We went to Kim’s school end-of-year show. It was predicatably bad and embarassing, and sad for the those who had actually worked to achieve something.

I arrived late. I had sat down at five o’clock and had woken with a start at ten to six. As I had planned to leave at half five I was late… Anyway I went into overdrive and arrived in front of a silent closed school at ten past six without getting a speeding ticket in the metro corridors.

There was another father just leaning against the railings outside, but that was all. I rang the bell. Nothing. He noted that there was no noise, and as school shows are very noisy events, this was suspicious. Had we got the wrong day? Even so, where were the kids? At ten past six they had never ever finished getting rid of the kids…

I looked for a poster or something. Nothing. There were the minutes of the last School Council meeting. Scanning that I saw an item named End-of-year show: it said that, this year, the show would be taking place at a municipal hall not far from here [the last time I went there I was part of a group all dressed as Santas, but that is another story]. I asked the other father if he knew of the hall. He didn’t. I explained that I was waiting for Ludivine and gave him directions if he wanted to go on ahead. He preferred to wait for me so I supposed that my directions had been too vague. Anyway after about another five minutes Ludivine turned up and we set off.

As we approached the room there was [again] nothing to be seen. This was in part because the room is in fact underground and there is only a gate and a staircase visible from street level, but I had been expecting a poster or something along the lines of “Parents of children from the school at 22 rue Saint-Maur: it is here.” Nothing. But the gates were not locked and so we slipped down, past some security guards who said that it [whatever the ‘it’ was] was just starting, and on, down further underground and into a large dark box.

We eventually found seats without crushing too many toes: one of the advantages of the dark was that they couldn’t see who it was doing their feet in like that…

There must have been about 500 parents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and everything that passes for family and whatever in that room. Perhaps more. About a third were children under ten. These were school children waiting for their turn to go up on the stage, or younger brothers and sisters of the same. You do not inflict a two hour ‘show’, where the pauses between the ill-conceived acts are longer than the acts themselves, where the sound [disco music?] is turned up to instant deafness level, without the kids getting bored, tired, starting to chatter, play shout, and cry. So this went on for two hours.

The new Head has done lots of good work for the school. This is part of that. Before the teachers couldn’t ever talk to each other, nevermind the parents. And coordinating something like this would have needed a United Nations’ Peacekeeping force. With the Head before he took over, the PTA exploded in flight after a couple of months leaving a total absence of dialogue for all the schoolyear. That Head also sent me letters threatening to take me to court because I refused to put Kim into school on Saturday mornings when she, or I, was too tired. Please note: it was she at the beginning of the year who said that she could understand parents not putting their children in school on Saturday mornings, and that she didn’t mind. And that by everyone’s admittance—head, teacher and Kim—they did nothing on Saturday mornings… I sent her a very bolshy note back and we stayed at daggerheads for the rest of the year.

However for all of the Head’s enthusiasm and good work, he is working in France, and he is French. The French have no idea how to organise a meeting that doesn’t take all day. Nor do they know how to organise any public gathering. It can’t be genetic, so it is either cultural or something they put in the water here.

Any idiot can tell you that something like a school show would be better as a 45 minute extravaganza, or, as a compromise, as two half-hour sessions with a good 15 minute pause between them. That pieces should be rehearsed [and preferably interesting] and not just be 30 kids bouncing up and down vaguely in rythmn on stage to deafenly-loud disco music [village people???]. Even the rehearsed pieces were too long—a set piece of songs revolving around bal populaire—or just badly [un]staged—a demonstration of renaissance dance that used twice the number of people it should and wandered aimlessly for twice the time it should.

Insert sound of me screaming here.

Of course, Kim was on in the next-to-last two pieces so I couldn’t even do the decent thing and see her performance and disappear discreetly into the sunset. She looked hopelessly stressed out in an aimless singing/dancing piece that had about 60 kids all up on stage together, and then managed to drop her drum and fluff her solo in her percussion class piece.

In fact the only decent events of the night were the last two pieces from the percussion class and the hiphop dancing from the centre de loisirs who work with the kids on wednesdays and during the holidays. They were short, rehearsed, and had a reduced number of kids on stage.

