I just returned from a business trip to Paris... Li came too to France, to meet some old friends (and for shopping!).
We both agree that Paris is a wonderful city... hum... when you are visiting. But absolutely not a place where we want to live...

I got a Bell's Palsy since beginning of December. I feel better now, but I did not recover completely yet...
When you wake up with half of the face not working (it really happens like that!), you completely panic, until google (first) and a doctor (second) makes you understand that it is not dangerous (but really disturbing, for eating, speaking, etc...)

Again, I was too lazy to write anything here for nearly two months... This is just a quick update:

Boudicca left her prison after 2 weeks, a couple of FAX exchanges, and the great help of a Li's friend in Paris... Domo Arigato Gozaimasu Izawa-Sama!

We are now living in Mita, iin the center of Tokyo, in a beautiful japanese wood house on a small street end. This is very nice, especially when the weather is bad (I love the rain music on the walls!).

Most disturbing was Li's mother heart attack two weeks ago: We received a phone call in middle of the night, and she (Li) went to Dalian the next day, to support her mom. The result was an heart operation, that hopefully will be enough for many years.

Oh, I forgot: My bicycle.
I received an old bicycle from an office friend in middle of July. That just triggered something in my mind: "This is very good!". The next day, Li bought me a new Peugeot bicycle, which I use every day to join the subway station. Two events about that:
A fall down two weeks ago (of course, due to Murphy's law, Li was already in China), and badly touched my left breast. It is still painfull, and difficult to move my arms. This was a good lesson: I am no more in my 18th!!
And yesterday was the best: We were called by the police at 22:00, to understand that someone was catched trying to steal the bicycle (crazy guy: 100 meters from a police station!). I had to spend 2 hours there to put my finger prints on papers that I did not understood at all!!

I will stop there for this post, the two important earthquakes being some kind of routine. We are just hoping that the big one is not going to happen soon...

We arrived in Japan last week.

Li landed a couple of days before me, as I had to come via Hong-Kong. Everything is fine, we live in a nice appart'hotel in Minami-Azabu, and started to look for our next home (likely not far from Azabu-Juban).

But one very important issue is still pending:

We miss Boudicca a lot: She could not pass Narita Airport controls. We eventually should get her back this Monday (but she was not far from getting a 180 days quarantine!). I understand authorities in this case: This dog is probably very dangerous for Japan's public health :-(

Subject: It is time to say my goodbyes...
From: bruno.raoult@sgcib.com
To: Many
Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 12:30:13 +0200

This is my last day in SGCIB.

After 12 years in SG, the time has come to head back to East, and to say goodbye to you.

I wish to thank you all for the years of fun, work and challenges we have been part of. It has been a privilege working with all of you through the ups and downs, and I hope you have enjoyed the ride as much as I have.

I wish you the best of luck in the times to come.

Sayonara.

Bruno, signing out.

Let's go for some updates:

As usual, I had some holidays: Canaria Islands with Li & Boudicca in March, and sailing (again!) in Phuket 2 weeks ago. No way for my wife to come this time (I mean in Thailand): Ghosts are probably everywhere in this place - a very important issue for many Asian people.
To say a word about December 26th tsunami, Koh Phi Phi was completely destroyed, and still not growing up (the lack of tourists does not help, I guess). Patong, on the other side, is very neat (I mean: no difference with the pre-tsunami town I know).

But the great news is that I am going back to Japan! After one year and a half in Paris, I resigned 2 months ago, and in exactly 18 days we will use our one way tickets, back to Asia...

Forty one years old today...

But I am still able to solve the very nice Petals Around the Rose puzzle in around 30 seconds... hehehe :-)

Not so old after all!

La FNAC m'a vraiment déçu le week-end dernier. En allant acheter une nouvelle lampe pour mon vidéoprojecteur (Hitachi PJ-TX10), le rayon vidéo m'a renvoyé au service après-vente.

Mais voila: Le jeune homme qui nous a reçu avait l'air surpris par ma demande, et son supérieur, un homme d'une cinquantaine d'années, m'annonce, d'un air hautain:

Pas de probleme, vous n'avez qu'à déposer un acompte de 400 Euros pour commander cette lampe.

Ooops! Je lui fais part de ma surprise (c'est plus du tiers du prix du projecteur lui-même!), mais il a une nouvelle réponse de spécialiste pour un pauvre idiot de client comme moi:

Mon Brave Monsieur, ça va vous coûter dans les 5,000 (ND br: Francs, c'est à dire 760 Euros), ce n'est pas une lampe de salon. Allez donc voir chez Hitachi si vous trouvez mieux...

