I guess I have already travelled about 10 times to Paris, apart from my 1-year in Paris. Finally I found a hotel which I can recommend. Last week, when I was again in Paris, I realized one more time how often tourists are confused about the city. Let me explain few things:
Journey to Paris
After the airport custom control in Charles de Gaulle, please follow the bus or “Roissybus” signs and look for the green big bus with the sign “Opera”. The ticket costs 9.20 Euro per person. There’s a ticket machine which works with coins and credit card. You can also pay the bus driver. This bus drives from Terminal 3 to 2 to 1 and then final station Opera. Normally there’s every 15 minutes a bus.
When you arrive at the “Charles de Gaulle” or also called “Roissy” Airport, there are some Taxi driver who will take you for 50-80 Euro to any place in Paris. I prefer to pay 5 to 8 times less and take the “Roissy-bus”. You can also take the train called “RER A” to “RER E”, but I can’t recommend because more people, difficult to change line and more complicated to find. There’s just one Roissy-bus, which drives always from each terminal to the place called “Opera”.
From there you can travel by metro lines very easy to your final destination or stay in the below hotel and enjoy your holidays close to all important sightseeing places in Paris. Traveling inside Paris is very common and easy by metro.
Hotel
The hotel I can recommend is the ” Orion Paris Haussmann“. About 1 minute on foot from the Roissybus-Stop. Very modern, each room with a little kitchen and a midsized fridge. The stuffs are so friendly and heartily. It’s a 3 star hotel with reception on the 4th floor and free internet. The rooms are cleaned every 3rd day and every day they bring you toilet paper and towels. For the hair dryer you have to pay deposit of 20 Euro.
This is definitely the wrong hotel if you are looking for a hotel with good service, but very nice if you also want to buy something in the supermarket (cookies, fruits and drinks) and if you are happy with the very close to bus connection which brings you easy and cheap to the airport.
If you want to change the partitions on your computer, you may think that you have to delete them before changing their sizes. Or you want to create an image from your hard disks as backup? Or you reset the Windows password from some users because you forgot them? Or you want to defragment your harddisk but it’s not working properly because some blocks are in use?
Here’s the answer: Hirens Boot CD. Download the ISO file and burn you own boot CD.
Many partition tools, backup tools, recovery tools, testing tools, hard disk tools, password tools, cleaners, optimizers, network tools, process tools, startup tools and antivirus tools. The right tool for every PC user. Also possible on a USB stick.
I am always surprised that many people don’t know how to handle computer images. There are simple rules you have to memorize. A picture consist mainly of the size and the resolution.
In computer language when we define the size we do it in pixels. My PC screen is quite big, 26″ which is about 66 cm. My screen size is 1920 pixels width and 1200 pixels height. Normally we say my screen has the resolution of 1920 x 1200. Strange isn’t it? We use the word “resolution” for the size. Don’t ask me why. If you think about printing out an image, please use centimeters instead of pixels. Here I just explain you about pixels, digital images for computer use only.
These sizes are all normal format 4:3, widescreen or 16:9 are also getting common. These sizes are like 1280 x 960 for example.
Here we speak of dpi (dots per inch) which is, like the name’s already telling you, the amount of dots or pixels per square inch. Here you have simple three values you have to memorize.
You can save your file in many formats. Use “gif” for clip arts with less colors, “jpg” for everything else. The ending “png” is more developed as “jpg” but less common. With “jpg” you can choose quality of the picture, from 0 to 100%. 60% is normally enough for computer screens, 80% is good.
My wife took a picture with her camera. If you open it with an image editor it’s telling you the size is 2736 x 3648 pixels with resolution of 72 dpi. The file size is 2.4 MB. If you wanna print it out, change to 26 x 20 cm and 300 dpi. Now the file is 4 MB, much bigger than before. If you wanna put it on your homepage you take for example 768 x 1024 pixels and 72 dpi. Here 60% quality is enough and then the file size is just 238 KB. More than 10 times smaller than before. 10 times faster for your visitor to see the pictures. This is very important.
It’s important to put your image in the right format. Don’t forget that you can not make your image bigger and bigger. If you take a picture from the internet which has size 100 x 100 pixels, you can not print it out on a A4 paper. You also cannot enlarge an ant to the size of an elephant, don’t you!?
First I have to say that my homepage is also not the best, but when I checked some homepages out there, I always find tiny things you should avoid doing it. Something I once learned is that a homepage is just the first page of your website and you shouldn’t use “homepage” if you talk about “website”, but for me it’s already so common that I don’t hesitate to use it wrong way.
These rules are my opinion. Thank you.
This year’s Christmas evening was amazing. First we baked cupcakes, it was 3 am. To do everything by ourself was also a premiere for me. It was quite easy and the result looks amazing. If every xmas eve will be like this with my super wife, I’ll die as a very happy man. Thank you darling.
When I think back this year, I’m very happy that I’ve done everything right. It was a good idea that I went to Paris, but an even better decision to marry Yuko. Next year will be also a time with lot of changes. Private changes, looking for a bigger apartment for example. The rest I will keep you informed.