Afterwards I saw Kim desperately peering out into the audience and went to find her. She was looking for her mother. I had seen her arrive earlier and pointed Kim in the direction that she had taken after giving Kim a big hug. On hearing that Ludivine was off at the toilets she disappeared off to find her before I could stop her. Anyway, they saw each other and said ‘Hello’ also. Ludivine having also seemed how tense Kim looked on stage asked her how it had been. ‘Oh fine,’ she said. ‘I played it very zen…’ Yes, Kim. Of course.

She ran off to look for her mother.

When it was all over we went looking for her to say ‘bye and found her bobbling around. Her clothes had disappeared. Eventually it turned out that one of her friends had taken all the clothes that she had found in the dressing room. That meant she had Kim’s. Except that the last time I had seen the friend she had been heading to the door. With a bulging plastic bag.

Anyway, friend was found. Everyone said good bye and on the way out Oumou collared me with all her kids around her, in arms, tied to her back and clinging at her legs, and cried out to me ‘Oh! There you are! Kids, look it’s Daddy. When are you going to pay some upkeep for the kids, eh?’ Which is funny the first time, but she says it every time we meet.

Oh well, that was Kim’s end-of-year show.

So I finally tried out iTunes to see what it was like… There was some good news, but overall I’m disappointed albeit with one proviso. Let’s start with that.

I am clearly against the ‘subscription’ model for renting music [the All New Napster Model^TM. I don’t want to pay 9.99 euros for months on end and then have my music disappear. I had reserves about Apple’s model, but no more. I went online, bought a disk that I had been seeking Glassworks by Philip Glass, all 6 tracks for 5.94. Reasonable.
I have just looked at amazon.fr and it is currently available as a CD for 10.50. Once I downloaded the tracks I immediately burnt them to CD as an audio disk and tested this on the home audio system. No problem. Whatever copy protection there is, is not carried onto the audio disks. This was my worry: you can use the iTunes-purchased tracks on only 3 computers I believe, and I change about every two years. I read that one can remove authorisations from a computer, but I have no idea how this works [This is, in itself, worrying, if I a computer geektype like myself cannot understand this stuff what will Jane Public make of it..?] But by burning the material to CD I am assured that I will continue to have the files that I have bought as music available to me as music, even if it is not a carbon copy of the original file that that music was delivered as [hope you’re following].

That was the good point.

Now the bad ones. I had read that the interface was supposed to be exemplary. It is not. I found it wasted space imposing thousands of choices that were in no way interesting [Top Ten, Other people bought, Playlists…]. And worse than that, there is no way to personnalise it. I want, for example, to say that even though I am in France I am not at all interested in French Pop music [about 50% of the content of any given page], and would prefer it to open on the ‘Alternative’ page with music and info about these ‘x’ artists and groups that I have selected. Then I can get directly to the music that interests me. [Were navigation quick and simple that might not be so annoying…].

On a minor point, I would also like to see Wishlists: where friends can go on line and buy me music and that it would be waiting for me with a short note the next time I go online. I would like to see an affiliate program so that I can add links to these pages, for example, and earn some mullah on buy-throughs.

Another minor irritation: even though the interface mimics a web page, it is not posisble to spawn a new window through cmd-clicking a link. This means that you spend all your time clicking backwards and forwards. And not only is the downloading and rastering of the pages slow [I have a boradband connection—what can it be like for a dial-up line?], but there appears to be no page caching, and so each page is painfully downloaded again and again. A most excrutiating experience.

If iTunes is supposed to be the best interface, then what are the others like?

