WhiteRabbit's Braindump

Mserv is quite a nice little program to avoid silences in the conversation. Only, the Web interface that comes with it misses a 'queue entire album' option, which is, in my opinion, quite bad: I personally tend to think of music as entire albums rather than individual songs. That goes even more for classical music, obviously.

So I've added the feature to the client, which turned out to be pretty trivial. You'll just need to install my 2-line patch.

I wrote yet another Dragon Go Server monitor over the weekend. That one's written in Perl and designed to run with Gkrellm. You can get it here.

The president of China is currently visiting the United States of America. The first person he met was Bill Gates. Then he met the president of Boeing. And last he will meet with President Bush. Now we know who's most important in the USA!

Last thursday, Narelle and I went to URSSAF to register her as a "travailleur independant", which is closest to what a Freelance worker is (I guess). See, Narelle is trying to establish herself as an English teacher. The hardest part was really to find the entrance point: where do you start looking for information, when you don't know what you're looking for?

So, I went and asked my IUT workmate Olivier, who recently hit his 30's crisis and resigned from his position to get thinking about the meaning of life, the margin his employer was doing on his back and how to get it for himself, all that being achieved by freelancing. He directed us to the very helpful Web site of APCE, and confimed what Narelle's friend Jennifer, who's also a teacher, had told us: just go to URSSAF.

Right oh, so we went, cowing in fear with the still fresh memories of the administrative hell we went through to get married and to sort out immigration, to URSSAF. We got a ticket at the front desk, sat down to wait for our number to be called, got up 37s later as we were called, and were introduced to an enthousiastic, smiling young man. Narelle liked him even though he had a tatoo, and that's saying something.

Turns out that it was all really simple: after giving names and current INSEE number, Narelle's registration was automatically sent through the computer to the health insurrance, social security, INSEE (that's the French bureau of statistics by the way), pension, and gods know what else. Seconds later, she had a SIRET number that gives her magic invoicing powers. The whole thing just lasted thirty minutes, with no papers whatsoever required. That goes to show that they do make it easy for you to pay tax.

After many tries, we finally got our new broadband connection this saturday. That was about time. So what went wrong?

We selected Free as a provider, because it's fairly cheap, it provides us with a fixed IP address, and their telephon offering is simply the best (free calls to Australia!). At first, I tried to subscribe without going through France Telecom at all. In principle, you send Free the phone number of the previous tenant, along with whatever else they need, and you get a fully degrouped line without ever talking to FT.

This method just doesn't seem to work. Thinking about it, I also don't understand how it possibly could. The previous tenant took their number with them, as most people do nowadays, so how does their number identifies anything about our current phone line?

After a month of waiting (and here is my biggest reproach to Free: if something goes wrong somewhere, they don't seem to tell you anything at all), we resolved to subscribing to a FT line, which we got in under a week. Now, FT manages to connect the line with the number of the previous tenant and the address. Hmm.

Now owning our very own FT number, we tried Free again, and this time it all went smoothly: 7 calendar day exactly to receive the magic Freebox and get everything working. Not bad.

So, we've now moved the server to our new home, and we're enjoying Free's beautiful service: it's fast, that's the fastest connection I've seen so far.