Imparable!! Sachant qu'il n'avait même pas daigné chercher le moindre prix (il a simplement regardé le modèle de mon appareil), j'ai préféré abandonner... J'avais spécialement apprécié au passage le "Mon Brave Monsieur" ;-)

Ca se passait a la FNAC les Halles, Paris, il y a 4 jours.

Ah, j'oubliais: Je viens de commander la fameuse lampe (modèle DT 00611) sur le net, pour 270 Euros... J'en aurai donc à peu près trois pour le prix d'une!!

After two months, I eventually took some time to release pictures of our last trip to phuket.

The most interesting during this trip was that Li was not sick at all for her first sailing experience. On contrary, she really did like it! Next step could be to learn how to sail alone? ;-)

We are going again to Thailand, and Li will sail for the first time. We will go with Jock and his yacht, Fi-Tuen, as I already know them.

As usual, Li was going to disturb these holidays, as she managed to find a temporary job for this month (April). So I am just going first there tonight, to arrange the sailing charter conditions with Jock, and she will take the plane this friday, a couple of hours after she finishes her job...

I simply hope she will love this new experience (she never sailed, as said previously), and especially that she will not be sick on board. This could force me to change the next holidays destinations!

Li was walking near La Madeleine this wednesday, when a guy on a motorbike robbed her bag. She was so surprised that she did not react at all: She just did not believe this could happen (this is a big change compared to Tokyo famous security!).
She managed to cancel quickly her credit card, and to file a complaint at the police station. As she did not have my phone number, she had to wait for me outside half of the day :-(

The next day she told the story to her french school (a Japanese one), and the other two students answered that they had exactly the same problem! The robbers are apparently looking for Asian women in touristic areas of Paris (Opera, la Madeleine, etc...), as they generally have a lot of cash.

We did not loose a lot this time, and fortunately no important papers. We will just need to change our door lock, which is not cheap at all (from 400 to 800 Euros, depending on the companies).

My internet is up again, after one month and a half of outage (!!). Free support service is simply crazy: Not only they did nothing for one month (despite my weekly calls), but they also tell you a different explanation every time you call them.
And try to guess what? Today this high-tech company is asking me to send them a regular mail to get some money back! Just incredible.

I am lucky: Somebody called me on friday, asking for Monsieur Grant.

It appears that my mobile number was previously that guy's. I got Monsieur Grant number, and called him. I got his father after a few tries, and explained him the situation. His answer was quite funny (imagine a strong contryside speaking):

"Ah oui... Quand il y a un problème, je me fais appeler chez moi, mais si je ne réponds pas, c'est renvoyé vers le portable. Je vais essayer de supprimer ça, mais c'est très compliqué, alors je ne sais pas si je pourrai le faire rapidement. Peut-être fin de semaine prochaine?"

"Hum... I see... When there is a problem, there is a phone call to my home, but if I don't answer, the call is forwarded to the mobile phone. I will try to change this, but it is very complicated, it will take time. Maybe end of next week?"

Apparently he still did not do it, as I was called this week-end during the night ;-)

Come on, Monsieur Grant! Read the f... phone documentation, or call France Telecom, or ask a friend to help you, but do it!

Eventually internet is up today: The problem was linked to the freebox ethernet port (it does not work at all).

Following free support advice (and after five phone calls costing me at least 50 €!), I decided to try the USB port - on an XP machine, as they don't have other drivers :-(

I first spent more than half an hour to reactivate the only dual-boot machine I have, and to remember my password ;-)
Then I installed the driver, and tried to connect: It worked! Hummm... Only two minutes in fact: I got quickly a message telling me that Windows was rebooting, what I did with no choice at all! The same message (and result) came again soon. I understood later that I was infected by the Blaster Worm. That one took only a few minutes to infect this Exccceeelllent operating system (I really like the word operating when this is Microsoft related).

It was a chance in fact: I just tried to reboot Linux, with the same USB connection. Surprise: No problem, no driver needed (the CDCEther module loaded without help and managed the connection), and of course no more virus/worm!

I am just waiting for a new freebox, so I can use the ethernet port, and my wireless airport station (Currently, the laptop linux box acts as firewall/NAT box, and the airport, which links my dual-processor as well as my wife's iBook is just a bridge).

By the way, it is a good occasion (and reason!) to erase my last end-of-century-system partition isn't it?

My provider, free is still not able to setup my ADSL connection, after one week of trouble.