But the worse point is in the selection of music available. If you want anything with any personality that exists out of the mainstream [I accept that some mainstream music does have personality, but it is not its primary characteristic] it is simply not here. I have been looking to buy Yann Tiersen’s Rue des Cascades for some time. Unknown. Even his very nice soundtrack for Good bye Lenin is unheard of. And the world famous Amélie soundtrack: nada. Even Amazon.com scores better on this. I have been wanting the track Your Ghost by Kristen Hersh for years, but don’t want to buy the album. This is the sort of thing that iTunes is made for, surely. Except it doesn’t know her. Oh well, Gary Jules singing Mad World from the Donnie Darko soundtrack. You guessed it: unknown. I can go on: Michael Nyman’s film music..? Hector Zazou? Paddy McAloon? Disturbed by Ilya, No Peter Gabriel at all… [I’m looking for The Tower that Ate People]. No R.E.M., no XTC later than about 1998. I’m pretty sure that I will end up finding albums and tracks I want, as I think that other material will eventually come on line, but it is balefully lacking on that front at that moment.

One final point that I did not like at all. I opted for a shopping basket rather than a one-click purchase [I don’t like one-clicks OK? It is my right not to like it: bear with me]. On any other site you browse and put your material in the basket. Then you get your card out at the checkout. Not on iTunes. You have to create an account giving all your details in order to create a basket. I do not like this. This and the fact that the service doesn’t have enough of the music I enjoy will be the reasons that I will not stick with this beyond a trial period.

Next week I’m going to give eMusic a try out. It offers a simple download of up to ‘x’ mp3s a week according to a subscription scheme, but once you have downloaded, it is yours. They also have an offer of about a dozen free mp3s when you sign up.

Can’t be bad…

In the triva section at IMDb for Swordfish it says that On the floor of Holly’s room, a copy of the cult cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer” by William Gibson is visible. Well, I can tell you that the other book next to it, with its cover turned to the floor, is the Puffin edition of The Magician’s Nephew by C.S.Lewis as I recognised the lovely Pauline Baynes illustration.

This is because we rented the DVD the other night. It was a strange (strange as in ‘strangely’ bad, not as in strange peculiar-mind-games-and-other-mental-messings-up, like, for example, ‘Ring’) film. It seems that it got good reviews because Halle Berry has very pretty boobs. That and the explosion at the beginning which was more impressive that Halle Berry’s acting generally. The dialogue was supposed to be sharp… I suppose that may be the case if you are a merikan of about 15 years of age. The ‘hacking’ was ridiculous, about the level of the aforementioned lady’s golf swing—and I don’t play, but I can tell someone making a fool of herself.

No post day yesterday. Funny day. Fell out of bed at about six o’clock and at ten I was trying not to fall asleep on the keyboard. I was supposed to leave to meet Alain at eleven and I knew that if I let my head touch that pillow I would be late. True. I finally let my head hit the pillow at about seven that night. And woke at half nine. Missed all the music, even Le nozze di Figaro on Arte. Sheesh. I also woke grumpy and with a headache.

And I only managed to write about 800 words. No way am I going to advance on all this at this rate. Not counting the fact that these 800 words were rough, rough notes, the sort that I write when I say, well, I must write something. It was something, but I suspect that that was all.

And I got a letter from the Unemployment Office. This is the third bureaucratic FU in a week:

. I transfered my Social Security dossier from Paris to here. When Ludivine did it they just took down the info and it was done. For me they wanted a dossier with last three pay slips, previous info, proof of address and all. So that was a month ago, more even. I thought that they were taking their take, by what where would bureaucracy be without time wasting? And they got my address wrong. They had it written on about twelve different documents. And they got it wrong. So I will now waste time speaking with all sorts of jobsworth’s because they got it wrong.

. My bank has sent me a letter saying that my Visa card has expired and there is a new one waiting for me. Except it hasn’t expired and the number on the letter is not my card. And this is the result of a cock-up at the bank more than two years ago. And not only can I not contact anyone at the bank, and will have to waste time to get this repaired—with no guarantee that it won’t happen again in two years—but I will also have to scour my bank statements looking for the corresponding charges and insist that they reimburse them.

. And the Unemployement Office computer records keep confusing me with someone else and sending me menacing letters. I call up and dial into the service and everything is OK. They tell me to ignore all of this, but it is not only annoying, but the guy whose dossier isn’t complete and whose letters I am receiving doesn’t know that the Unemployment Office is threatening him in this way. And knowing that there is someone who is going to have even more reason than me to be angry with the Unemployment Office is no consolation.

