The Glass Menagerie Gets 21 Views

Posted on 4/22/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Tonight I went to the Community Theater League show “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams. “The Glass Menagerie” is my third favorite play, right behind “Hamlet” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”. I first saw this play in high school where we saw the film version starring Katharine Hepburn and Sam Waterston. I’ve always found this play very moving because I can identify with the character Laura who is painfully shy and lost in her own dream world.

Unfortunately there were only 21 people in the audience for the opening night’s performance. Just think of all the hours they spent in rehearsal and all the effort that went into stage design, lighting, and costuming, just to get 21 views (as we would say on Vloggerheads or YouTube). I bet most vloggers would not stage some drama for just 21 views. Some day I’m going to go to a play and find myself the only person in the audience. Won’t that be awkward!

The Community Theater League uses the McDade Trade and Transit Centre theater which manages to seem professional yet intimate. I have not been to a play in a long time so it was great to see real people perform in front of me instead of watching people perform online. I was itching to comment on all the drama though; Hey Laura, get a life.

I love “The Glass Menagerie” because it elevates the mundane disappointments of life into major tragedy. It is a play about ordinary people who can’t live their dreams. It got me to thinking about fulfilling dreams. Recently I made my dream of traveling to Paris, France come true. In the play, the main character yearns to travel and have adventures. I don’t know if my trip was that much of an adventure. I just went to Paris as a tourist, shot photos, and put myself through the tourist mill. There was nothing really extraordinary about that. My point is, when do you decide that you are having a genuine adventure and not a mundane experience? I would argue that elevating the mundane into the profound is merely a matter of establishing the significance of the event as Tennessee Williams does using symbols like the glass unicorn. By the way, in this performance the actors unintentionally knocked the phone off the table and broke that instead of the glass unicorn. I established the personal significance of my Paris vacation by buying symbolic books at famous bookstores.

A community theater performance that is only attended by 21 people may seem disappointing. But it was also kind of special because it involved people in my community going to extraordinary lengths to entertain and enlighten a very select audience of fellow theater enthusiasts. It wasn’t a famous entertainment company providing an impersonal and strictly professional performance for millions of people of which I am just an anonymous nonentity.

I don’t know when I’ll go to the theater again because their 2009-2010 season does not feature any shows I care for. Also, it cost me $17.00 for my ticket which is pretty steep. It used to cost $12.00. Maybe that is why they only had 21 people for the opening night.

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Parisian Flâneur

Posted on 4/18/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

It rained all day long Saturday and my feet were sore so I just made short trips from my hotel to shot video and photos. First I walked to the Champ De Mars and shot some video of the Eiffel Tower. Then I walked towards the Ecole Militaire and got some video of the statues there. From there I walked along the Avenue de Tourville to the Eglise Du Dome and the Place Vauban. Along the way I also took some video of the movie posters in a Spectacle advertising column (known as a Morris column) which was advertising the Coco Chanel film starring Audrey Tautou.

I had made that first walk without my umbrella so when I returned to my hotel I made sure to take that with me on my next walk. I headed towards the Seine from my hotel and walked along the Branly Quai and the Citroën Quai until I reached some rail lines which showed signs of urban blight. I shot a closeup of a sign warning about a risk of death due to something being electrified. I’ll have to translate it later but I recognized the word “Mort” and its meaning was clear. I also got some video of Palais Chaillot which is where our tour bus dropped us off to take photos of the Eiffel Tower. This is were the street demonstration was held. I think they have demonstrations there every day.

Pont Alexander III

For my third and final stroll I walked to the Place Des Invalides and headed down Avenue Du Mal Gallieni to cross the Pont Alexander III (the bridge used in the movie Angel-A). I only walked as far as the Grand Palais and then I went back to my hotel.

