February 25th, 2012, 5 Comments »
We live in a very typical village house here in France. It’s on three floors, and is taller than it is wide. The first floor includes a long entrance way, the dining room, kitchen, garage and downstairs bathroom. The second floor features our office, sitting room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The top floor has a kind of loft-style master bedroom and en-suite bathroom.
We get our Internet access via ADSL, and the only phone outlet in the house is on the first floor (meaning the bottom floor–in Europe, the ‘first floor’ often refers to what North Americans call ‘the second floor’). So our modem/wifi router from our Internet provider, called a Livebox, is plugged in there. The wifi signal easily reaches our second floor office, but it’s a little hit and miss in our bedroom up on the third floor. This isn’t all that surprising, given that the house has stone walls, and concrete floors.
Because I’m a nerd, I brought along our Apple Airport Extreme (it’s extreme, bro!). Hoping for a better signal in the bedroom, I decided to compare the quality of the signal from our Apple router to our Livebox.
I downloaded and installed a free app called NetSpot, which enables you to evaluate the quality of your wifi signal in different parts of your house. First you draw a map of your house and then you walk around testing the signal strength in various locations. It produces a series of heatmaps which you can use to, for example, better position your router.
I drew a really simple map of our bedroom, and then tested a bunch of spots on the default Livebox setup. Here’s the resulting heatmap:
Then I turned off the wifi on the Livebox, plugged in the Airport Extreme and repeated the exercise.
I can only show one test site at a time, but all of the locations were 10 to 15 dBm better (whatever that means) with the Airport Extreme. The wifi access is still a little dodgy up in the bedroom, so I may get an Airport Express to boost the signal from the office. In any case, I was happy to discover that hauling the Airport Extreme all 5263 kilometres was worth the effort.
I was a little concerned that the Internet speed would be pretty shoddy here, but I have no complaints:
I see that we’re only in the 44th percentile for France, but apparently we’re doing better than Ireland, Israel and Saskatchewan.
How does that compare with where you live? Run a test and leave a comment with the results.
5 Comments »
February 19th, 2012, 17 Comments »
I’m writing this from a bed and breakfast in the town of Mireipesset, in the southwest corner of France. We flew here from Vancouver on Valentine’s Day, and plan to live in this part of the world for the next year or so. An old friend of my wife’s has a house for rent in the nearby village of Argeliers. They’re just putting the finishing touches on the renovation, so we’re squatting in the B&B for a few more days. Then we’ll move on in.
I suppose it’s a bit ironic that, after a year of living Canadian, I have fled the nation for foreign shores.
We’re hoping that our year in France will be much like our year in Malta. We’ll enjoy life at a slower pace, and have a chance for some reflection and renewal after a hectic five years in Victoria and Vancouver. Even if you work as much as usual, living abroad affords you the luxury of a lot of extra free time. Until I lived in Malta, I never realized how much of my time was occupied with the, for want of a better word, bureaucracy of my life.
About a month ago, I realized that I hadn’t “announced” in any formal way the fact that we were leaving the country. Not on this site, nor on Facebook or Twitter. I’d wanted to ensure that our ducks were all in a row, I guess, and then I became particularly busy.
As a kind of experiment in discretion, I decided to just hold off on telling the Internet (I know, what a strange world we live in where that’s even a consideration) that we were moving to France. What, if any, are the results of that experiment? I’m not sure yet.
Here are a couple of photos I shot in and around our village. You can also find some photos on Instagram, including me standing in our swimming pool (sans l’eau) and a field full of sheep.
Argeliers is on the Canal du Midi, a 240 km canal system built in the 17th century. It makes for excellent walking and cycling.
This is the impasse or alley where we live. Ours is the orange house on the right. I’ll post some photos of the house soon, but it’s got a nice view over the canal.