And today I have managed about 100 words so far. Think I’ll go get a coffee and try and call the bank. Again.

After breakfast, I suggested to Kim for the fifteenth time that she took a shower and got dressed. Then for the seventeenth time said that, no, she couldn’t have a bath. And then, once she was having her shower—remember, these things are supposed to be quicker and more economical than baths—so while she was having this shower, I asked her why she was just sitting in the bath watching the entire contents of the East Paris Fresh Water Reservoir disappear down the plughole while she wasn’t even wet. Note: French houses don’t have cold water tanks in the roof, so you get interesting things like diminuishing water pressure the higher up you live in a building. I remember a flat where I lived on the 5th floor, and if anyone else in the building took a shower at the same time as me in the morning, I could get nothing to come out of the bathroom taps…

Daughters, don’t you just love ‘em.

There is a cat conspiracy out there… and no-one is writing about it. I was peacefully reading Daring Fireball, basking in the thrill of being able to get in again, and not being sent off to some bit bucket in space by a hell hound proxy server somewhere, when I read this:
In short, a hobby-level Daring Fireball will resemble much more a typical weblog — blurb-length posts, often only to link to articles elsewhere. No cat pictures, but still.

Nothing to write home about you say.

Then I thought about the number of sites and blogs that I visit that have cat pictures and talk about cats. And—let this be clear—I am not a cat-enthousiast, and am not browsing the web actively seeking cat-news, cat-pix or cat-whatever.

Is the web in fact just some huge cat cabal to get their pictures everywhere? Does Tim Berners-Lee have a cat I ask myself?

I amaze myself: the hallway lamp is repaired.

I should explain… There are two switches in the hallway, either can be used to switch on or off the light. About a month ago, maybe more, I entered the flat, reached round the corner and flicked the light switch nearest the door and… nothing happened. Now, to me this was curious. Not because lights don’t blow in this world, because they do. But because before they blow they generally display symptoms along the lines of flickering, changing intensity of light and buzzing. This light bulb had done none of those things. A bad point. A point that implied [rightly] Future Complications^TM.

I keep the lightbulbs in the cupboard that houses the fuse box. I also keep the torch and the electricity bills there. In that way, if any electricity leaks out, it stays in a familiar environment. I unscrewed the old bulb, placing it on top of the cupboard rather than in the dustbin. Then I switched on the light again. Nothing.

The way that I saw it was that there were two possible outcomes: the second bulb, fresh from the shelves of the supermarket was well past its Sell-By date; there was a problem in the circuit.

I took the bulb out and exchanged it with one in the bathroom. It worked in the bathroom. Nothing worked in the hall.

That left circuits.

I had a quick look at the fusebox, to set my conscience to rest. It couldn’t be that, and wasn’t. There are other lights on the same circuit, had the fuse blown there would be other lights not lighting. QED.

So I did what any reasonable handyman would do: I abandonned the tools on top of the cupboard with the lightbulbs and left it at that saying that I would come back to it.

Like I said, that was three weeks or two months ago.

Recently, coming back to the flat at night we have had to use the kitchen light to see what we were doing in the hallway. This increased my annoyance factor to the degree that I finally decided to repair this. After a few more days my resolution had sufficiently hardened that this morning, a cup of coffee in hand, I looked up at the empty socket thinking ‘It’s you or me, kiddo. And I’m not going to let a simple light bumb get the better of me…’

I got the step ladder out and climbed up and looked at the socket. It was a screw-in job. I got the light bulb from next to the hot plate to where it had gravitated from the top of the cupboard. Any good DIY-er can talk for hours about the migration of disassembled objects around the house. And bad ones for even longer. Anyway, I unscrewed the light in the bathroom, screwed in the light from the hot plate, and lit the bathroom light. Voilà. It worked. But thereagain, there had never been any problem in the bathroom. I then took the lamp I had got from the bathroom and screwed that into the hallway. I then switched on the light. And this worked too.

Then I realised.