Well, one week does not change a lot, after a two months delay, but it is surprising to see these so-called broadband links (only 2 Mbps in France, and more often 512 Kbps!) being so difficult to setup: Everything here is paper based, hot-line is inexistant, and, AFAIK, it does not work (at least for me!) :-(

I would not like to joke about french customers, who are really happy with their 2 Mbps Super Broadband service, but they should have a look around, to understand that other countries offer 13 times this speed for the same price!

But, more than the speed, my concern is on the setup procedure. Have a look on the Japan one, as explained in the previous link:

Another factor worth noting concerns the set-up procedure.
There is no taking an afternoon off work and waiting around for an engineer to do something mysterious with your phone socket.
[...]
Connect the ADSL modem to your computer, run the supplied software (Windows, Mac or Linux) and that is it.

To finish, have a look on this ADSL study in the world. You will be surprised.

Hum... No comment.

I am not lucky with my phone lines. In Tokyo, my home line was subject to many FAX calls, especially in middle of the night, and it just happened a few days ago that my french mobile phone is the target of a farmer who has some kind of automatic alerts.

Here is the message I received, every five minutes for more than two hours:

Ici l'élevage de Monsieur Grant. Le bâtiment est en panne. Intervenir d'urgence. Acquitter après le bip sonore. Merci.

Here the breeding of Mr Grant. The building is out of service. Intervene urgently. Discharge after the beep. Thank you.

I tried to find who is this Monsieur Grant, without any success :-(
I hope he will notice that the number is wrong, before all his animals die!

We found an apartment in Paris last week, after visiting more than ten. This one is well situated, in Rue Cambon (1st district), just in front of Chanel Headquarters.

Of course, this last detail could be somehow dangerous for my credit card ;-)

We should get this apartment from middle of next week, but won't be able to live there before we receive our shipping from Japan, probably during the first week of December.

We decided yesterday that it was not worth staying in Japan a few more days, as we initially planned. We took the plane yesterday night, and arrived in Paris this morning at 4:00.

Our hotel is near Les Halles, quite a good place (fucking AZERTY keyboqrd).

Here is the final schedule for our last days in Japan:

• Oct 8th: Sayonara party at the office
• Oct 14th-16th: Business trip to Sydney
• Oct 17th: Sayonara party at home. I will need to push everybody outside before 8:00 the next day because...
• Oct 18th: Moving company will empty our apartment (the travel will take 6-8 weeks to Paris)
• Oct 19th: We send some cases to Narita airport, and go for a few days to Kusatsu
• Oct 23rd: Flight to Paris
• Oct 27th: First apartments visits in Paris

I bought a new toy last week: The Zaurus SL-C760 is really a cool device... Launching a shell on such PDA is simply like a dream ;-)

I had first to localize it to English (everything is japanese by default). Then I started playing: Importing my Sony Clié NR70V data, installing a cross compiler on my PC, and compiling my first program for the Zaurus (Hello World! of course!).

I came back yesterday from a business trip to Hong-Kong. Not much to say about it... Next one will be Sydney next week...

In the meantime, Li's mother arrived in Tokyo for a few days visit... She should leave on 16th.

As I was in Singapore, Li told me that Earthquakes were a hot subject on Japanese TV.

But the Big One did not came as Yoshio Kushida predicted. But when I called Li the next day (on Saturday 21), she told me they just had a quite a good one (4 on Japan scale).

My immediate thinking was: Is Kushida right? In all case, his prevision impresses me a lot. This could be (we can hope!) the beginning of a fiable method...

Still in Singapore, I watched on BBC World channel a long report on the next Big One in Tokyo. It was not what we call an optimistic one :-(

I just got a new mp3 player... It is the size of a lighter, and it is also a FM radio, and voice recorder... The model is a SonicBlue Rio SU30.
Perfect, isn't it? Of course, my Linux box can manage it (this was my first criteria!).

My only small problem is to understand how to navigate all these japanese menus (I spent half an hour to find the volume switch!).

e had some fun (I had at least!) during these long nights playing Diablo II, one of the best games I ever played.

I just closed our Games web site, and the associated mailing list. I will just keep the pages available for good memories...

But it does not mean the game is totally over: I still hope to play some games with this group members again! Timezone difference will be the only problem, and, as far as I know, this was not really a problem when whe finished very late ;-)

By the way, If anyone wishes to take over the Games page (and all the stuff around), and revive this group, please let me know, I would be happy to give you the whole data (with no copyrights!).

I am sure that she was looking at me when I was leaving our home this morning.
And Li found her inside the closed toilets this evening, when she came back.

What happened?

Apparently, today, Boudicca managed to close the toilets from the inside while she was alone at home. We only hope it was late in the evening, as today was very hot in Tokyo, and this poor little girl was catched in a very dark place with no water :-(