MrWoodleigh

This video from Google tries to make Google Docs easier to understand:

I’m re-reading Emma. I can’t believe how clueless she is!

On Wednesday, I walked to the center of Paris. That’s a big walk from Montmartre. I left our apartment at around 3:30, Mrs. W happily ensconced within, and walked for two and a half straight hours. Finding my way was a little challenging. I had a map of central Paris and one of Montmartre but that left a gap in between. Still, I had a general idea of how they related and that turned out to be sufficient. I walked down the hill along a route that eventually took me to the Place de la Concorde, hung a left, and entered the Tuileries, walked down to the Lourvre, then started home. On the way I spent a few minutes resting in the jardin outside the Palais Royal. Up until now, that little oasis of quiet has to be my favorite discovery. If I’d been there before, I have no memory of it. Of course, Mrs W says that we’ve been to all sorts of places that I have no memory of. I’m not sure whether to believe her. She could be making stuff up.

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It’s very nice up here on the butte. Montmartre is like a little village in the middle of a big city and, apart from all the stair climbing, easy to navigate. Our studio apartment is very pleasant. Just one problem: Mrs W is allergic to it. We suspect a cat lives here part of the year.

We’re very near a Metro station. One you enter the station, you need to descend 112 steps to get to track level. That’s because the station sits near the top of the Montmartre butte. Fortunately, you don’t have to take the stairs. There are two elevators. We usually take an elevator up.

There aren’t too many tourists where we are staying, but when walk near the Place du Tertre, the famous square where people have their portraits done, or near Sacre Coeur, they are everywhere. We hear snippets of English, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. We do our best to engage our fellow travelers by speaking with them in their native tongues (offer directions, provide restaurant suggestions, warn them about the dog doo-doo underfoot, etc.), but speaking French all day has positively driven everything else from our heads. It’s a wonder I can compose this passage in English!

Speaking of restaurants, we ate at a tiny veggie restaurant in the neighborhood. We weren’t sure what time Parisians ate dinner and arrived at 7:35. We were the only ones for quite some time. 8:30 seems to be more like it. Despite our exquisite Parisian French, the waitress/cook/dishwasher/owner (did I mention it is a small place?) broke into English after we had uttered but a few words. I suppose she wanted to practice. The food was good, served all at once on large platters. Mine featured sauteed seitan and Mrs W’s featured a slice of squash pie and vegetable pate. The waitress/cook/dishwasher/owner (wcdo) is either a bookie, operating a front for the mafia, or providing fair trade and/or organic goods to those who march to the beat of a different drummer, if you catch my drift. Whatever the case, a French person would periodically enter the premises, speak completely unintelligible French with the wcdo, and leave with a bulging shopping bag.

I’m finding Paris a little hard to crack, wirelessly. It’s not a lack of wireless. I can see a dozen wireless networks from the comfort of the couch in our studio apartment and from about any other place I try. (Almost) everybody’s wireless is password-protected here. What’s with that?!? I’m thinking that the wireless routers are installed by Internet providers, who can’t be overly fond of unsecured wireless routers. Costs them customers.

My ipod Touch turns out to be a great little wireless network finder. It displays a very readable list of all the wireless networks it detects and places a little lock symbol next to any that are password protected.

I’m a happy man. Now that Google has added IMAP access (Google is rolling out IMAP over several days; it’s possible that not all Gmail users have the option yet), I can see my Gmail messages from Outlook, Mac Mail, and Evolution (my email clients on Windows, Mac OS, and Ubuntu respectively) and move messages back and forth from the school’s Microsoft Exchange server to Gmail, effectively making Gmail a gigantic back-end store to my more limited Exchange account. Gmail labels are mapped to IMAP folders, so moving back and forth between Gmail web access and IMAP access very natural.

Here are some links for configuring Mac Mail and Outlook It’s not hard to find Google’s instructions for many other email clients.

I just installed Vista on my HP tc4400 Tablet PC and I’m going to use this entry to keep track of performance tweaks.

• Turn off most of the visual effects.   Right-click on Computer and Choose Advanced Properties, then click on Performance Setting.
  • Choose Adjust for Best Performance.  Hit Apply.  Things will get ugly.
  • Using the checkboxes turn on what really matters to you.  The most important one to turn on, assuming you don’t want ugly, is Use visual styles… — it’s at the bottom.  I turned on Smooth edges of screen fonts, too.
• Disable Services.  Type services in the Start Search box to bring up the control panel.
  • Certificate Propogation: Used with Smart Cards, which most people don’t use.  Mine was set to manual, but it was started.  I disabled it.  There are two other services related to Smart Cards, but mine were set to Manual and not running, so I left them alone.
  • Offline Files: A nice service, if you use it.   I don’t mirror my network files on my tablet, so I disabled it.
• If you have a USB flash drive, use ReadyBoost.    Vista will set up a disk cache on a USB-attached drive.  You use as much of us as you want, leaving the rest for files.   I used a 512MB drive that was gathering dust.   I devoted 444MB, leaving a little space for files.   To turn it on, right-click on the drive icon under Computer and chose properties off the menu.   When the properties sheet pops up, look for the ReadyBoost tab.
• Remove items from the Run list.  Start Regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. What you can remove varies a lot, depending on what you’ve installed.  You need to look up what each program does.  I was able to remove:
  • Quick Time
  • Tunes Helper.
• Replace the bloated Adobe Reader with FoxIt or a similar PDF reader.