I had, up to now, always tested this light using the swicth by the front door, not the one next to bathroom that I had just used. And the switch just up by the bathroom that I had just used was, when I pressed it, neither on nor off. It was flat between the two states. The switching circuit that we have in the hallway works by flipping a connection from a first line to a second one or back again. If both of the switches are on the same line, there is light, else the circuit is broken, and there is none. This implies that each of the switches is always in one of two possible states: ON or OFF. We forget that there is a third, improbable but possible state: NEITHER ON NOR OFF. This is the equivalent of the tossed coin coming down on its edge. It’s not common, but it is possible. In my case, the possibility—and I am pretty sure about this—increases enormously when there is a little girl in the house who likes playing with light switches, among other things.

Anyway. Lights repaired, I can get on with other things. If only I can find my tools…

I have updated my résumé online and downloadable as a PDF file

This is the French version as I’m currently looking for work here. If you have any ideas, please tell me. If you have any connections, please feel free to pass on the URL. If you see any faults… Oops! Please let me know.

Went into the office today. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it…

In fact, MB and Hubby are in Copenhagen at a professional conference. As I have heard them blithly massacring english and understanding everything backwards I imagine everyone is having fun, and if tomorrow Denmark breaks off all diplomatic relations with France, well, we shall know why…

I had gone in to see Colleague Opposite who got back from Madagascar to find the desk opposite vacant. I wanted to thank him as he had brought me back postcards of Lemurs. Friendly advice: do not get me started on the subject of Lemurs.

Colleague Opposite was orange. He was not orange before he left, by the way. The sun, sea and whatever else there had bleached his hair and beard orange, brought out freckles and tinted his skin orange [well, all that was visible… a aspirin-white band flashed out from time to time from the sleeve of his t-shirt, so—wisely—he didn’t go topless]. Quite a surprise. He also looked quite relaxed. I was probably green. With envy.

I offered my apologies for disappearing like I did, and leaving the new site in such a state. He generously said that he would have done exactly the same thing, and I was not to blame nor to worry. He also said that he had repeated to MB that the work that I had been doing was way over his head and that he had neither the time nor the capacity to finish it. And so he told me that since then, MB has been wandering around the agency repeating to herself as well as to anyone she meets, that the site is fine as it is and there is absolutely no need to change it. So why then did we waste about 6 man months [person months?] working on this, revising all the indexing to integrate her dumb themes and categories, wasting days in meetings and dummies and me coding for months… Let me guess… It was to create work in order to keep me on and avoid firing me… Of course! Why didn’t I think of that.

We ate at the local Indian chippy, drinking Indian Kingfisher beer—it was all very pleasant—and thanks are due to Colleague Opposite for inviting me. I just hope that I will be inviting him out soon, in order to celebrate a happy event for him. And then we’ll all be laughing.

This is just to say that things no work as I intended. Links on site stay in this window, links off site open up a new window. This works [thanks to JavaScript]. If you don’t like this, I’m sorry, this is a feature that I worked hard to obtain.

There are minor esthetic problems, and the ‘Moving Aroundwards’ part doesn’t work on Archives, but I’m a lot further ahead than yesterday at this hour.

I have been playing around with Pivot for about 24 hours now, and finally the archives are working. The only major technical crink left to iron out is why all links on the site open up a new page and do not open in the current page as I wanted.

Getting there.

Fell out of bed before six this morning. This was a relief of sorts as the temperature was fresh. I opened all the windows to air the place, get some of the heat air moving and replaced by something cooler. When the sun rises, I’ll start closing.

Waking [and coughing] before six is slightly worrying as I didn’t go to bed until past two in the morning. I do hope that this is just to do with the heat, not with anything else.

Only managed about 150 words yesterday. And then, about 40 of those were rewriting work from the day before, but I do have an excuse. Well, an explanation.