17 Comments »
October 22nd, 2007, No Comments »
Julie just spent five days at Fontana Del Papa, a cooking school outside of Rome (booked via the excellent folks at Responsible Travel). That’s kind of an anti-holiday for me, but she had a great time. She took a bunch of photos, and here are three of my favourites:
She also spent a day in Rome, and some time in Barcelona and the south of France. I quite like this photo of seats awaiting Catholic bums in the Vatican.
It’s really a photo-bloggy kind of day today, isn’t it?
No Comments »
April 26th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Over the past week or so, I’ve taken a few random photos which each merited commentary, if not their own blog post. In all cases, click the images for larger sizes.
We visited Minerve, which is a charming hilltop medieval town. Beside the church, there was a little museum of archeaology and paleontology. There were a series of, well, high-school quality dioramas inside, including this awesome one. The context, I think, is fairly obvious:
There was another diorama of the Siege of Minerve in 1210. The Cathars, a religious group declared heretics by the church, had been mostly slaughtered by Crusade armies at Beziers. A couple of hundred escaped to Minerve, where they were besieged and eventually burned alive:
I turned on the TV in our Dublin hotel, and surfed to a new (to me, at least) channel called Setanta Sports (man, that URL ought to be a lot shorter). Low and behold, there was ice hockey on TV. And it was those embattled giants of the frozen game, Ireland vs. Luxembourg.
By Canadian standards, it was amateur hour all around, from the on-ice play to the commentary to the charming scale of the Dundalk Ice Dome. Still, I was pleased to see that Ireland will be promoted from Division Three to Division Two after a shootout victory. The other teams in the tournament: New Zealand (who took home the gold), South Africa, Mongolia (they got their Yak-riding asses handed to them by everybody) and Luxembourg. Awesome:
1 Comment »
April 23rd, 2007, 3 Comments »
After a busy weekend in Dublin, attending Barcamp (more on that later) and recovering from the jetlag, we’re done in the tiny village of Argeliers (population: 1237) in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southwestern France.
Our friends have a gorgeous villa down here. This was my first time seeing it, and it’s pretty specatcular. It’s called La Lavandiere, which means ‘The Laundry’:
Built in 1836 in the small Languedoc village of Argeliers, the Barn was originally built by adding on to the neighbouring barns and distilleries. During the mid 1900′s the Barn was used for storing agricultural and wine-making equipment, a collection of which has been saved and moved into the back garden.
The surrounding grand homes had their laundry serviced by the “ancienne lavandiere”, the soap-making fireplace and wash-house. This outbuilding remains in the back garden.
They have a dog, and a small tortoise who lives in the backyard. He hangs out in the pool shed a lot, because he apparently likes the vibrations. Whenever he’s feeling a bit randy, he tries to get amorous with the pool pump. You can hear the clink, clink, clink of his menage a un if you’re standing nearby.
I had an exceptionally uneventful day, which is just what I need this week. Finished a pretty bad Steven King novel, took a walk around the village, and then went for a short but sweaty (I’m so unfit) bike ride to Montouliers, a nearby village (population: 201) where there are some nice ruins of a 12th century chateau and a 14th century church.
I also did some laundry, and hanging the clothes out in the midday sun was surprisingly pleasant. There are, of course, photos from the day’s non-adventures.
Tomorrow, I may do pretty much the same thing.
3 Comments »
April 10th, 2007, No Comments »
Posting will probably be a little light and unpredictable through the rest of April, as we ramp up for departure. In case anybody’s wondering (and I can’t imagine why), here’s where I’ll be:
April 18 – Leave Vancouver, fly to Dublin via London.
April 21 – Participate in BarCamp Dublin.
April 22 – Fly from Dublin to Carcassonne for five nights at our friends’ villa–this is vacation, so I’ll hopefully be totally unavailable.
April 28 – Fly back to Dublin to speak at ShareIT.
May 1 – Fly to Malta, stay overnight.
May 2 – Take the ferry to Gozo, meet our letting agent and, Flying Spaghetti Monster-willing, find a place to live.
No Comments »