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Pompidou Center And Montparnasse Cemetery

Posted on 4/18/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I went to the Pompidou Center, the ugly modern art museum in Paris. Along the way there, I snapped photos of the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Seine, and the Hôtel de Ville and its carousel. There was a long line to get into the museum even though I arrived shortly before it opened at 11:00 AM. After I bought my ticket I headed for the bookstore. I bought a paperback art book entitled “Qu’Est Ce Que La Bande Dessinée Aujourd’Hui?“. It is a history of the French comic book art form. I browsed through some DVDs but could not find anything I was familiar with so I just picked something out at random, “Les conditions du visible” (Conditions of the visible) which is a documentary about the work of Marc’O. It seems like the French enjoy a lot of cultural documentaries which originally air on their TV channel for the arts.

I saw two exhibits at the Pompidou Center; Alexander Calder “Les Années Parisiennes” which was about his years in Paris, and hundreds of paintings by Kandinsky. The Alexander Calder exhibit featured some of his wire sculptures. They were quite ingenious because with the correct light on the wire sculpture you would get a shadow that looks just like a sketch made up of lines. And what was really cool about that is the shadow sketch would change as the wire sculpture rotated. In other words, the rotation of the wire sculpture would give you different renderings of the line art. I thought that was pure genius. While I was observing this effect it occurred to me that you could do the same thing in After Effects. You could create a wireframe solid and position a light so it casts a shadow. Then you could animate the solid to cause the shadow to change.

While exploring the Wassily Kandinsky exhibit I noticed a mistake in the English translation for one title, “Romantical Landscape”. There is no word “romantical”. They should have used the word “romantic”. Several of the paintings were on loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York City and it occurred to me that I’ve never been there. Unfortunately, much of the Pompidou Center was closed so all I saw were those two exhibits. As far as I could tell, that was all there was to see. I went to the information desk to ask about what else was open but they did not understand much English. So I left there early at 2:00 PM and had to find something else to do for the rest of the day. I decided to visit the Montparnasse Cemetery. First I had to buy a map at a newsstand because my Frommer’s pocket map of Paris did not show Montparnasse.

At Montparnasse Cemetery I found the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir together. That was the first famous grave I saw there. Then I found Charles Baudelaire’s grave which was a profound moment because Baudelaire is one of my favorite poets. I even named my black cat after him. Baudelaire’s grave had many flowers (flowers of evil?) on it and someone left a laminated poem held down by pebbles. I also found the grave of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Susan Sontag. I was surprised to learn that people are still being buried in this cemetery. Many of the monuments were modern. In fact, I think somebody was being buried while I was there. I have to admit it got to be a little depressing to hang around all those cemetery monuments for hours on end. I took a shorter route to get to my hotel but all that walking really made my feet sore. I may have to limit my walking tomorrow.

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The Pantheon, Village Voice Bookstore, and Musée d’Orsay

Posted on 4/16/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today began with a final meeting with my Trafalgar tour director, Mariannne. I had only met her briefly once before. Today I noticed that she had a German accent. She gave me my airport transportation transfer. The supplier is Paris Airport Services. I leave at 7:00 AM on Sunday morning.

I walked to the Latin Quarter to visit the Pantheon. The Pantheon is located close to the Sorbonne. I saw some occult bookstores in that area. The Pantheon is a majestic Christian basilica which has been converted for secular state use. It is primarily used as the final resting place for the heros of France in its crypt. I saw Foucault’s pendulum. I especially liked the paintings of Joan of Arc. It was in four huge panels or scenes. The first scene showed an angel giving the peasant girl Joan a sword. The second scene was of Joan in her armor leading the French forces against England. The third scene featured the King of France being crowned as Joan of Arc looks on. The final scene was of Joan of Arc being burnt at the stake. I went down into the crypt and saw the tombs of various great men and women. I saw Victor Hugo’s tomb. The crypt was a bit chilly and one of the guards had a space heater to keep himself warm. I saw a lot of fancy, ancient funeral weaths in one tomb but otherwise there wasn’t much to see. There were two TV sets playing a documentary in a dark chamber of the crypt. I thought that was slightly eerie and strangely symbolic.

