hannah dee

A few weeks back I went to the Grenoble Swing Dance Festival (GSDF). This involved all sorts of fun, like 6 hours of classes and 45 minutes volunteering to work on the bar. Strangely, the bar only sold soft drinks. Yes, only soft drinks. And pancakes. Believe me, you didn’t want to get the first crepe I made, it was more like a baguette. Fortunately, I sold it to an American guy, who probably didn’t know any better.

The Flocon classes (this was translated as “snowflake”, but I think also means “flake”, ha ha) were the absolute beginner level and were taught by a couple called Fabrice & Geraldine. They were really excellent – fantastic dancers, and very good at coming down to the level of the total beginner for us. I also did a couple of taster classes with American teachers Peter & Naomi, who were also really good, but those were open to all levels and I got a bit lost at times. The video below is the showcase piece Fabrice & Geraldine did at the cabaret. Impressive eh?

I’ve been using Citeulike to manage my references for a few months now and there are some things about it that are great. I love the browser button (available from here) and the way that it means I don’t have to type in article details any more. However, there are a few glitches.

Sometimes, upon import, a conference paper is incorrectly entered as being a journal paper or a full conference proceedings. I’ve not worked out which sites this happens with yet, but I’ve definitely seen it with Springer LNCS imports and maybe some others. To correct this, you need to edit the article details. However, the “journal name” field can’t be blanked out just by deleting it. To remove a journal name you have to actively tell citeulike that you want that field to be empty, which is done by putting two slashes in the text entry box – that is, //. Otherwise you’ll end up with both journal name and conference name (identical) appearing in your output.

This information (and much more) can be found in the citeulike FAQ wiki.

I’ve just bought another French mobile phone. This isn’t because I’m some kind of gadget freak, it’s because I lost the one that Graham kindly gave me to replace the one I lost about four months ago. Yes, that’s right, I’m on my 3rd French mobile. When I’m leaving a place, I have a voice in my head that says “Wallet, Keys, Tobacco, Lighter, Phone… Ready!” and I’ve had real difficulty adding “Other phone” to the mental list.

This necessitated a visit to the Orange store. I first tried to fix this problem – AKA buy a phone – on Saturday, when I turned up at the store in town with one and a half hours to spare, only to find out that they couldn’t possibly sell me a mobile phone unless I had my passport on me. No, a gas bill wasn’t enough, nor the receipt for the original phone, nor the same credit card – it had to be a passport or driving license. I had to show my passport to get the first phone, but not to get the replacement SIM, so I thought I’d be OK but this time it was not going to be possible.

So I cycled across the Isére today to Meylan

And then I spent 45 minutes of my lunchtime in the Orange/France Telecom store, first queuing, and then watching a saleswoman navigate a web-based menu system in order to give me the same phone number, and finally watching her on hold to some helpdesk when she realised she didn’t know how to transfer the number over. I actually checked my watch part way through the helpdesk phonecall – she was on hold for at least 8 minutes. The queue was building up behind me, and one guy completely gave up waiting and tried to buy a TV package off her just as the helpdesk on the other end of the phone picked up. He got short shrift.

I realised two things when I got back to the lab – firstly, she hadn’t sold me any credit (so I can’t make any calls until I get to somewhere that does mobicart topups); and secondly, that she hadn’t asked to see my passport at all. Oh well. At least the view from the shopping centre carpark was good.

Number 6 in a series of N…

I particularly like the photo on the sign.

I’m halfway through my French Adventure now – my work contract tells me that I run out of job on the last day of May, and my flat contract ends on June 6. Paradoxically, time is both speeding and crawling by. In one sense I feel like I’ve been here forever and in another sense like I have only just arrived.

My French skills are very much improved; I’m not sure that the people I share an office with would agree wholeheartedly, but I can perceive the difference myself. Every now and then, in conversation, I do something surprising (like use the futur antérieur) and I want to stop the conversation and go “See what I did there?”. Although just as often I’ll be talking with one of the people in the lab and someone will start giggling at my construction (I tell myself it’s a good sign that I’m trying to make these more complicated sentences). Yesterday there was a long conversation about how and whether you could cite a paper that had been submitted to conference A in another paper to be submitted to conference B, but when the submission date for B was before the conference for A (although the conference itself was after). Of course, it all comes down to the dates the respective conferences announce their decisions. And of course, trying to express this in French took a bloody long time, but we got there in the end (with the aid of a timeline drawn on the whiteboard). I’m utterly useless at understanding French when there’s any background noise though.

The second half of my time in France is likely to be very different to the first. For a start, the flat is sorted so I’m not going to have to go to Ikea again unless I really want a cheap hotdog or breakfast for 1€. I know my way around (so I’m not going to waste an entire Saturday trying to find fresh coriander or brown basmati rice). And I think the worst of the admin is done, so I don’t expect to be baffled by many more forms before the time comes to leave.

And the weather is beginning to close in – I can often see snow on the foothills as I cycle in in the morning, and soon there’ll be snow in the city itself. I’m not sure how it works with the cycle network, maybe they grit them and I’ll be able to continue doing things by bike, maybe I’ll have to look into tram passes. It’s definitely getting cold though, and soon I’m going to have to find someone to teach me how to snowboard.