| Tuesday, September 23, 2003 |  |
| France Telecom phone home |
 My telephone has been out for a week. Well, it is a long story, related to my struggle to get DSL from France Telecom.
I had actually gotten them finally persuaded to turn it on, despite various messages to the contrary. They said it should be working the next day. Instead the phone line went dead. At first that just made me think they were working on it, switching my line over to a central that would support DSL, so I didn't worry at first. But that was a week ago, and various phone calls, and a visit from a technician happened in that week. He thought the problem was up in one of the poles, so they had to come back. And then, this afternoon, they showed up with two trucks full of France Telecom people. They blocked off the whole street, and their crane truck put a guy in a basket up in several of the telephone poles. Still no luck. Then, inside my house, after a call to my landlord that helped them finally locate where the line came into my house, they found the problem. As a matter of fact, the guy was shaking his head, insisting that we couldn't possibly ever had telephone service with that kind of wiring, as it wasn't really connected properly. "Tres bizarre!" Of course all the wires were in the closet in our bathroom, which tends to have a water problem when somebody takes a shower on the second floor. This is a nice-looking new house, but the wiring and plumbing is a little hokey. Anyway, so the phone is on, and the green light is now on on my DSL modem. But they somehow had cancelled my actual account and forgotten to reinstate it, so I still can't get it to log in. But we're a good deal closer. On the picture you see the phone guy in the pole, incidentally while one of the strange A300 'Beluga' transport planes was coming in for landing in Blagnac with airplane parts for Airbus. [ Diary | 2003-09-23 17:12 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Organizing thoughts in Fontainebleau |
 Now, since I couldn't be on the net anyway, it was quite convenient that this was the weekend scheduled for going to Fontainebleau outside Paris to work with George Por on a project we're exploring. More on George here.
We're working on some tools to help knowledge workers organize their thoughts and guide them towards constructive innovaton. More on that later, as I can't really say too much right now. But George and I are quite on the same page in many areas, and it has great potential. Since I was there anyway, I took a few hours to do a little sightseeing too. The Palace of Fontainebleau is quite a place for one thing. Since the 12th century it was a royal hunting lodge, surrounded on all sides by a large forest, and it was later greatly expanded and a long line of kings and queens and emperors have lived there one time or another. On the picture you see Napoleon's globe in the Gallery of Diane, which was later turned into a library. In Paris I walked around in the Notre Dame cathedral and in the Louvre museum. Which in itself one can easily use days in. I picked the wing with the Mona Lisa, and just walked through a couple of floors. She didn't really look like much, though. Anyway, I ofcourse also walked through the controversial glass pyramid which is the entrance to the Louvre. It actually works quite well there. I found an open Wi-Fi connection in my first try, on Place de Chatelet, while sitting on the fountain, when I got worried about not having checked my mail for a while. [ Diary | 2003-09-23 18:05 | 2 comments | PermaLink ] More > |