After I left the Pantheon, I found my way to the Village Voice Bookstore. This was one of the first bookstores I came across in my research. It is a very professional bookstore where many visiting English speaking authors and literary figures give readings. I bought the book “Sylvia Beach And The Lost Generation: A History Of Literary Paris In The Twenties & Thirties”. The salesman recommended that I buy “Americans In Paris” as well if I wanted to know more about Sylvia Beach so I bought that too. Paris is a great city for a book lover. They have bookstores all over the place so you are always tempted to buy some books. Now, in Philadelphia, you can’t find bookstores anywhere because the only ones left are chain stores in the shopping malls. The salesman was British and he asked me if I was French or American. That amused me because I was only using English and he should have been able to tell.

I walked all the way to my hotel just to drop off my books and to freshen up. Then I walked to the Museum d’Orsay. I could have gone straight to the Museum d’Orsay if not for the books. I also wanted to get rid of my jacket which I wore because it was chilly this morning. But it got hot later on, as I was doing a lot of walking. I saw some of those curious kiosks they have in France to advertise movies. They are advertising the Coco Chanel film starring Audrey Tautou of Amelie and The Da Vinci Code fame. I’ve seen the trailer for the Coco Chanel film on the Paris DVD I bought. I haven’t seen The Da Vinci Code movie so I’ll have to do that when I get home.

I went back to the Museum d’Orsay because I did not think I saw everything on my first visit. There were many rooms and artwork that I didn’t see on that initial visit. For example, I missed the ballroom and the exhibit “The Italy of the Architects, from layout to invention”. Another exhibit was “Italian Models”, an exhibition of Hébert’s paintings of Italian peasants. This probably explains why there were many Italians in the line to get in. One of the more interesting paintings I saw was Francois-Louis’s “Orphée”. I also liked “La jeune fille et la Mort” by Marianne Stokes.

After I was sure I’d seen everything at the Museum d’Orsay I walked back to the area around the Eiffel Tower and had diner at Le Dome. The waiter remembered what I liked so I had the same meal as yesterday. I watched the French traffic police give tickets to a bicyclist riding down the middle of the road. They also pulled over a few cars by standing in front of them and blowing a whistle. The cops would not be able to stop cars on foot like that in America.

That evening I rode to the top of the Eiffel Tower again to take some photos of Paris all lit up at night. Unfortunately most of my photos did not turn out well but I got a few good shots. I don’t know when I’ll ever return to Paris so I figured it was a good idea to do the Eiffel Tower twice on this visit.

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Shakespeare and Company, Notre-Dame Cathedral, And Eiffel Tower

Posted on 4/15/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I managed to get several more things done that you must try to do when you are in Paris. First I walked from my hotel near the Eiffel Tower to the bookstore Shakespeare and Company near the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Along the way I stopped at the ED supermarche on Rue Saint-Dominique to buy some AA batteries for my camera. Fortunately I did not have to say a word to make my purchase because I doubt they spoke any English. The batteries only cost 1.77 euros which is much cheaper than American batteries, even factoring in the exchange rate. This may seem like a trivial detail but just buying batteries can be a major challenge when traveling abroad. I took some great photos today and this would not have been possible if I had not located some batteries.

At Shakespeare and Company I saw a biography of Rimbaud way in the back in the Biographies section but it was out of reach. I had to ask the British salesgirl for some help. She was on the phone for a long time but she seemed to be excited about some readings they were arranging so I just waited. Eventually she asked a tall man to get it for me. This was probably one of the young writers or students they allow to sleep in the bookstore in exchange for helping out around the store. He pronounced “Rimbaud” differently than I did and I was trying for the correct pronunciation. Some people think you pronounce it like Rambo but that makes the French laugh at you so I try to pronounce the first syllable with an i like in vin (wine).

I already have this biography, written by Graham Robb, but my copy is the hardcover edition and I’ve never seen this green paperback edition with gold lettering. This book is stamped by Shakespeare and Company so that adds to its value. I think I dropped some euro coins while pulling out my wallet to pay for this book but I just left them there for the bohemians.

I took some photos of the bookstore before going in and after I made my purchase I sat outside waiting for someone. That someone was Theo, our Theo at Vloggerheads. Today I met Theo in Paris!

