Retiring in Europe

We were talking about retirement today at lunch.

Retirement benefits in France are calculated on a point system.

For each year that you work you earn a 'point', with your total number of points maxing out at 40. For each point you have, you get better benefits upon retirement. If you max out, you will earn in retirement some percentage of your best annual Salary (people debated as to whether the number was 40%, 50% or 80%).

Points are earnable any where in the EU, and a certain number of points are transferable from other Countries including America (I'm not sure about Canada). Additionally, you can spend your points in any other country in the EU. This means that it's possible that you could work in Germany your whole life, where wages are quite high, and then retire in France, where wages are low but retirement and medical benefits are high.

An interesting fact that I learned today: You get 3 points for each child that you bear. So, normally a woman can retire with full benefits after 40 years of work. However, if she has three kids, she can retire 9 years early!

The Boat that Rocked, and the movie that may not have.

I just got back from seeing The Boat that Rocked (or, Good Morning England, as it's known here in France). Despite the generally mediocre reviews that it got, I thought it was outright hilarious, and is the an excellent laugh-out-loud movie; unfortunately, I was the only one doing so. In what was one of the stranger movie going experiences I've had, I was the only person in the entire theatre that laughed at all. There was the odd chuckle here and there when the movie poked fun at the British - but for the most part I was alone in a crowd of a hundred or so people who just sat still and quietly munched on popcorn.

My hypothesis here are three:

• They mixed up the subtitle reel before showing the film.
• The French have a strange sense of humour.
• I have a strange sense of humour.

While I'm willing to conced to Option 3, I'm going to believe Option 1 until proven otherwise. If anyone else does watch it, let me know what you thought, I'm a little concerned at the difference between the crowds perception of the film and my own.

Geoblocking

There's an excellent post over on the CBC that talks about the practice of Geoblocking, what it is, and why broadcasters insist on doing it. For those that don't know, Geoblocking is a way for a company to limit access to particular parts of their website based upon the physical location of the person coming to the site. For example, I can't watch re-runs of Star Trek on the CBS site because I'm not in the USA (which is annoying; but understandable), and Sarah can't look at Jeans on the Canadian guess website (which is just dumb), presumably because they charge more if you live in Europe.

Without a doubt, my favourite part of the article was this gem from the comments section.

There's a simple way to get around any geoblocking fence. It's called reverse urling. if you are being denied access to a site, just type the url backwards, character for character, eventually ending with :ptth.

What this does is tell the server to come to you rather than you go to it. The only danger is if the website is huge, by inviting it into your computer you stand a chance of overloading your machine, and, under rare circumstances, this can cause the cpu the short out and catch fire.

The best thing to do, should that happen, is to quickly type the url again but forwards. The sudden reversal in direction in the flow of electrons from your computer to the server should bring things back into equilibrium.

Should you find it impossible to type due to electric shocks from the keyboard, very common in pre 2004 keyboards which are not properly grounded against reverse urling, you should try to cut power to the computer. Electrical problems from the short have been known to spread within a house, or sometimes even to a whole neighbourhood., depending on whether the houses are connected serially or not in the powergrid (I never remember which one is bad).

Note to readers, I'm pretty sure this won't work, although I'm not will to test on my laptop for fear of damage to my pants (and the contents thereof).

Horrible product naming.

Recently, I've started reading some of the spam that comes through my inbox (reading my actual email is much less interesting). It's come to my attention that Spammers have an even worse mastery of product marketing than they do of the English language. This is, by far, the worst ad I've seen yet.

Marketing is (not) exciting!!

This morning, my inbox was warmed by an email from our marketing team, letting me know that, tomorrow, the company will be launching a 'New and Exciting Marketing campaign,' and asking us to 'keep [our] eyes focused on the marketing website for exciting details.'

I don't know why they send these emails to the development staff. I've never actually seen a marketing campaign that I would consider to be 'exciting'. My excitement levels are elevated by lower compile times and hot fixes; not flash animations and buzzwords.

The best idea I could come up with for something that would get me excited would be the 'Help us help ourselves (to dinner)' campaign. During this campaign, anytime a customer buys a product, a developer gets a steak. Maintenance renewals are paid out in beer; a sixer for each year of the agreement.