When Nina and I travel together, I walk around a lot by myself. Today I decided to get out to la campagna. This is no easy matter when you start in the heart of Arezzo. Like many old European cities, Arezzo has expanded well beyond its walls and is surrounded on most sides by apartment blocks.

When Nina and I were up on the walls of the old fortress at the “top” of town (not far from the cathedral) yesterday or the day before, I could see that on that side of the city, the fields didn’t seem so far away, just beyond the large cemetery on a hill below the walls, so I decided to head out in that direction today. Today was a good day to tackle it because it was relatively cool.

I went out through the gate below the cathedral and immediately made two or three wrong choices, following roads that dead-ended or ended with private roads. I had to double back and stick to an unpleasant and busy road longer than I wanted to. Eventually I discovered a beautiful country road that followed a valley among hills covered in olive trees and grape vines. I didn’t manage the trifecta: I didn’t see any sunflower fields, although I saw lots of wildflowers growing around the olive trees. As I looked back I could see the walls of the fortress and the cathedral and nothing else of Arezzo. The rest of the city slopes down the other side. I walked out some distance and thought I should stop, rest, and get ready to head back. I read my book, The Dark Heart of Italy (which I’ll talk about another time), for a while at the base of a little Madonna shrine at the junction of two narrow roads on the top of a hill. At one point I saw a truck go by me and disappear down the hill only to reappear a little while later traveling in reverse. The driver had encountered a truck traveling in the other direction and the two trucks could not maneuver by each other except in this little intersection.

When I turned back, I found a way to avoid the unpleasant road I had taken by walking to the back of a large public park onto a road that led me to the back end of the cemetery I had noticed from the fortress walls. That road “ended” in a roadblock, but I found a footpath around the roadblock. (I have this in common with many Italians: I’m reluctant to let a sign or a rule stand in my way.) I managed to get all the way to the base of the fortress walls only to discover that there was no way up from there, so had to walk a long way around.

My Italian is still really bad, but I generally manage.  The Italians I talk to don’t seem to mind how badly I mangle their language.  Maybe those who have to listen to me ask for something have a laugh riot after I’m gone; that I can’t know.  I’ve learned to lace my primarily noun-based Italian with suggestive mumblings in English and very expressive gestures.  That’s key.  I also add per favore as often as I can to cancel out the indelicacy of my words. 

Another way I manage is to have Nina tell me what to say.  Kind of works for both of us.  She won’t speak Italian unless she can do so correctly.  She has to be able to use the verb in the correct tense, use the right preposition, have her adjectives and nouns agree in count and in gender — all that crap — before she’ll utter a word.  Even when she has it all lined up in her head, she’d rather not say anything to any actual Italian person.  

It is my belief that talking to Italians is a good idea for two reasons.  1)  It helps you get better at Italian 2) Italians actually can actually tell you useful things such as whether a particular loaf of bread you might want to buy has salt in it (it almost never does).  I want to talk to Italians, but as I said my Italian is bad, while Nina’s is good despite the fact that she doesn’t practice by speaking with Italians.  Earlier in her life she learned to speak excellent French without talking to the people she met in France and excellent Russian without talking to the people she met in the Soviet Union.   So when we’re out together I just ask her to tell me how to say it in Italian.   She works it out, then relays it to me.  I then repeat it to the actual Italian person, perhaps dropping a few sounds and changing a few others, but I get the point across.  Unfortunately, I rarely understand the response.  Often I think I understand, only to find out I completely misunderstood it.  This poses no problem because Nina understands everything the person says.  

I’m not sure why Arezzo isn’t more of a tourist destination, but I’m not complaining. It’s a very nice city. Although its population is about 90,000, the old city is compact and walkable, if you don’t mind some steep climbs.

If you enter on the side of town where the rail station is, then you walk mostly uphill, first gradually then not so gradually, probably via Corso Italia until you reach the cathedral on the upper end of town. In the neighborhood of the cathedral, there is a beautiful park that looks over the “back” walls, a fortress (we haven’t visited yet), ancient churches, Petrarch’s house, some old municipal buildings, and, of course, your palazzi e piazze.

Our apartment, on piazza San Gemignano, is spacious and overlooks the mountains in the distance. It’s up a couple flights of steep stairs and is 4 rooms plus the bath. The bigger bedroom is inside a old tower. The kitchen isn’t as well stocked as some because, we speculate, the apartment has only recently been made available for weekly rentals. What often happens at these rental apartments is that the kitchen benefits from the parade of renters, each leaving behind some of what they purchased for la cucina e la tavola. At any rate, after two days of making frustratingly small amounts of bad coffee in a tiny, leaky stove-top espresso maker with a dried out gasket and a half melted-off handle, we bought a bigger espresso maker from a sweet old couple who have a stall in an open-air market that operates in a nearby piazza. It was a real bargain at sei euro and the man threw in 4 extra gaskets.

We were going to visit Cortona by rail and bus today, but didn’t muster up the energy so we’ll do so tomorrow.