I led Theo to Les Deux Magots on Saint-Germain-des-Prés where she helped me to find a table and place an order. I wanted to eat at this cafe because according to Wikipedia, “It once had a reputation as the rendezvous of the literary and intellectual élite of the city. This derived from the patronage of Surrealist artists, intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and young writers, such as Ernest Hemingway. Other patrons included Albert Camus and Pablo Picasso“. This restaurant was featured in all of my Paris guidebooks. I ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine. The sandwich was ham covered in melted cheese on two regular slices of bread. Not much of a meal. Theo and I discussed Paris and Vloggerheads. I think she had a part in a Nalts video compilation which I’m familiar with, the YouTube Conspiracy, but I’m not sure I’ve seen all of the videos for that. It was great to meet somebody in Paris. Now I can say that I actually talked to someone while I was here.

After we parted at Les Deux Magots, I went to the Notre-Dame Cathedral. I took some great photos of this gothic cathedral. I’m really pleased and impressed by how well these photos turned out. Many of them are good enough for me to use as my desktop wallpaper for my computer. My camera batteries died again just after I arrived at the cathedral but fortunately I had batteries in my pocket. By the way, I also took photos of another gothic cathedral in Paris, Iglesia de Sainte-Clotilde which is on my favorite route through the city.

I went inside the Notre-Dame Cathedral and sat on a pew for awhile. I took some photos inside because everyone else was but not many because it seemed a little disrespectful. I hate to say this, but the Notre-Dame Cathedral is more a tourist attraction than a gothic cathedral. I was shocked by the extent of its commercialization for tourists. They had vending machines where you could buy a gold medallion by inserting an euro coin. This is the first church I’ve seen with a trinket vending machine. Some of the confessionals were all glassed in like a security guard’s glass office. That did not look right in a gothic arcade. However other rooms in the arcade were more impressive and gave you a better feel for the age of this sacred place. They also had a souvenir stand in the cathedral. And I saw a model of the cathedral. According to Wikipedia, “Notre Dame remains state property, like all cathedrals built by the Kingdom of France, but exclusive use is granted to the Roman Catholic Church“. This probably explains why the cathedral isn’t run like a Catholic institution.

I walked to the back of the cathedral to take some photos of the flying buttresses. I am very pleased with these photos.

I saw some “bouquiniste” stalls along the Seine near the Notre-Dame Cathedral and I could not resist browsing. I bought some paperbacks of Nerval’s “Le Voyage en Orient” (volume 1 and 2 together) for 8 euros. Nerval is an obscure French poet in the English speaking world. You could say he was one of the “damned poets” because his life was very tragic. Nerval wasted most of his money trying to advance the career of an actress he was infatuated with by publishing a theater magazine to sing her praises but she never returned his affections. Nerval later went insane and led a pet lobster on a leash. He finally hanged himself with an apron string. Nerval is mentioned in Gary Lachman’s book “A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult”. Gary Lachman used to be a guitar player for Blondie but now he writes interesting books about the occult. Which is to say, Nerval has some significance for me so I was pleased with this acquisition.

After I bought the books I returned to my hotel room near the Eiffel Tower. I really can’t buy any more books or my suitcase will be too heavy for the flight home. Well…I’ll buy one more token book at the Village Voice Bookstore and then call it quits.

Later I stood in line for the elevators to the top floor of the Eiffel Tower. It took me two and a half hours to complete my visit. It was very crowded. We were packed in like sardines in the elevators. I bought a ticket for the “sommet” for 13 euros. I paid in coins to get rid of my change which was piling up. You get currency from ATMs but most salespeople give you euro coins in change. I took a lot of photos from the Eiffel Tower and most of them turned out really well. These photos will make excellent desktop wallpapers to remind me of my trip.

I had diner at Le Dome on Rue Sainte Domonique again. This has become my favorite cafe. You have a view of the Eiffel Tower. The food is excellent and comes in decent sized portions. And the waiters speak English and are friendly and professional. Most of the other diners that evening were Americans. I had Faux Filet Grille (grilled steak), Bacchus Brouilly (wine), and Irlandaise (some kind of ice cream desert with whipped cream and brandy). The Irlandaise was really good. I think I’ll have that with every meal.