Yesterday was my big day at the Unemployment Office. When I went to sign on, they gave me a pile of bumpf and told me to call the Job Centre for an Interview. I did. The Job Centre gave me a date for two weeks hence. Yesterday. I looked at the reading matter from the Unemployment Office. Half was little booklets about my rights and obligations, and their obligations and so forth. And there was a big folder thingy labelled ‘Fill in and take to your Interview’. I read it over. It was very nannying. I can understand that if you’re dealing with kids fresh from school who have no idea about job hunting, then it would be acceptable. Except that, kids fresh from school can’t sign on, as you qualify for Dole by working. And if they’re under 25 they can’t get Welfare either. That just leaves McJobs. So next time, smile at the kid opposite the counter: he or she certainly isn’t doing it for the career options. And Ronald knows that, and that’s how he manages to pay them so little, to cheat on the hours, and to generally mess them around by shifting shifts.

I filled out the form, grabbed my latest resumé and headed off for the Job Centre. When I got into the Interview Room, the girl asked if I had filled out the form: I said ‘Yes’. Not once did she ask to see it. This confirmed my opinion that it was a ploy to incite kids to get into job-seeking mode^TM. The interview was painless except for the usual glitches in the Job Centre software: all comments had to be kept to 4 lines only; job categories are very restrictive; I didn’t entirely agree with the job description for my second category; you can only have two categories.

When asked, I said that I would be using family-and-friends network first, as well as surveying job sites but that things were very quiet at the moment [confirmed by the fact that there were no jobs for me in her machine]; then, in July I would spend some time with my daughter. In August, if nothing was happening, I’d contact Temp Agencies. And if by the end of September, the jobs hadn’t picked up I would contact the Job Centre again and perhaps consider retraining for something completely different^TM. She didn’t see any problems with that program and told me that the Job Centre would be expecting to see me again in December, and that the Unemployment Office probably hadn’t told me that when my notice period ended, I should contact them again to change status else they would cross me off the unemployment lists. This was very nice of her as, in fact, they hadn’t told me.

While leaving, she gave me an anonymous QA form to fill out. It was designed to see how well the Job Centre did the task of looking after me. I imagine that this is designed to give them feedback to fight the current government’s plans to allow Temp Agencies to compete against the Job Centres and deal with the unemployed. I wonder if the government shouldn’t just completely shorten the supply chain, cut out the middleman, and subcontract the work to McDonald’s… Anyway, I dutifully noted all the things that I have already said above, and tried to ignore the three female members of staff standing next to me trying to decide if a poster was straight or not. For at least 15 minutes.

Then I walked home under the scorching sun.

“Please try to remember that the purpose of baths—before flooding the bathroom—is to wash…” I said, handing Kim flannel and liquid soap.
She is at a curious age; whereas, for her, washing means dabbing at just the visible parts of her face and fingertips, she will languish in a bath for hours forgetting entirely to wash, until she steps out looking like a species of pink prune.
Then drying her hair; for once, she came to me and said “Papa, there are knots that I can’t get out…” and proceeded to let me comb them out in my usual caring and gentle manner without the usual screaming, cries and jumping up and down saying “You’re hurting, you’re hurting,” when I’m not, or I may be, but I’m just doing my best.
That sort of Sunday morning.
. . . .
The other part is that I finally stopped that hacking cough at 4 in the morning, that the baby upstairs still cries for quarter-of-an-hours on end [and the parents do nothing…], that Kim started coughing again at 6 this morning, and that at 9:30 I was in no fit state to get up. I am still coughing up that horrible greeny-brown mucus stuff and I feel as if there is an orangutan squeezing my chest permanently, or at least a small gorilla. I can’t remember feeling that breathing was so difficult since my lung collapsed 20-odd years ago.

“Some people say not to worry about the air
Some people never had experience with…
Air…air”
David Byrne/Talking Heads, Air [from Fear of Music]

When I started work at The Place That Shall Not Be Named my Colleague Opposite indicated that there was a large hard drive with filesharing on, on C’s hard drive. This was the place where people stored mp3s. Staff brought in CDs, ripped them, and streamed the music to a player on their local machine. As I was working on a Mac I didn’t bother, I listened to the radio on iTunes most of the time.

Now fast forward a year and bear with me while I explain a rather annoying and intricate detail.

