Hegs

Your pages are in their index, as these examples show. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.the-languedoc-page.com+http&meta= http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Languedoc+has+been+settled+by+the+Greeks%2C+Phoenicians+and+Romans%22&meta= So, I suspect you have been penalized, check on www.webmasterworld.com for how to go about confirming and getting something done about it. Good luck.

Taping films for home use from the TV *is* legal. P2P in itself as a system for transmission of files is also legal, however sharing copyrighted material is illegal pretty much everywhere in the Western world. BTW American law doesn't apply to either France or the UK (though you may have to remind them of that from time to time). Be very careful about what you are downloading, as what is on the title of some of these movies is not necessarily what you end up downloading and you are putting yourself in danger of a visit from the gendarmes for much more serious things than copyright infringement.

Hi Cathy, I'm really interested in this, could you provide some more details? How big is the surface area you are heating, is it a renovation or a new build? Do you have an idea of how the cost splits ip into underfloor heating runs/machinery/outside piping?

I see a lot of comments along the lines "I am paid in currency X into a bank account in country Y". As far as I'm aware which currency you are paid in and into a bank account of which country makes no difference to which country you are supposed to pay your tax. Does anyone know any different? However I can see it might make a difference to whether the tax authority notices you...

The Hugo course follows on from their "French in 3 months" course, however I didn't do that. The old edition I used (it has recently been rereleased with CDs) consists of 4 tapes , and a book with about 10 chapters. Each chapter contained a listening/reading comprehension based on the theme (say, public holidays in France, or the freedom of movement in the EU), followed by on and off tape exercises etc. There is review of grammer points you should already know as they arise, and new grammar points but which I found well handled, didn't distract too much and weren't too heavy. I would say to get the best of this you should have done something relatively formal at some point in time before, you will need to have a grasp of different tenses and a fair bit of vocab to make headway here. You can see the product detail here: http://uk.dk.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,11_1405304855,00.html

I have a carte vitale, we went to get my wife her own one last June (yes, I know it is not necessary, yes I know the attestation works). We went to the head office of our department, to cut a long story short they told us they are having massive delays at the head office (Nimes? Rheims? can't remember) and 6-9 month delays are not unexpected.

The world famous Reading and WOMAD music festivals, when the whole town turn into a freak show, are probably why it is known abroad and considered cool by the young. As well it is a pretty big center of the UK IT industry, but also a lot of the French I knew worked in the big new retail developments there, pubs and bars. Before I left the UK a couple of years back unemployment practically doesn't exist in Reading and so it's pretty easy to get a job even with a low level of English fluency. Also there is a pretty large university, good transport links to the whole of the south east and Wales, etc.

There appears to be a very big French contingent in Reading. One friend was the only English in a block of 8 flats, all the rest French except one Spanish. Taking the trains around there I usually tuned into one conversation in French. In my companies office in London I used to drop into, 7 or 8 of the 40-odd employees were French (all mid-20s to early 30s), in addition the team I worked with had a Francophone Canadiene, and English guy and a Swede with French degrees so French was the language there... I found it funny that most of the young French planned to leave London, go home to France, start a family without the stresses and strains of SE England life... different nationality same dream :-)

I spent a little while looking at the local online immos tonight for my area, (Aude/Ariege border, nr Audois). My impression is that prices in the area are still going up quite noticably, especially for village houses and still selling, a lot of property also marked as sold. There doesn't seem to be very many largish properties with a reasonable amount land up for sale either in 200-250k+ bracket which I'm sure there used to be. Interestingly nearly all property sales in my area I am aware of have been to French including many locals as well who surprised me when they said they were buying. Personally I have thought for a long time that prices have to fall - 120k village houses and 25k average salaries are not compatible - but I think regardless of what is happening overall in the property market there will be regional and local economic and long term demographic changes, low cost airlines, etc and it could be said this area has been quite blessed so far in that respect which may delay or minimize the impact.

The trick is to search for the mairie whose number is published all over the web: 05.55.69.27.81 It looks good to me :-)

Here are a couple I've seen. Guide to ECS Solaire (ECS = Eau Chaude Sanitaire) http://www.ademe.fr/particuliers/Fiches/cesi/index.htm Reduction in impots http://www.ademe.fr/htdocs/presentation/aidefinanciere/plansoleil/cesi.htm#CESI

A register plate is something insulating and non flammable that sits in the chimney just out of sight that the flue from the stove passes through. Ours is made of thin steel, imagine a steel plate with a circular hole in that blocks the width of the chimney and you will not be far wrong.

Have a look under Chauffage/Chauffage au bois/Récupérateurs de chaleur on www.castorama.fr "Récupérateur de chaleur, puissance 5kW / h environ, pour cheminée. Equipé d'un système de filtration et d'un filtre. Dimensions : L 50 x H 21 x P 53 cm." I have no idea how or whether they work, we went for a wood burner/register plate which works great.