I don't know if this kind of campaign would improve the company’s bottom line in anyway - but it's certainly a marketing idea I could get behind.

Canned Chicken

Should this not be available in your grocery outlet, Amazon.com will deliver. To me, this seems like a bad dare (bet you can't fit a whole chicken in that can!) gone to market.

A WHOLE chicken in a CAN | I Hate My Message Board

Swine Flu returns from Vacation

So it seems that concerns about Swine Flu has breached the Atlantic.
When I looked on Sunday, there was a reported case in the South-West region, near Bordeaux, but nothing confirmed nearby. But it seems like that could be changing.

Yesterday, a lady in my office came back from a canceled appointment with her Dr. As it turns out, her Dr was under quarantine for possible infection. Earlier that week, a patient had come into the office that had previously been traveling in Mexico on Vacation. He was feeling under the weather, so he did his due diligence by getting checked out. His Dr did her work, and called it into the larger medical body in France (whatever the French CDC would be) resulting in both Dr and Patient being put in quarantine for 15 days!

There's still no word on whether either of these people (or that person in Bordeaux) actually have anything wrong with them, but it's interesting to note how seriously it's being taken here.

Bier, Bitte.

The trip to Germany was short, but rad.
One of the most pleasant parts about the Country is that they have price controls on Beer, in much the same way France controls the price of bread. Which is good, because, as it turns out, the only words I know how to say in German are 'Bier, bitte' and 'Danke!' Both are of limited use around the office, but invaluable in the restaurants of the tiny town I stayed in.

In general, the trip was a whirlwind introduction to a lot of people and places, and marks the real beginning of integration talks between our two companies. Wish me luck, it's going to be an interesting summer.

For those that are interested, there are some pics up on our photo site.

5 Years of Awesomeness

Last Friday Sarah and I celebrated 5 years of Awesomeness together. (Prior to getting married, we were both independently awesome.)



To celebrate -- Eurodisney!

From Disneyland!

There should be more to this, but I'm sleepy and should probably go to bed. I think Sarah's still riding the sugar high, so she'll probably be good for stories for the next few days.

[Edit: Fixed a typo.]

Taking the Train to Deutschland

This morning I'm taking the train East, to Germany. Including an 8 hour haul from Edmonton to Vancouver through the Rockies, this is the second time in my life I've travelled by train. This trip takes about 1/3 the time though, thanks to the high speed TGV line that runs through Western Europe.

In the few minutes that I've been on the train, I've been convinced that this is vastly superior to air travel. There is no line to pass security, no border authentication, and no wait to get on board. I showed up 25 minutes before departure and the guy at the gate told me I was here too early and that I should take a coffee and come back in 10. Awesome. That said, the train left very promptly at 6:58 as the ticket noted, so I don't think I'd push my luck.

The seats are huge and get comfier by ticket price. The lowest class seats are slightly more spaced out than a Greyhound. As you move up in category you get desks, tables or even a private room (which seems to be reserved for Children to yell in and has been, blissfully, sound proofed).

The scenery on this trip is a refreshing change from the grey, grey and grey that I'm used to looking at in paris. Mostly it's grassy hills but there's also a lot of trees and huge fields of yellow, flowering plants (does anyone know what this might be?). It reminds me an awful lot of Rural Ontario.

Wherever I just passed is a tiny town of maybe 100 single story houses with brick or thatched roofs. A river, (which is really just a creek with high aspirations) runs through the centre of town, dividing rolling fields of golden flowers on the West bank from grassy pastures dotted with hungry cows and sheep on the Eastern side. Above the rows of houses stands a single church with a three story steeple, and grassy green hills as far as I can see, to the North.

[Update] I think that we just stopped in the city of Lorraine, which would make sense because I am pretty sure that it's a primary-agriculture region of eastern France.

I would love to share picture of all of this, but unfortunately the pocket camera I brought with me does not have a 300 km/h mode. Most of the pictures come out as a blurry mess. Sarah and I have talked about taking a trip out this way to Alsace, maybe we will bring the beefier camera then so that we can snap some pics of the scenery.