les Davey de France

It's good to get those things done. The tax return is my UK one - as I declare my income in France it made my UK tax return very simple. My declaration d'impôts here in May, however, will be much more complicated ! The worst thing about doing my UK tax return is trying to find where I recorded our user ids and passwords. I keep them in a safe place. Yes, you guessed it. So I run round the house in a vague and silent panic hunting in all sorts of odd places. Moving house every year doesn't help, either. Still it's done now.

This eeePC is supposed to serve for UK church visits. It shows every sign of doing that very well. It weighs FAR less than my laptop, is more robust, is quicker ( my poor laptop is starting to struggle just a bit. After all it is two years old ! :( ) and it will be so much more easy to cart about. But it doesn't have a DVD drive and UFM produced this wonderful piece of art cinema called 'Bordeaux, Brittany and beyond' which churches can see if they want. But how ? Well how do people watch films on their iPods and so on ? It must be possible to load a DVD onto a computer like you can load a song from a CD. ( Rip , is what one says.) Some Google searches later, with results in French, English and both at once, followed by downloading a piece of software onto my poor struggling laptop (the stupid DVD wouldn't read on the big computer) and Bob's your uncle ! The entire "Bordeaux, Brittany and beyond" DVD is now loaded on the little SD-card that fits in the eee...

I have only done this once and it didn't go wrong then so I have no reason to fear except that I am messing about with the PC at it's deepest level. Still... if all fails I format the whole disk and reinstall everything from scratch (sigh !) Last night for a time it looked as if I would be spared this electronic surgical intervention because of a bigger problem. No connection was possible to the wifi printer or to the internet. I tried the usual blather. Was it Sunday ? Is this a case of the strict sabbatarian printer again ? Could it be too much nylon in the shirt, sir ? Seriously, in the personnel department of a national TV company they had me convinced that one particular Canadian lady had recurring problems with the sheet feeder because of her choice of fabrics... But then I was about 23, single and thrown into the nearest thing I have ever known to a lion's den ! I will never forget their comments when I delivered their acoustic hood. My rosy cheeks date to this time....

We don't often use Skype. Why ? Various reasons : 1) if you don't use a headset people complain of echo 2) so we have various headsets in various cupboards, drawers, nooks and crannies 3) and one which sprawls on top of the screen in the living room trailing wire everywhere 4) but is never plugged in when the PC starts ringing (how weird is a ringing PC, by the way ?) 5) and with Free we get free phone calls to nearly everywhere anyway but with the advent of the eeePc I have started using Skype again because it is so EASY, because it has a built in webcam that just works and because it is utterly wireless. You just pop the thing on your lap and talk. Crackerjack !

why the French are so unhappy

MacDonalds here follow the popular films to get the themes for their happy meal toys. Sweeney Todd is really very popular at the moment ... but MacDo are doing Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques ... thankfully !

is that when my son arrives at school he shakes hands with the lads in his class and does la bise with the girls.