Life in Paris, my universe and potentially everything

“C’est la rentrée” or: Welcome Back Everybody

As I think I already mentioned at least once there are a few things that work differently in France and thus take a little getting used to. One of them is “centralisation”: this does of course apply to how the country is laid out, i.e. most things happen in and around Paris, and about everything is directed towards this city (people from other cities like Lyon or Marseille might tell you that this isn’t true, but they’re wrong).

And there’s more to this, one other thing that is centralized (or rather synchronized) are the summer holidays, they begin and end at the same time for each and every school in the country, which means you really don’t want to have to drive anywhere on the first or last few days and that virtually everyone is on holidays in August. That in turn also implies a thing or two:

  • In case you need anything work related done in August: good luck to you, you’ll need it
  • If you’re a Paris resident and go to southern France for your holidays, there’s a good chance you’ll meet all of your neighbors down there.
  • Going to work by motorbike is soooo much more fun, since there is so much less traffic on the streets, for me the time I needed door to door was cut in half (to just over ten minutes), even though most road improvement and repair is usually scheduled for August.

But coming back to this posts title: now that mid-September is approaching, it’s back to school for the kids (la rentrée) and everybody’s back and Paris is back to its usual nice overcrowded self and since road works work the same way in France as everywhere else, i.e. they’re never done in time, going to work by motorbike or car has lost most – or pretty much all – of its appeal.

So here’s to everybody: welcome back…

Another WordPress Update

Disclaimer: if you don’t use WordPress yourself (or don’t even know what it is), don’t bother reading this post, it’ll be a waste of your time. You have been warned… ;)

Still here? Good. So here goes:

Whew – it’s been a while, but contrary to all rumors I haven’t abandoned my blog, and just finished updating to the latest version of WordPress, as I was told there were serious security issues with the older versions. So, for everybody who’s still using a version < 2.6.2: the good news is that upgrading wordpress has become a bit simpler than before, and the bad news is that it still isn’t fun.

But still one hint for people like me who don’t always RTFM: one of the things that might be trouble is that you need to either recreate your wp-config.php or add a few lines (see wp-config-sample.php for details…).