Paris Journal 2012 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
Find me on Facebook 2011
Paris Journal ← Previous Next
→ Go back to the beginning
|
Gadgets. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. I missed a dinner with my family last night because of one of them. To be fair, if a human had taken care of the situation in time, the gadget would have worked, and I would have been able to join Tom, Dan and the girls for dinner. But one of our two cell phones, the one we’ve loaned to Dan, had run out of minutes. Somehow, I’m the only one who knows how to recharge the thing, and nobody told me about the need to do so, despite the phone’s warnings of low balances. When Tom called in the evening from the land line in the apartment in the 6th, he didn’t yet know where they were going for dinner. I was waiting in “our” apartment in the 15th for my friend from Australia to call so that she and I could meet for a quick drink. Tom told me about the depleted phone balance, and I promised him I’d immediately recharge the thing via the internet. As soon as I hung up, my friend called, and was waiting for me at the Commerce Café. So I quickly recharged the minutes for the small cell phone and went on my way to the café. My friend, Caroline, and I had a nice time over a drink. The Commerce Café was alive, positively electric, with almost every seat taken on the terrasse and in the bar. This is the neighborhood pub for this quartier. At 8:30, it was time for Caroline and I to re-join our respective families for dinner, so we said goodbye on the avenue Emile Zola, where I thought I’d be hopping on the line 10 metro to go over to the 6th arrondissement. I pulled out the smartphone, and tried to reach Tom and Dan on the small phone. Nothing. Le French Mobile’s answering system claimed that my party was not available. Darn. I thought the guys must not have recharged the phone’s battery. Not knowing where to go to meet them for dinner, I went back to the apartment. Maybe they were there, waiting for me, I thought. But no, the apartment in the 15th was devoid of family. Unless they called me, there was nothing I could do! They didn’t call. It turns out, the small phone needs to have a PIN number punched into it when it re-starts. I’d told Tom about this, but he’d forgotten, and they didn’t have a copy of the PIN with them anyway. If they’d left me a message before they left the apartment in the 6th, the message would have said they’d gone to the Café Tournon. But when they arrived, the Tournon was closed, presumably for vacation. So they walked up to the P’tit Fernand, near the Marché Saint Germain. They had a lovely dinner. I had reheated lasagna, from the freezer. Yuck. Eventually, after dinner, Tom called me from the other apartment, and explained that the small phone wanted a PIN. I found the number, and read it off to him. He tried the phone out, and it worked once again. Aaargh. I wish the thing didn’t require a PIN, but that is the way Le French Mobile works with this little Samsung Champ phone. At least, Le French Mobile allows me to recharge via the internet. The other phone (Samsung Galaxy smartphone), with its France Telecom/Orange prepaid sim card (Mobicarte), does not allow me to recharge via the internet. When we go back to Florida, both of these unlocked phones will have the French sim cards replaced by the American prepaid sim cards (T-mobile and AT&T). No contracts, no locked phones, lots of flexibility, and pay-as-you-go. That’s the way we like it. On the whole, I think I like Le French Mobile better than Orange, so next summer, we’ll probably have two sim cards from that company. I’d be interested to hear what anyone else thinks of Le French Mobile. (I’ve heard enough about Orange.) Not long ago, we had no cell phone while in France. Then there was my unlocked Motorola Razr. Now we have the two Samsungs – one little non-smart phone called the Champ, and one very cool Galaxy smartphone. Cool it may be, but the Galaxy can do funny things sometimes. For example, yesterday, as I was expecting my friend Caroline’s call, I didn’t realize the Galaxy had turned itself off again. It does this every once in a while, not because its battery has run down, but because of automatic software updates, I believe. The problem is, when this happens, I am oblivious to the fact that the Galaxy is off, not on, unless I happen to look at it. At about 4:30, I looked at it, and realized what it had done. Sure enough, Caroline had called; there was a message from her in voicemail. Anyway, that part of the evening worked out. Caroline and I did catch up with each other, and it’s a good thing, because she and John leave for London tomorrow, and soon after, they’ll return to the land down under. We’ll see them next summer, I’m sure. Caroline’s cousin owns an