Well, I’m back in France again on assignment for TI. It was a long flight but I sat next to an interesting guy from Texas who was on his way to Sadir City in Iraq as a contractor. He said that it was a tough job, but they fed you well and the pay was really good. I don’t think they could pay me enough to work out in 140 degree weather though.
  I found that I remembered my way around fairly well. I was able to get to the hotel, and the office with no problems. I did a little exploring too but I didn’t find anything of interest.
   There have been a string of problems on my trip already though. I found that my T-Mobile Sidekick II (Hiptop) doesn’t play nice with the local carriers here in France (Oragne J, FPR, and some other one). I can only assume that means that there aren’t any agreements between those carriers. I also found that my camera (a Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Elph) which has been flacking out recently is only getting worse. It can’t seem to use my 256MB compact flash card anymore. It claims that the card has an error on it, but when I use the laptop to scan the card, it has no errors. When I format it in the laptop the camera still can’t see it. When I format it in the camera, the camera turns itself off gives the error “E50″, which I interpret as an expletive directed at the user (it actually means “compact flash error”). And to top it all off, my DVD drive on the work laptop isn’t working either. Now I can’t watch all the movies I brought with me. It’s a good thing i always overpack my entertainment items. I brought several books, my PSP, my iPod, and even an old text book on Linear Algebra, which I am re-reading for the fun [sic] of it.
   I also managed to pop the circuit breaker on the room last night when I plugged in a power strip I brought, not thinking that it, itself, would have a power requirement (it had a ground detection circuit). My thinking was that it would pass whatever power was already in the walls, this way I only had to have the one power pin adapter for a whole set of US plug devices (which all do their own drop down to whatever output voltage they produce from 220V 50Hz). It took about 40 minutes for the hotel to get someone to come throw the circuit breaker back on. Looks like I’ll have to buy a power strip locally and use all of my converters ( i brought 3).