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Palace Of Versailles And Rimbaud At The Musée d’Orsay

Posted on 4/14/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today was a busy day for me in Paris. I had insomnia last night and only got three or four hours sleep. I woke up at 7:00 AM and had a continental breakfast at my hotel. Then I went to the hotel next door, the Mercure hotel, to wait for the Trafalgar bus ride to Versailles. I almost got on the wrong tour bus because I followed a group that was going to Paris Disneyland. Fortunately, I realized that something wasn’t right before it was too late.

We had a different tour guide for this excursion although the previous guide made an appearance. She gave a lecture on the kings of France as the tour bus drove to the south west of Paris to the city of Versailles. When we arrived at the Palace of Versailles she told us to memorize the license plate of our bus because we had to be back there by 11:30 AM. She waited for a man with some headsets but he did not turn up (later learned he was sick) so we proceeded through the gates. We were given 15 minutes to take photos before going inside.

The Palace of Versailles was extraordinarily grand with gold leaf on the roof, classical statuary in the architecture, and a gold gate; real gold mind you. The first thing I noticed was the motto “À Toutes les gloires de la France” which translates as “To all the glories of France”. I’m assuming this was added after the palace became a museum. There was a vast cobblestone courtyard that we climbed to get to the entrance on the right wing.

Our tour guide had to get permission to lecture and she held up her umbrella so we could more easily follow her. We were allowed to take photos as long as we did not use a flash. The rooms were crowded and the lighting was bad so many of my photos did not turn out well.

Many of the rooms had marble busts of classical figures, chandeliers, paintings of the French kings (which would be Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI), beds, clocks, and other furniture. The highlights of the tour were the famous Hall of Mirrors and another copy of the painting “The Consecration of Emperor Napoleon” by Jaques-Lois David (a second canvas painted by the original artist).

At the end of the tour we got to explore the gardens. The gardens were enormous so if you wandered too far or got lost, nobody from the tour would have been able to find you. I walked past the Pièce d’eau des Suisses and looked back at the facade of the palace. Then I walked past the Latona Fountain and went all the way to the Apollo Fountain before heading back. That was quite a distance. There were many Greek statues around the garden and I spent some time looking at a few. The only one I recognized was a copy of Laocoön. According to Wikipedia, the original is in the Vatican but I saw a life sized copy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I found a refreshment stand hidden in the gardens where I bought a coke. This was probably my most successful exchange in French since all I had to say was “Coca Cola sil vous plait” and “merci”.

I was worried about being left behind because I was far from the palace so I quickly found my way back. I was the first person back on the bus. I listened to the bus driver and the tour guide conversing in French. I did not understand their conversation but it was quite clear.

When the bus returned to Paris we were dropped off at the Bateaux-Mouches pier on the Port de la Conference. I’m glad I was able to follow the other tourists in our group because we had some slight trouble finding where to board the boat. The public address system on the boat announced each site in several different languages as we approached them. It was a bright sunny day and I did not have sunglasses so my eyes hurt from the glare. Then my camera batteries started to die so I had to conserve shots. But it was still pretty awe inspiring. I especially liked the Pont Alexandre III bridge because it was used in the film Angel-A. It is the Pont Alexandre III from which Angela and André jump into the Seine.

After the boat returned to the pier I crossed the Seine and returned to my hotel near the Eiffel Tower. After freshening up I struck out for the Musée d’Orsay to make good use of my 2 day museum pass. I arrived at the museum at 3:00 PM and it closed at 6 so I only had three hours.

I had thought the Musée d’Orsay was actually quite small and only contained impressionist paintings but in actuality it is enormous and contains some truly extraordinary works of art. It totally blew my mind!

First I bought a guide book in English. You could buy them in various languages. Then I wandered around the upper level looking at various statues. At the end of this level I saw Auguste Rodin’s Balzac and The Gates of Hell. One of the most breathtaking paintings I saw there was “The Knight with the Flowers” by Georges Antoine Rochegrosse. This has got to be the loveliest image I have ever seen! It is an awe inspiring fantasy. I’m amazed that this painting isn’t better known. I’ve never seen it before, not even in my art books. It is the only painting that has really and truly stunned me. I’ll have to buy a poster of it when I get home.