Most serious companies where IT is important have an IT charter. This document sets out what you and the company can and cannot do on the computers that the company provides. For example, you agree not to spread virii in your spare time, and the company agrees not to spy on your private mail; that sort of thing. However, in France, in the absence of such a charter, jurisprudence provides that a computer is a ‘private place’, in the same way that, for example, a locker or a drawer is. An employer, for the better or the worse, may not search a ‘private place’ if the employee [or someone representing the employee] is not present. Now I pointed this out to MB and Hubby when I arrived but, as ever, they reacted by saying that they didn’t need such things [an IT charter] in their company.

One weekend Hubby decided to examine C’s computer and came across the hard drive containing the mp3s. All 4 GB of them, all organised by artist/disk/title, just like the ripping software allow you to do. Hubby went through the ceiling.

He imagined that:
1 – C spent all her days downloading and organising the material instead of working. To that end he prepared charts in Excel* based on his calculations of an average download-and-organise time in order to show that she had been spending all her time for the past year doing only this. Of course, he is incapable of understanding that the computer can rip while it is doing something else because he personally has no multitasking capability, and that the software is perfectly capable of naming and filing the material without the need to do anything else.
[*Question: What is worse than an idiot? Answer: An idiot with Excel. Question: What is worse than an idiot with Excel? Answer: An idiot with MS Access… ]

2 – all of this were downloaded mp3s and thus ‘illegal’. I put ‘illegal’ in inverted commas as I have hundreds of downloaded mp3s that are downloaded legally from musicians’ sites and music discovery services. Possessing a mp3-encoded music file for which you possess the disk is of course, perfectly legal. Possessing a mp3-encoded music file where you have the permission from the artist and any other rights holders to download is also perfectly legal. But for Hubby, the company IT specialist, the equation was simple: mp3s = illegal filesharing.

3 – that this was company material that was being misued. In fact Colleague Opposite had bought the disk for the purpose of containing ripped files. It wasn’t declared as such, but it was he who set this up.

4 – that this was hidden. In fact, as I noted, everyone knew of it.

So MB did what any reasonable person would do. She called in a Public Notary to provide witness that Hubby had found the files on C’s machine. And she sent a registered letter to C informing her of her instant dismissal from the company. Following that, other machines were searched and Kazaa was found running on some. And some of the piggy-back spyware that lives on Kazaa.

Come Monday morning we were all invited into MB’s office in two groups, which she named, in front of us, the ‘conspirators’ group and the ‘nothing to worry about’ group. The first were given a bollocking, the second of which I was part, were informed of the ‘facts’ and told we had nothing to worry about. Personally I asked to be allowed to leave the group in order to give my reactions to the information later in private not wanting to embarass and contradict MB and Hubby in front of other staff. MB refused and asked that I speak.

So I said that:
1 – in April of the previous year I had advised them to ban Kazaa. I did not talk about file-sharing, for me that was a private matter for each person’s conscience, however Kazaa ate a lot of bandwidth and the spyware that piggy-backed on the system made the machines unstable. [Not as unstable as the cheapo-cheapo hard drives that Hubby installed in the machines and which crashed—losing unbacked-up data—with unsurprising regularity. When I arrived I asked what the backup policy was. I was told that all was under order. Yep. All was under order, the data bases were backed up but that was all. It took a year to get a reasonable off-site backup policy implemented for all the servers, and there was still no policy for individual machines…]
Hubby had decided then that Kazza wasn’t a problem [because he’d never heard of it…].

2 – I had also proposed then that they put together a charter to cover this activity. They had poo-pooed the idea.

3 – that in the absence of said charter their messing about in people’s machines over the weekend was an intrusion in their employees private lives and that any material gathered in that way would be looked on with suspicion.

4 – that there was nothing illegal about ripping music files for private use, nor in streaming music from one computer to another provided that the files were not copied in the process. [They informed us that they contacted a lawyer who worked for the French Music Industry Rights Protection Agency, an organisation that like its American counterpart wants to see filesharing made illegal, and wants to block the legal right to copy music that you have aquired legally. A neutral third-party then… And this lawyer informed them that the copying of files onto the computer was in fact an ilegal operation. As it is clear that MB and Hubby had no understanding of what happened, I question there capacity to explain clearly to said lawyer—whatever his agenda—and it is not at all certain that they understood the answer either: lawyers rarely give straight black and white answers…].

