into every posts one by one.

So the applications are now running. I think I’ll do fine with just WordPress and Gallery this time. The next thing to do is to work on the graphics and the start page. I think I’ll start as soon as possible with a very simple text based front page while I work on the elaborate long term website.

WordPress has this nifty feature where you can send an email to a special address and the server parses the mail into a blog entry.
Problem so far is that there is only one possible category and its hard coded in the WordPress options. That’s a small problem. I’ve tried to send a blog entry from my office’s Lotus Notes email client and what happens is that the entry includes a couple of redundant extra line which is just markup excesses that is not stripped out. Same for attachment. WordPress displays the text version of the file (the hex bytes?), but then again I’d be really surprised if it can identify attachments! So no Lotus Notes email.

The convenience obviously outweighs the stuff above. Now there’s no need to log into a certain web based system to blog anymore, at least for me. I’m just imagining the future where I can use my iPhone to email blog entries! Too bad the phone wont be out in Europe nor Asia till end of 2007 or even next year. I’m sure you can get it in the US before but I’m betting it will SIM locked to Cingular… that’s another issue.

Switched my ISP to GoDaddy this week. And most of the stuff are up and working. I’v migrated the blogging software from Movable Type to WordPress and still have not migrated the entries into the new system. Same for the gallery installation on /gallery. Will do it over the week, I dont think I generate enough traffic to do anyting too hasty.
The other thing I’m thinking of is to remodel the site so that its simpler to design and modify. I think I just need 2 directories and a main page that’s really simple. I’ll sit down one day and think about that. In the meantime you’re not going to get any main page (too much time to redesign) until the final one is up. I dont think there’s a point to put “under construction” either since its so cliche’d.

Enjoy!

Normal life of a hard disk should be 5 years, but when I tried to boot up my Windows XP machine this morning, I couldn’t get further than the Windows startup screen, at which, the computer will restart. A quick check indicated one of the partition (happens to be the C:!!!!) was dead. The old HDD was a Maxtor 160Gb.
Luckily a backup was made, but at least a month old, so 3-4 weeks of information was probably not updated. So its going to be a long process to get a new HDD up and running and to get all standard information and PDAs up and running again… Sigh…

Today (actually last night) marks the day when my gallery site is updated. Now its on version 2.x up from 1.4 yesterday. Why so long? Thought that the old version, although serving its purpose, requires a refresh to make the administration of the albums easier.
The skin of the program will be updated when I have the time. Planning to include the Carbon theme from gallery so that I maintain the darker theme throughout the site.

Nothing to do? check it out. Ask me for a login if you need one to see more photos.

http://nangka.org/gallery

First, we got to experience the famous nasty frenchie neighbour today. We came back from a dinner last night and saw an urgent post-it note from the owner of the apartment on the door, talking about leaking pipes and the neighbour’s apartment was affected.
We woke up in the morning with a big surprise, when the neighbour came in to turn off the main water supply. He did it in an extremely rude manner, like a bastard and a half that he was. Anyway, called up the plumber, who came in at 6pm in the evening and the problem was a little thing in the pipe that was dripping water slowly, slowly.

Anyways, French laws apparently requires reparation to be carried out and paid by the tenants. There’s insurance for this but it only covers water damage, so if you dont have moulds or something destroyed, its not covered, meaning no labour charges are included in the insurance.

By the way, it seems to be ok now. Lessons learnt:
1. We found out we’ve got bastards for neighbours.
2. Forget becoming a doctor or lawyer if you want to be rich. Be a plumber. I think I could have done the repair (tighten the nut?) and we were charged freaking 98 Euros. That’s for 30min work. Something is wrong with this country…

Its probably something particular only to France: I’ve joined the Paris 20km run (almost a half marathon) on 15th October, and to do the actual run, I will need to present a certificate from the doctor saying that I should be fit to do it.
So I took some time off this morning to visit the friendly neighbourhood doctor, and for 10mins, I got my blood pressure checked, and some readings of my heart beats through the stethoscope… and I got my certification to run! Its in the form of a letter from the doctor with your name and the statement that he has no reason to believe that you can’t compete.
Continue reading “Le Certificat Medicale…”

I was checking my main running shoe this morning (bought in april 2006) and the fabric at the heel is starting to fray, actually even torn on the right shoe. The rest of the shoe, especially cushioning, is still quite alright even with a few hundred km use, but I hope that this doesn’t mean that I have to replace it anytime soon. I don’t get blisters or anything from it. At least not yet. Amazing how flimsy things are nowadays.