I also saw many paintings by Vincent Van Gogh including his Self-Portrait. I think I’ve seen this before on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City because they had a special exhibit when I visited.

But for me the highlight of my visit was seeing Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting, “Corner of the Table” also known as “Around the Table (Writers), 1872” which is one of the most famous paintings related to French literature because the writers in the painting include Rimbaud and Verlaine. I’ve seen this painting in many of my books on Rimbaud. A detail image of just Rimbaud from the painting is used on the cover of many Rimbaud biographies such as the one written by Enid Starkie. I have 104 books on Rimbaud. It could be the largest collection of Rimbaud books in America outside of an university library, i.e. a private collection. So of course it was a huge thrill to actually stand before this painting. I took a few photos of it and spent extra time looking at it. To be perfectly honest, I did not do my homework before leaving and was expecting to find this painting in the Louvre. I also found the painting “Homage to Delacroix, 1864” with Baudelaire portrayed in the group, by the same artist. My trip has been a glorious success!

After the museum closed I walked back to my hotel but first I had a glass of kronenbourg beer at O’Brien’s Irish Pub, one of the landmarks I navigate by. This was a mistake because that made me slightly drunk. Then I finally braved a Paris cafe and had steak and frites (french fries) at Le Dome on Rue St. Dominique. I had a glass of wine with that meal which didn’t help my slight dizziness. I was going to finally get in line for the Eiffel Tower but I fell asleep when I got back to my room.

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Second Day In Paris

Posted on 4/13/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today was spent on a half-day bus ride around Paris followed by an afternoon at The Louvre. I started the day with a free Continental breakfast in my hotel. I felt sufficiently alert enough to make an attempt to respond in French. When I feel exhausted or overwhelmed I just can’t make the effort.

Our tour guide for today was a native French woman who spoke English with a British accent. I thought she was British until she introduced herself. The bus drove us around Unesco, Hotel des Invalides, the Rodin Museum, the Sorbonne, the Pantheon, Notre Dame, Hotel de Ville, Champs Eylsees, the Arc de Triomphe, the Pompidou Centre, and ended at the Opera de Paris Garnier. Then we had a short tour at the Fragonard Perfumery. The Fragonard Perfumery is a very lovely Napoleon III town house built in 1860 by Lesoufaché, a student of Garnierand and has paneled walls and a chandelier. I saw some antique perfume labels including one with a pierrot. The tour guide sold me a two day museum pass for 32 euros so I walked to the Louvre after taking some photos of the Opera de Paris Garnier.

I almost forgot this. I saw my first street demonstration. There were some Indians protesting the Sri Lankan government’s assault on the Tamil Tiger separatists. This was at the Palais de Chaillot were we stopped to shot photos of the Eiffel Tower.

I entered the Louvre at the I. M. Pei glass pyramid and was able to walk right into the Denon Wing after getting my pass stamped. I immediately saw the Nike of Samothrace (winged victory) which is one of their most famous works. This was a thrill for me because I’ve read a lot of books on ancient Greece while studying mythology. The Louve has an extensive collection of Greek antiquities and I especially liked the red figure kraters. Unfortunately I could not find the Venus de Milo. I did see the Mona Lisa though. The painting had a large crowd around it and was protected by a huge pane of glass.

I saw some amazing Italian art in that wing which were completely unfamiliar to me. There was an impressive statue of Athena, a colored marble bust of an Italian youth that was particularly handsome (Portrait de Commode jeune), and a very curious painting of a monk with a cleaver through his head (Saint Pierre martyr et une donatrice agenouillée). The figures were done in stark black and white like a photo. It was quite impressive on that score alone but the cleaver through the head made it seem like a classical horror movie still.

Another big thrill for me was seeing some massive French paintings which are very famous. For example, I saw “Bonaparte Visiting The Plague-Stricken in Jaffa”. And I stood before “The Raft of the Medusa”. Curiously I am familiar with this painting because it was used on the cover of an old book I read when I didn’t have many books, “The Raft of The Medusa” by Jean Bruller (Vercors). The only thing I remember about that book is the child characters were way too adult.