5 – that if C was ‘guilty’ of anything then I was also ‘guilty’, and that the practise of dividing the employees into groups of ‘nice, good children’ and ‘nasty, naughty children’ was ridiculous.

MB and Hubby were also shouted at by their accountant who told them they were just covering themselves with ridicule. They withdraw the dismissal notice to C [who negociated her departure anyway, arguing that she had lost confidence in her bosses—ahem—and they paid her about 6 months’ salary over the odds just to get off the hook.] Colleague Opposite received an unjustified and disagreable ‘warning’ letter and we promptly wasted about three months fighting an extremely repressive and badly worded IT charter that basically gave the employers the right to do what they wanted, and the employees extreme and unrealisable responsabilties under penalty of being sacked if they even coughed. While proposing a decent charter that laid out clearly not only mutual and compatible rights and responsabilities, I also told them that it would be a good idea if they trusted their employees a little, as so far it had been the employees who had acted the most intelligently.

We heard nothing more of the charter which is both a good and bad thing.

But typical of MB and Hubby.

Oh, and I got the sack. Pure coincidence.

So we saw HP3. There were some disappointing parts, principally the kids [mostly Emma ‘wide-eyes’ Watson and Dan Radcliffe] still can’t act [Tom Felton, Rupert Grint and Matthew ‘Neville’ Lewis were fine though]. And the plot had to be hacked around to get it to fit. But while the latter part is reasonable and always open to debate, the former is just painful.

There are other errors, also. The biggest is that nowhere is any explanation given about the Four, about Remus’ role [and so why he recognised the map], and thus why it was such an insult to Snape, and the role of the deer reinforcing why Harry thought he saw his father, etc. On a minor level the means of neutralising the Tree wasn’t given and so it went from being scenery to instrument of murder and back again, which is a bit odd.

[Later update that came to me as I was going to sleep. Askaban was handled badly. It is just said that it is the ‘Wizard’s Prison’. The book is much clearer on the abject terror of the place, the toll that it placed on Sirius Black. And the ambiguity of the Dementors…]

However what was good was very well done: Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson appeared to adore hamming it up; Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman and David Thewlis were just right—each dangerous and sexy in their different ways… And the design! Visually and graphically it was invention after invention. I loved the new look of the buildings, the hillside outside the school, the Marauders’ Map, and much more. And the snow, and the visual effects around the Dementors, the transitions about the seasons… While these may not have been perfectly faithful to descriptions in the book, they were in the spirit of it. In fact, in cases, better as the book descriptions can be poor at times. [This is not bitching—writing is hard, imaging all this is difficult. Let this be clear: I think JKR is fine on plot, she is OK on dialogue and weak on writing. But she gets millions of kids reading and that is not bad. Hell, she gets hundreds of thousands of adults reading too! And the kids don’t care, they just read and discover they like it and just go on reading. And I’ll hope that they will comme back to these books when they’re older and they won’t see them as I do, they’ll still see them with their eyes as when they were kids and still adore them.]

Kim’s birthday party came and went. She did invite most of her class (argh!), however only four of the kids turned up (aaah!). She was positively burdened down with pressies—I know, I had to carry them back to her mum’s flat. And while Ludivine thought that I had exagerrated by preparing a programme for the afternoon that separated activities into 15-minute divisions (3:00 – blow out candles, 3:15 – eat cake…) by having this, as well as a big list of party games and prizes, I was able to occupy them and more importantly, stop them squabbling.
That evening Ludivine went off to her parent’s goodbye party with all the cookies she’s been preparing all day. I put Agathe (she was staying over) and Kim in the bath, then filled them with soup and then put them in front of Luputa, Castle in the Sky on video while I went to bed and watched Dark Water on DVD. The film was sadder than I expected. And creepingly uneasy rather than pure horror.
Ludivine and I watched Castle in the Sky on Sunday night after I took Kim back home. It was OK. There were some nice visuals at times but I felt that the story was a little stretched out. But thereagain, I’m not 9.