Steve Last

According to the map on the BBC News website the 4.3 SE England earthquake today appeared to be centred abouit 1/3 of the way from Folkestone to Calais...   anyone in the Tunnel notice anything?? Steve L

This correspondence triggered me to take a look at my brand new Citroen and I am a bit surprised to find it has been delivered with plates without a "standard Euro" GB tag on .  Thought that was basic these days. Will have to get some as we are going back over on Friday!   

As we thought, many thanks! Steve 

Many thanks all for the suggestions.  I'm trying to figure out the optimum speed / consumption / cost as a reference point really, not really needing just to save a few centimes. Our trip is 13 hours, door to door from Marlow Bucks to the northern edge Vaucluse. That's depending on exact timing of the shuttle, traffic conditions etc. It's 730 miles / 1175 km,  all bar 30 miles autoroute or motorway. This is "do-able" in one blast without being too tiring IF we can avoid heavy traffic, so we tend to leave about 0330, Monday to Thursday, get a offpeak shuttle just before 0600, and cruise at the autoroute speed limit. My wife goes back to sleep for the first few hours, I take a break, and she drives most of the boring bit across Champagne towards Lyon and I do the rest. That way it takes 13 hours door to door, plus or minus an hour. We arrive at about 6.30 pm local, which is OK for unloading, getting a meal and settling in without being too knackered. That includes decent breaks every couple of hours. Over such a long distance slowing down much does add significantly to the trip time and turns it something needing an overnight, so the cost goes way up even though the fuel burn is a bit less. Steve.   

My wife is just looking at a fish terrine recipe* for a big lunch tomorrow and realised that it seems to start with the raw fish, and says "Mixer le saumon avec 2 oeufs et 15 cl de creme liquide."  She is pretty sure this means "put it in the food processor/liquidiser" but can anyone confirm this - our dictionary just says "Mixer" (Fr) = Mix (Eng).   Thanks Steve * "Vous prendrez bien un peu d'terrine?" by Stephane Reynaud, P 42

Touche!  The book says 3.8, so we shall see! Steve

I've jsut been looking for the specifics in the text but can't find the exact phrase to search for - can you point me to it? No, found it, 5.119. Thanks for the tip !!!  

Taking a quick look it appears that it is average about €1 a litre in France and €1.37 in England so definitely a big saving!    Now I just need to find put if the car will do the 75 mpg claimed for autoroute driving....  If so, it looks lije a fuel cost of £60 per round trip rather than £200 as in my previous car. It also gets into the lowest bracket for emissions so only £35 a year road tax and no Congetsion Charge in London. Fingers crossed they don't change that. Steve

Taking a quick look it appears that it is average about €1 a litre in France and €1.37 in England so definitely a big saving!   Now I just need to find put if the car will do the 75 mpg claimed for autoroute driving.... 

Thanks very much both! Looks like it's not far from 1€ a litre everywhere, which compares to about 95p plus in England - so will definitely make a difference.  Very useful site suggestions.  

However, the original cause of this thread is good news for anyone who has used an SCI as we did, in order to avoid problems with the French inheritance situation.   Thanks very much for posting it, I had not seen it anyweher else in the papers. Steve

I read somewhere recently that alhough in general the autoroute fuel prices are a lot higher than off-route / hypermarket ones, that is not the case wiith the LeClerc stations. Can anyone confirm that this is true?  If so, anyone know if there is a Leclerc one on the route Tunnel > A26 Calais - Troyes > A5 Langres > A31 Lyon > Provence?  How much is diesel generally in France at the moment? I just acquired a Citroen c4 with electronic gearbox which is claimed to be mega-efficient. So I want to experiment to see how much I can cut my costs compared with other cars I've had on this trip south, which have always been petrol, so I've not really looked at diesel prices before.   Steve 

Thanks for the suggestions - Sete sounded good but unfortunately it appears that the company involved "Balearexpress" ceased operating in 2003.  We'll keep researching! Steve 

Yes. I'm aware of that possibility...  our problem is that we will be in the Vaucluse: we have the possibility of going to Mallorca in a friend's boat maybe from Nice, but can't figure out how to get back!  Maybe have to leave our car in Nice, get a ferry back to Barcelona, rent a a car from there and leave it in Nice.  However rental in Spain and leaving in France tends to be pretty expensive! I did find a "cheap flight" connection from Palma to Marseille on BA,  which turned out to be via Gatwick! Steve    

Does anyone know if there are any air or sea connections from the south of France to Majorca ?  Initial web searces have not produced anything so far..... Steve

probably doesn't count as we are about 900 metres the "wrong" (from your perspective!) side of the Drome/Vaucluse border! Steve Last Puymeras, 84110