More importantly I saw “Liberty Guiding The People” by Eugene Delacroix which is an iconographic image of the French republic. I have a book on French history that uses this painting on its cover but I’ve never read the book because it is a collection of extremely dry essays. Jaques-Lois David’s “The Consecration of Emperor Napolean” was also thrilling because I’ve seen photos of it while researching my trip.

I had lunch at the Cafe Mollien. The meal was overpriced and not that good. I was particularly disappointed by the expresso in the tiny shot glass. Maybe that was a true expresso but you wouldn’t get a shotglass of coffee at Starbucks! I’m probably being gauche there.

After that I toured the Greek and Egyptian antiquities and was about to explore Northern European works when there was an announcement about the museum closing soon. While looking for the way out I found the sculpture garden but only had time to see a few.

I was going to finally give the Paris Metro a try but I could not locate the station in the Louvre’s underground levels. However I did come across a Virgin Megastore which is the jackpot of media (books, CDs, DVDs, and graphic novels). I bought a DVD documentary of Paris history. I also bought a French graphic novel (known as Bande Dessinée), something called AquaBlue Volume 4. Although Japanese anime is famous around the world, the bande dessinée is completely unknown in the United States (at least, I’ve never heard of it). All of the graphic novels I saw there came in oversized hardcovers which is also a little different.

AquaBlue Bande Dessinee

I also bought a Petits Classiques Larousse edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Poesies diverses. This will make a fine addition to my collection because it appears to be a study guide.

While walking back to the Left Bank from the Louve I passed the Musée d’Orsay which I may visit tomorrow to get the most out of my 2 day museum pass.

NOTE: My Flickr username is YouTuber. That is were I am uploading my vacation photos.

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French Culture

Posted on 3/30/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

I have finally switched over to my Acer, Windows Vista computer as my primary workstation. Unfortunately, I had to buy a video card in order to use my widescreen monitor with its DVI cable. I bought a XFX PVT72SWANG GeForce 7200GS 256MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card (VGA / DVI / S-Video) on Amazon. This card does work as a dual-head video card so I can continue to use my old CRT monitor for my extended desktop. By the way, I’m now using a beautiful photo of the city of Paris light up at night as my desktop wallpaper. I also bought another Firewire PCI card to give me some Firewire ports.

Last night I watched the movie, “The Dreamers” on DVD because the film takes place in Paris. The main characters race through The Louvre which is one of the museums I’ll be visiting. The film is set in 1968 during the student riots so the fashions seem rather dated although not authentically 60ish. I watched the film in French with English subtitles. It was a typical French film in that the characters spent a lot of time talking about love. I recently discovered a French film on a different topic, “The Class“by François Bégaudeau. This movie is about France’s immigration problems and restrictive school system so it probably provides a more accurate glimpse of the current culture. Unfortunately, the movie is not available on DVD yet unless you buy the PAL import version but you can read the associated book translated into English.

Last night I also read a book of French poetry in translation which has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s pocket poet book of Jacques Prévert’s “Paroles”. This was the first book of poetry that I’ve read in a very long time, maybe a year or two. Maybe my vacation in Paris will inspire me to return to my old intellectual pretensions and I’ll read literature and poetry again. I’ve more or less given up on literature because it does not seem to be connected with anything essential. Writers only write for the sake of writing. They have nothing to say and they have nothing to offer other than their skill with words. They do not dream or offer their reflections on life or seek the truth. They are not philosophical. They play it safe by not saying anything at all that they could be criticized for and their work is nothing more than a skillful exercise in a mild and obscure profundity.They do not dare to express themselves. However, Jacques Prévert expresses himself quite clearly and directly so reading his poems did satisfy my need for reflection. Anyway, I intend to make literary sightseeing the focus of my Paris vacation rather than l’amour.

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Paris Vacation Corrections

Posted on 3/19/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Yesterday I received my travel documents from Trafalgar Tours so I know exactly which hotel I will be staying at. My hotel is the Pullman Paris Tour Eiffel at 18 ave de Suffren, 75715 Paris. Although the Google Street View below shows the Paris Hilton I’m pretty sure this hotel has changed hands because the hotel web site shows the identical view with the name of hotel masked out: http://www.pullmanhotels.com/gb/hotel-7229-pullman-paris-tour-eiffel/index.shtml. As you can see, this hotel is very close to the Eiffel Tower!

