Am I mad or just not sane!!!!!

Recently I got a new stills camera (early birthday and christmas present). This camera also has a pretty good quality video camera and like, I' sure, most camera techie people know, there is really only one way to test this sort of thing...enjoy...

Retour des Alpages

Yesterday was the Retour des Alpages, which according the Babelfish translates to "Return of the Mountain pastures". Basically, every year on the second Saturday of October, all the animals are brought down from the mountains and are paraded through Annecy old town.

The whole day is dedicated to this event with the entire old town being converted into a huge fair whereby people are demonstrating and selling a variety of things.

We had a really nice day out and I'd definitely recommend it if you are in the area at this time of year.

Tech Stuff: svchost.exe and Windows Update

Yesterday, my machine received the usual monthly batch of windows updates. They appeared to install and everything seemed OK.

This morning, however, was a different story. When windows had booted and had finished loading all the services a message appeared saying svchost has tried to access some dodgy memory. Clicking OK to this message prevented any further programs from running and so the only way to get out was to do a hard reset (switch the machine off).

Booting into safe mode I was able to access the internet and do some searching. I restricted the search to the last week which yielded dozens of other people who were getting the same problem...and the common scenario was that it happened after windows update.

For future reference, if you ever get a similar problem then this link details the steps that I followed to fix the corrupted automatic windows update options. After doing this, everything was back to normal.

Competition Time : Spot the Difference

After many months of dealing with the bureaucrats in France, we have now reached a major milestone in our integration into the French system. Our car is now officially French registered and we can now finally get some insurance!!!

Sarah did a magnificent job sorting all the paper work out and taking the car to the various garages, etc (I would have helped if I understood the lingo....honest). But the process wasn't without its set-backs...

The first thing to do was fill out all the paperwork, which actually wasn't too bad.

Next before the process could start, we had to get a letter of conformity from Honda UK. It took about eight calls before they finally admitted they were rubbish and in the end they couriered a copy over. It took about two and a half months to get the letter (from the first phone call to actually receiving it)!

As the letter took so long to come we thought we'd just stick with UK insurance and not bother changing the car plates, but I'd already told UK that the car was now exported and so any English insurance would not be valid. We therefore had to persevere with the French route.

The next stage was to get a control technique (MOT). A major problem here was that we had UK lights which were currently blinding the oncoming traffic (still not sure I understand what the problem is with this!), so we would have to change the lights. A quote from the local Honda garage came in at 900 Euros (including 50 Euros labour). What a ripoff, it would be easier to just sell the car in England. But, then a friend suggested we tried using some headlight adjusters that tourists use when driving abroad. These consisted of stickers that you stick on your headlights to adjust the beam. We didn't know if we would get through the control technique with these, but it was worth a go. We got some sent over from England, I stuck them on, Sarah took it for the test and Hoorah (ginger beers all round) it passed, although he did say we would have to change the lights by the next test in two years time.

The final stage in the process was to take all the various pieces of paper to the local government offices, pay the 350 Euro fee and they then issue you a new registration document (a bit like the log book). Sarah then took the car to the local KwikFit type garage where they made up the new plate.

With a French registered car, Sarah was then able to sort out some insurance which cost about the same as in England.