Chips, shoulders, Sex and the French HADOPI Internet "3-strikes" Law

The French assembly is about to vote a really dumb « three-strikes » anti « Internet piracy » law. Among many other obscenities, it puts the onus on citizens to protect their Internet connections against people who would use it to download copyrighted materials. And the only way you can prove you are innocent is if you install some…

Logorrhea

This post has been brewing for a while… It’s about a logo. SFR is the second-largest mobile phone carrier in France. They have stores everywhere, they advertise like crazy, and they are folding other brands under the SFR banner. Which is probably why they decided to redesign their logo. The decision was probably long overdue.…

Ce Insanity, continued (squared)

Epilogue. Following the calls from the customer service lady, and then from Davina, the online sales department lady, I got the third call, as promised, from Kaoutar, the regular sales department lady. She told me that they would exchange the defective LG set by an identically priced Toshiba set, which had the same specs. We…

CE Insanity, continued, continued

Chapter 3. So the repairman came to check out the slightly defective new TV set last wednesday. He said he couldn’t fix it (big surprise) and that they would get back to me. Which they did, today, saying we had to go into a store to get an exchange. So far, so good. Except that:…

CE Insanity, continued

So, how does the new HDTV stack up you may wonder, if you somehow made it through this recent post? Well, it’s pretty great, even though I’m still mourning the loss of my 16+ year-old Sony 20″ CRT TV… I still haven’t connected anything via HDMI to the new set, but standard (wide-screen) TV, PPV,…

CE Insanity

I bought a TV about 16 years ago. A mono Sony set, with a 20 inch screen. In color mind you. I got cable about 8 years ago. I got a combo VHS+DVD player a few years ago. I got TV (some of it HD) via ADSL for free, without asking for it, as part…

Pyramids

In the early nineties, in my late twenties, I worked for Symantec, a large American software company (of Norton fame). It was only my second serious job, so I was still very wet behind the ears. One day, we got an email from the big boss, explaining that we were entering some kind of shitstorm…

The Geeks In Love go to the Senate

I’ve been waiting for Pamela to do the heavy blogging about our election night for the Public Sénat TV station, live from the French Senate, lazy coward that I am. Backstage (see photos), things were a bit of a mess, what with technical problems, and a largely uneventful blogosphere and twittersphere (which we were there…

O

It took me such a long time to come to terms with the demise of the USA. I went through the usual stages of anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Acceptance that there was nothing left to expect or to hope for from an increasingly dumbed-down, obscurantist, fascist-leaning superpower, except possibly endless war to secure…