Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada

So, this is where I'm going to start an MSc in Electrical Engineering. It's a small town: about 150 000 inhabitants and ~150 km south of Montreal, so it's going to be a real change from Paris :-) It has been now a while since I was in search of an "empty" place, close to nature where you can live peacefully and have a better Quality of Life. Living in a great city is really stressing. You have access to a lot of facilities, but in the meantime you cannot quite enjoy it.

Sherbrooke verifies all this criteria. It's famous for its university (there are actually two of them) and thus is a rather "young" town. It is by the way only 50 km north of the New England border, so maybe I'll make a visit there although I heard the visa fee is astronomical...

I'm really eager to be there, especially at the beginning of the Autumn (and the Indian Summer ;-)).

Leaving Paris

We're leaving in about 2 weeks... There is still a lot to do with paperwork, selling the rest of the furniture and buying some new stuff (suitcases ;-)). I am not surprised of not regretting to leave this city. I remember planning to leave it the very first year we arrived here. Six years later, I'm looking forward to leave it as soon as possible. I mean, if you are a tourist then Paris is really great: architecture, history, culture, gastronomy, etc. Even after all this time, we still discover new places regularly.

But to be honest it is really not appropriate for living. I also never felt like I was home in this country. Partly and probably because I never wanted to feel like I was home, I must confess. I have then been feeling like a stranger all this time. In Canada, I want to feel like I am home, so it will probably be different. Or maybe this is completely stupid ;-) I guess I will know soon...

I don't doubt that there will soon be nostalgia. We have family, friends and also good memories here. But I rather think about the future for now, not the past ;-)

Yet Another African Coup

I suppose this is what happens when the people are poor, have identity issues, the economy is on crutches and the main way to change the totalitarian political regime has been - for decades - military coups, "democratic" elections or not.

The last one, which failed, happened in 2003. The probability law made it that among many attempts, at least one had to succeed anyway. Now waiting for the next one...

Selling the House on eBay

Okay, not the house (we don't own it ;-)) but merely the furniture. But I've been thinking about this for weeks. How to get rid, in a very limited time, of the furniture you've accumulated during six years, when you are about to leave for a faraway country? There is always the solution of paying a transporter to move everything for you directly there. However, I was not very enthusiast to pay at least 2000 euros for some objects that are not that special anyway.

Usually, you ask your family, your friends, the friends of your friends and their acquaintances and eventually place an advert in a special newspaper. We've tried those solutions in the past, but it was for one or two things. But how about selling a lot of them? The problem when you live in a foreign country is that you don't have that much friends anyway, so waiting for someone to be interested in one or two objects may take some time. And the ad in the newspaper, well, we've tried it too, but with very limited success. The problem with it is that you won't probably reach enough audience.

So, we decided to try the internet! eBay to be more specific. I've already bought there once or twice, DVD's mainly, but never sold anything. So we decided to give it a try. We did an attempt at the beginning of July which went well. So we decided to sell almost everything around two weeks ago (we'll sell the rest soon). Everything was sold. Now I'm in the process of waiting for the bidders to come and get their stuff. Something that can be a little bit annoying: for 10 objects, the appointments span almost over two weeks. Which means that you have to be there almost everyday waiting for someone. Anyway, I am happy that I could sell everything, so I suppose I can manage this inconvenience ;-) Now, I'm sitting on a very uncomfortable backless plastic chair as I'm writing this, and this evening even the desk will be gone...

What is also interesting about auction, is that you can fix a minimal price, but the final price can be very cool if enough people are interested. In our case, the minimal price was not 1.00 euro but the minimal value at which we were ready to sell the objects. This is not usually the case with the solutions I mentioned previously: the objects are sold with that minimal-fixed price, unless you take the risk of selling nothing if it is too high. Anyway, the final prices were not as we expected them. For example, a small table was taken for almost its brand-new price, while a computer chair was taken for almost nothing (well, the minimal price actually). I suppose this also depends on the period. I'm sure I could have had better prices if I sold in September. But that would have been too late for me...

What is also interesting about eBay is that you can find something as special as this Sinclair Spectrum ZX+. This was the first computer I've ever had, twelve years ago, on which I learnt to program in BASIC. Maybe I'll buy one someday ;-)

Goodbye Computer

I sold today the PC I had for almost 5 years :-( The computer of my first Linux install (a Mandrake 7.2?) and a lot more.

A Gateway Pentium III 800 MHz, but highly efficient all the same. During that period, I replaced the HD (after a painful crash and data loss), the DVD player, the DVD writer (initially a CD writer), the monitor, the keyboard (twice ;-)) and the mouse. I installed a TV tuner card, an Ethernet one and more RAM. So, pretty different from the initial configuration, isn't it? Sold it for 250 euros at Cash Express, a store for secondhand products, where I also sold many "small" things, mainly, but not only, electronic devices. I'm sure I could have had a better price if I sold it on eBay, but I'm already selling a lot of stuff there (more on that later...), and I wanted to do it quickly. Yup, time is money. I didn't expect much more anyway.

All I have left now is this tired Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop...

Hotwayd or the Highway

If you happen to have a Hotmail account like me (you shouldn't, really), you already know how hard it is, not to say impossible, to view and/or send emails if you want to bypass your favorite browser or... Outlook, and rather use your favorite mail client, under Linux preferably.

In this case, you may find Hotwayd very handy. It is a daemon (actually two of them: hotwayd and hotsmtpd) that you can use in order to retrieve your email using POP and to send it via SMTP. I discovered this project a year and half ago and it seems to be making its own way gently and surely (for example, only POP support was available by that time).

The install is straight-forward (especially if you use the RPM) and the developers plan to support IMAP "soon". It supports hotmail/msn/lycos/spray services.

Goodbye KMail, Hello Thunderbird

I've been using KMail for around 18 long months now, although not intensively, and I have encountered bugs, crashes and such on many occasions. Yesterday, while I was moving my data from my PC to my laptop (in order to sell the former), I asked myself why not give Thunderbird a try? This happened while I was trying to figure out where the KMail developers managed to move this time the local mail directory between versions 1.7 and 1.8 (this already happened somewhere between versions 1.6 and 1.7).

So, I did the move today. I attempted to export my local mail from KMail to Thunderbird via my ISP's IMAP server. KMail gave me a super nice goodbye present by miserably creating only the root directory on the distant server and successfully deleting the whole local mail. Alright, what Mr KMail didn't know is that I did the backup before. However, in order to export I had to recreate the whole arborescence on the IMAP server and export directories one by one. I decided eventually to keep that mail on the server and not to import it to Thunderbird.

I like in Thunderbird the possibility to share mail between Linux and Windows while on dual boot, although I don't know if I'll ever need it (you can likewise share Firefox's bookmarks by the way). Most of all, I can now read Planet Arabeyes' posts in Thunderbird as though they were mere emails ;-)