This is a little old but I haven't seen it discussed. Orange agreed to have 100% of communes covered by the end of 2007 last year. Has anyone seen any evidence of this starting to happen, my commune keeps on making plans then pulling out because the funding isn't available :-( http://www.francetelecom.com/fr/espaces/colocales/mobiles/couverture/zones/

I know nothing about Dinan at all :-) However it seems to me that someone is going out of their way to tell you things which are deliberately intended to make you believe this is a good buy, and that should make you suspicious. If it is the immobilier, then at the very least you should ignore anything, and if I were you I would question why he is so keen to persuade *you* to buy this property at the expense of his friends if it is such a good buy? >Am I right in thinking that a small town house within walking distance of Dinan centre will always be a good investment? No, something can only be a good investment if the price is right for the long term. There is some perception that the party is over, French house prices might be susceptable to a downturn, not as bad as the UK but perhaps triggered by a UK downturn. >It does require a lot of work to bring it to the standard we want. Are you absolutely, absolutely sure you are aware of everything that needs to be done and there are no hidden nasties? Structural, damp, legal etc?

There is a Crowne Plaza in Andorra la Vella, which is large and as the chain is more of a business hotel than a tourist hotel, maybe it will have some occupancy for two or three days... Just a thought as noone else has replied. Website is http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/

Mazan, OnSpeed has been highly rated by pretty much every UK net magazine I can think of, including Which? Magazine Online (Best Buy), .net magazine (5 Star Rating), Internet Advisor  (Best Buy Award 5/5), PC Answers Magazine (Editors choice), PC Advisor Magazine (Gold award) and a load of others. You can see the reviews http://www.onspeed.com/en/reviews/index.php , at least two of which I have on paper so I know they are genuine. Of course they *did* look at the product before passing judgement, maybe you should too :-)          

>They are all useless for anything other than webpages and don't work particularly well for that. I disagree strongly, at least with respect to ISDN users. I have OnSpeed on two computers on ISDN (where there is no native compression) running for over a year now, I have resubscribed. As part of my job I sometimes have to review tens of random web pages per day and it was a nightmare before. The performance improvement is extremely good, usually the reported improvement is more than 5x and I would agree with that. There has only been one web site that caused a problem Also OnSpeed also compresses email transactions over the public net, I don't use that as I use a corporate email behind a firewall. If you are fundamentally offended by images appearing slightly blurry but several times faster (note there is an option to refresh the page with all images showing), you can disable that and "just" rely on the lossless 5x compression of the web pages. Now, if you are not using ISDN and have a V92 modem then there might be limited benefits as those already do good web page compression.

>Only Southampton will stop from April 2005 due to lack of profitability of the route (too much cheap tickets sold). This makes me laugh, from June 2003 onwards (i.e. just after the route opened) I regularly checked the prices from TLS-Southampton. Only the first time did I get a reasonable price (57 eur each way), after that every single time, no matter how far in advance I looked, what time of the week etc, it was about 160 euros each way!

What they are doing is slowly making major roads priorataire on a case-by-case basis, which is a completely different matter from changing the rule itself. I was picked up on this during my French practical two weeks ago when I let people coming from the left go ahead of me - luckily I still passed. The rule also applies, e.g. when traffic lights have failed.

I haven't come across a very good explanation. But this has a reasonably good explanation of priority to the right: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/geology/8394/roads.html Basically you give way to the right UNLESS there are signs to the contrary both in town and country, and for that matter in parkings, private and public. In the country on fast roads the diagonal cross is a reminder that at the next junction people coming from the right have priority, but it is not always there. The fact you are on a "main road" doesn't mean anything unless you have seen one of the diamond signs which means the road does have priority. In towns you will often see people going fast then slow as they check out whether anyone is coming from the right, including cyclists coming down alleyways! It is hard to get used to... There are lots of other differences, that is definitely the biggest one and the one most likely to cause a crash, most of the other differences will just get you points. If you are worried the best thing to get is the "Tests Rousseau de la Route", which is a pictorial test of the Code available in supermarkets with answers, the French is not difficult.

On a more serious note, however, how many of the brits living in France do you think actually have taken the time to study the French driving system rather than "picking it up as they go along"? A good example of this is priority to the right, when I explain how it actually works, it becomes clear that what they had thought was lunatic driving is actually quite correct and the brits are usually the ones causing the accidents.

Run, don't walk, down to Decathlon (www.decathlon.fr) - there is a sale on. They have a great range of bikes from about 100 euros up, you get a free service after 3 months on a new bike. I don't know where in the SW you are but there are branches at Toulouse (Portet-sur-Garonne) and Carcassonne. Make sure you get a loyalty card as a lot of people get Decathlon addiction! The other option is a depot-vente for a second hand one.

Bit of a late reply, sorry! I was in the same situation a couple of years back. I tried a few things, what particularly worked was: I bought a CGSE revision course from Lett's and worked through that pretty quickly (a few weeks) which brought a lot back and gave me an idea of what I had forgotten. I also got a simple everyday vocab book (Collin's Wordpack, about UKP 5) and did a few from there a day The next big thing was a course called "Hugo's Advanced French" which seems to be something between O-level and A-level but with a good emphasis on listening comprehension. I would also recommend you spend some time with something to improve pronunciation and fluency at the same time, radio or channel 825 on Sky, for home use Fluent French Audio seems to be the best home study thingy for this I've seen but it is quite expensive (100 euros).

There is no difference between a like-for-like internal and external modem, in fact pretty much all modems on the market rely on a tiny number of internal chips that actually do the conversion. Though I agree some internal modems CAN be rubbish. What is more likely to be the reason for the faster performance is the fact that a new standard for modems, and in particular data compression, came out in the last year or so (V92). So new modems will work much better than the 2 year old ones you brought out from the UK.