If you are interested in making panoramas for your web site you might want to take a look at Pixtra Panostitcher.  www.pixtra.com . I have tried literally dozens of panorama packages and have found nearly all the cheap/free ones are too limited, slow or otherwise a waste of time if you need them for any kind of commercial use, while the expensive ones are way too heavyweight if you are not doing it full time. Panosticher has some slightly weird interface issues (e.g. no UNDO facility) but it is very fast and does an excellent job of stitching, blending and correcting geometry errors without requiring significant input.  However for me the big plus is that you can use it to make interactive panoramas, so that instead of having to show the panorama as a wide banner you can have a normal size window and the image moves around within it. This can be put straight onto your website and edited as an ordinary page. You can see examples on my website, e.g. at  http://www.ownergroups.com/Miraflores/pictures.htm . It takes a few seconds to load the little viewer application and then each image, but it is then very effective (in my opinion!).  It is not free software but pretty cheap ($30 US = £15). The demo is free and works 100% (it just leaves a "watermark" on the panoramas).  They also do a "3D" version (Omnistitcher) which gives a vertical as well as horizontal image.  For anyone who needs that kind of "virtual tour" but doesn't want to spend lots of time and money on it I think it is a pretty good deal. cheers Steve

Many thanks all for the suggestions. Changing the outbound server does seem to have fixed it. Having to do this is a bit of a pain as my outgoing mail actually goes through my business server and a relay system - a process which I don't fully (!!??) understand anyway.  I wish outfits like Free wouldn't make these changes without alerting people (they may have done but I don't check the free email as I never use it).   Anyway at least I can get my wife's to work - just have to remember to switch it again when we go home. Thanks again Steve 

My Freebox is still fine for internet, but after working perfectly well last time I was in France a month ago, I have found that I can't SEND email using Outlook - get a message "unable to connect to server, error 0x800ccc0e".   This occurs on all my accounts using MS Outlook, and also on my wife's laptop using Outlook Express. Both worked fine on leaving the UK on Friday but produced same result on connecting to the Freebox at the weekend.  So it looks like something has changed with France Free. I have found some troubleshooting stuff on the web which indicates that this is something which may involve our antivirus and firewall software, but even with both turned off the problem remains.  Anyone else had similar problems and have a solution? It is really maddening having to go to a webmail server to send anything. Steve   

thanks for the suggestions - the old floor is sound but 15 cm sq terracotta tiles and not 100% flat, the new tiles are 30 cm and I've found that when just put on top dry to check layout, they rattle a bit. I think the cement should take care of it, but might try something else like the "ragreage autolissant". as well. Thanks again.

I believe there is a self-levelling or similar compound formulated for existing tile floors for use when one can't lift the old ones and wants to tile over them. Does anyone know what it's called? Steve

Many thanks LesLauriers, I found the key that way - they've changed the page access though and it's not exactly intuitive, is it? And if you can't access the net, you can't find the code to tell you to access the net.... ! Different problem now is that BOTH computers now seem to have the same IP address so the other one won't work! How can I get the system to give each one its own as seems to be OK with my BT system in the UK? Steve

With Freebox operating with a wifi card I have one laptop which is working fine. (The card didn't come with any paperwork or instructions but must have set itself up OK or the laptop wopuldn't work.) I want to have a another laptop access the wifi network and it seems to find the right "network" - I must have given it the name on installation. t also refers to needing a network key - this appears to be like a password but I cannot find any record of what it is or where I put it in!! Meanwhile the other laptop is sitting there saying it IS CONNECTED to this network and is "acquiring a network address" but this has been going on for nearly an hour which doesn't seem right. It also is showing a network key in its properties. What's going on? Do I need to insert a "network key" password? If so how can I find out what it is ?!? Steve

Also now trying Anapod and it seems pretty effective - at least one can see where things are. On a slighly different topic, my iPod itself keeps "freezing" - can't access the menus with the top of the thumbwheel - it just gets stuck on "shuffle" which I use a lot, and it only seems to get unfrozen by plugging into the computer and updating. Is this a common problem? Steve

Problem resolved, I sent an email to the support people (for anyone else who has not yet found out, you can't do this directly... it is only accessible from the problems FAQ pages if you didn't find the answer in the FAQs themselves, and you need to set up a free.fr webmail address as well. They then send answers to THAT address and NOT your principal email used in setting up the original account) Anyway after 6 hours I had an auto acknowledgement, and after 30 hrs a personalised reply, ending in a "if that doesn't work call support phone number" message. Called support and after about 5 min wait spoke to a guy who was reasonably bilingual, and suggested I try disconnecting from the extension I had been using and reconnecting from the main phone socket - which has done did the trick. TIP: pick up the other phone BEFORE unplugging the ADSL filter and cutting yourself off from the help line person!!!! With the WIFI card in place I can still use the laptop in my office with the Freebox 3 rooms away so problem solved. Thanks all for comments Steve