apartment very near “ours,” over on the avenue Emile Zola. She and John visit it every summer. Technology came in handy earlier in the day when I needed to respond to an email from a new neighbor back home. She had questions of a nature that I do not like to respond to in writing; I wanted to call her instead. So we exchanged messages about phone numbers. She and her husband only recently decided to get a land line. I called her using Skype, on my computer. I could have called using Skype on my smartphone, but I thought I was keeping that line open for Caroline (little did I know the Galaxy was off). I tried calling the neighbor Skype-to-Skype, which would have cost nothing. But she didn’t seem to hear her Skype ring, so I called her new land line via Skype-to-phone. We talked for more than a half hour, and it cost only 80 cents or so. What a bargain! Another gadget I now rely upon is my Kindle. There have been English language bookstores in Paris, but they are disappearing, one by one. And even when they all existed, oh my heavens, were they ever expensive! All prices were always way above the publisher’s suggested retail, at least for the books we wanted and needed to buy. We’d buy them anyway, spending a small fortune each summer. We certainly did more than our share to keep these English-language bookstores alive in Paris. But our effort was not enough. In addition to being expensive, these bookstores could not order in English-language books very quickly. Now, unable to meet customer needs, they are closing up. The latest closing, over in the 5th arrondissement, happened last month. Currently, buying these books in bookstores here is not much of an option. So the Kindle is good, especially while we’re in Paris. Tom even uses the Kindle for PC on his computer. To do the research and find readings for the textbooks, being able to buy popular English-language books of a wide variety and of certain kinds is essential. Another gadget that helps me is my MP3 player. For a swamp person like me to fall asleep in the big city, I often need to listen to soothing music to drown out the urban noises. I have a great collection on my Sansa Fuse, carefully picked from our CDs back home, but I also use the Fuse to listen to FM radio, specifically TSF Jazz’s nighttime program, which has no commercials, or so few commercials that I never hear them before I fall soundly asleep. Of course, I will wake up at 3AM or so, and the music is still playing. I turn it off; the city is quiet by then. I fall right back to sleep. My camera, my almost constant companion as I walk through Paris, is a marvelous gadget. In earlier years, I used very inexpensive digital cameras, because I didn’t want to worry about them being stolen in Paris. But for two summers now, I’ve been using a better Nikon. I used to insist on an optical viewfinder in addition to the LCD screen. But at some point, I realized that in Paris (but not in Florida), this wasn’t necessary because, quite frankly, it is not as sunny and bright here in Paris as it is in southwest Florida. In Paris, the LCD screen is easy to see. Not so much so in Florida. The Nikon will take much higher resolution photos than you see in this journal. The problem with using those hi-res images is, as you know, they take way too long to download. So part of what I do every morning is edit the photos from the day before, and a small part of that task is downsizing images so that you don’t have to wait all morning for that day’s entry of the Paris Journal to load. I’m loathe to use a flash, so that also diminishes the clarity of my photos somewhat. But I just cannot stand to disrupt the serenity of diners and worshipers in restaurants and churches. Often, though, the use of natural light alone makes the photo much more appealing. The photo editing (done with software called ACD See) can take quite a while in the morning, depending on how many shots I took the day before, and that depends on what we did the day before. Then there’s the writing, done on the grand gadgets, the computers. Oh the writing, done on Microsoft Word, looks so easy, but you know it is not. Both Tom and I try to make it look easy, but it is not. What it is, is what we do. |
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Ducks
on Seine.
Cute
little car used by a guy named Nat who will come to your home and solve your
internet connectivity problems and will tutor you in technology.
The
kindle, smartphone, dumb phone, and bag that the Nikon digital camera lives
in. Another gadget, the remote control
for the TV, is used mostly just in July, when we watch the Tour de France on
French national television.
Old
clock, above, and wall sconce, below, hanging in the Auberge Bressane.
The
City of Paris uses billboards to educate about safe sex in several languages. |