After a very nice sleep with my wife, we went first to my parents house to decorate the christmas tree and later we went back for the perfect christmas dinner. My wife did it and I just helped. She said “Thank you that you work hard the whole year!” Which Swiss girl would ever say this to their husband? She’s sooo cute! The chicken was sooo soft, it melted like butter on my tongue. The world best chicken I ever had. As side dish she made Italian ham with onions and Camembert cheese. Thank you darling, you are the best happened to me!
28-years-old still sounds young, but I feel like I am not. I’m very happy that I finally found the woman of my life. She gives me every day happiness. “Thank you darling to be with me.”
Last Saturday evening we went in a Japanese restaurant, because I really like Japanese food. It was very interesting and “sugoi yammy” food. “Fuji of Japan” is near the train station “Enge”. For European people I can recommend it. Not for Japanese, because they changed the menu for non-Japanese. Where else you get extra much soja sauce and a Steak in a normal menu. I ate sushi and sashimi, while Yuko took the steak. Yesterday evening we went together with my parents in the same restaurant, where we celebrated our swiss wedding and it was like always a pleasure. Restaurant Waldmannsburg in Dübendorf with its beautiful view of the city.
Last Friday evening, my wife surprised me with a special present and a self-made cake. She worked for 2 weeks, many hours on an album which describes our life with self-painted pictures. It’s an incredible beautiful album within you find lovely hand-made drawings. Thank you ne! And the cake, a chocolate cake of course, was the best I’ve ever had. Big kiss to my super-wife!
In a few days I will have my birthday and because I was a very good boy I already bought it myself. Most people (my parents, sister and wife) can’t understand why I’m so excited, but for me it’s a very cool present. Synology are making harddisk cases with including RAID technologies. Imagine a big box (actually not so big, but bigger than usual) wherein you find 4 harddisks. These drives are interconnected and if you save a file on it, this file will be divided and saved on all of them, but in a way that if one harddisk fails, the file can still be read. This is called a RAID5. If you save a file on two hardisk like mirroring this is called RAID1.
In a summary, I bought disk space with 4’000 Gigabyte with RAID5, which can be integrated in a network. I also bought a I-can-play-everything-movie-box. Connected to the box above and to my plasma, I never have to worry again to play my Anime on the small PC screen. After downloading Animes with bittorrent, they will automatically be saved on the big box (called BigMamma) and after turning on the Plasma-TV, I just need to press the play button to enjoy them..
On the right picture I’m holding a 1.5 TB harddisk from Samsung.
I found two solutions, for mac and windows, if you want to limit the bandwidth of your browser. The best solution for firefox on windows is the add-on “Firefox Throttle“. The developer says it’s useless but I think it is very easy to use. Of course it is much easier of the mac. Just use the local built-in firewall with the commands in the terminal. This limits your port 80 with 8Kbyte/s (just change the values if needed).
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 8KByte/s sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
I already had two reasons for doing this. I didn’t want to steal bandwidth from my office when I downloaded big files and also bandwidth of my wife’s laptop at home to avoid argument With the following command you can delete this “rule”.
sudo ipfw delete 1
I installed a web server (apache2) in our office which is accessable over the internet from outside. With “.htaccess” and “.htpassword” it’s secured with login and password. But the transmission of these parameters is of course in clear text, so everyone could read if the person has the knowledge. With the “digest authentication” method, it will be encrypted with/to MD5, your password will not be transmitted in clear form through the internet. The best howto I found is here: http://finelycultured.com/2009/09/using-apache2s-digest-authentication/
Suddenly on my Windows XP SP3 PC it wasn’t possible to write/format my USB Stick anymore this week. “Write protection” on the USB, for what? Even with the second USB Stick I had the same problem, so I thought what’s wrong? After surfing an hour in the WWW I found the easiest and the best solution for me here: http://situsnya.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/write-protect-usb-devices-in-windows-xp/ Of course you could use the same method to secure all your USB devices.. ;D
Our second part of the honeymoon was Greece, Athens and Santorini to be exact. Athens is a beautiful city, very clean and the people are very friendly. Also the food was good, better than the greek restaurant where I’m going to every week. Just one thing I don’t like in Greece, the language. It sounds like you have an insect in your throat. Acropolis is very beautiful and you have an amazing view in the night. After 2 days we flew to the island.
Santorini is famous for breath-taking sunsets and incredible view by the ocean. It’s true! Don’t go there with children as they would just be bored, but to spend a romantic time with your partner, it’s perfect. We stayed in a quite expensive hotel with a balcony which was bigger than the room itself. When we were sitting in the Jacuzzi, we looked at the amazing view and felt like being the last humans in the world. Totally 5 days we spent there.
Nearly every day we saw a cat, so that’s why many photos with cats are on my homepage and also SHE loves cats. We were a little bit unlucky with the weather as it rained 2 days. But that’s just an another reason for staying in the bed…
If you are more interested in my honeymoon, don’t hesitate to check my wife’s homepage as she described neatly every day we spent in Greece. Thanks to my super wife who gives me every day happiness.