Also, my tour will not include a trip to the south of France as I mistakenly believed. The Fragonard Perfumery and museum is actually located in Paris at: Le musée du parfum, 9 rue Scribe, 75009 Paris.

One of the tourist sites I hope to visit in Paris is the Shakespeare & Company bookstore across from Notre Dame de Paris, a famous institution in the Parisian literary bohemia. According to Wikipedia, this shop served as a base for many of the writers of the Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. Today I got a book written about this quirky little bookstore, “Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.” by Jeremy Mercer.

I hope to find a book on Arthur Rimbaud to add to my collection:

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Fromage Et Bande Dessinée

Posted on 3/11/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I went to Wegmans and bought some French cheese; Valmont Bleu V’Auvergne, Chimay a la Biere, and Fourme D’Ambert. I also bought a roast beef baguette. It would not normally occur to me to buy gourmet cheeses but I watched a French movie last night and they had a fine cheese with their meal. One of the arguments for foreign travel is to explore new possibilities. Sometimes when I get really bored and listless I try to think of some simple thing that I could do to break up the monotony. I’m fond of the notion that there are many little adventures you could have if only you could think of something to do that you would not normally consider. Buying moldy cheese is certainly out of the ordinary for me!

The movie that inspired my purchase of fromage was Six In Paris, a collection of six short films set in various neighborhoods in Paris. This is an old movie from 1965 so  it won’t be that helpful in giving you a sense of modern Paris. I especially liked Jean Rouch’s “Gare du Nord” in which a young housewife complains about her dreary life and expresses a desire for travel and mystery. While walking to work a man invites her to run away with him. He is the personification of her dreams and offers her everything she talked about earlier. But she refuses him and says it is impossible so he jumps to his death onto some train tracks because he was weary of life and she struck him as being his last hope.

The moral of this film is perhaps a little unfair. After all, a young woman can’t just take off with a stranger to the airport for an unknown destination without getting into unpleasant circumstances. But it did resonate with me because it was a perfect expression of the little death you experience when you deny even the possibility of doing something unlike you and say no to what life has to offer.

I’m currently reading this high school textbook to learn a little French before my vacation. This textbook was published in 1985 so it is probably similar to the textbook we used when I took French in high school, although I don’t remember exactly what that book looked like. I originally just bought this book for the nostalgia. It has lots of photos of French high school kids in the 1980s so there are photos of Star Wars (Guerres des étoiles) and old video game consoles like Atari, the original Personal Computer, Le Concorde, etc. It might be interesting to buy a more recent French textbook which would cover the euro and the Internet. I have a small collection of French textbooks so I probably have a more recent publication but I prefer this book.

I’ve learned that the French really love graphic novels and comic books which they call bande dessinée. Even though Japanese Manga is quite popular in the United States, French bande dessinée seems to be completely unknown. I found this very intriguing. Maybe there is a business opportunity in introducing Americans to bande dessinée. You could make a fortune translating them and importing them.

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Paris Film And Euros

Posted on 3/8/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Last night I watched the film Paris by director Cédric Klapisch. This film hasn’t been released for the English speaking market so I got an import copy. All of the text on the packaging is in French and there is no English audio, just an option for English subtitles. Even though the video is in the PAL format I could watch it on my iBook. However I did need to switch to Region 2 for this DVD. That was the first time I’ve had to do that.

The movie follows the lives of various characters living in Paris, France and provides some excellent views of the city. The Tour Montparnasse, the Eiffel Tower, and of course Haussmann’s bourgeois apartments are seen in many location shots. As I was watching this film, I realized that I should not plan to walk everywhere because the city is actually huge. Like most politically correct French films, some North African Parisians were given a token storyline in the movie. This film was released last year 2008 so it provides some insight into the current trends. For example, the professor text messages his student. I’ve heard that text messaging is very popular in France now. There were also a few scenes in a boulangeries (bakery) which provided some confirmation of how customers should greet the owner of an establishment. In other words, if you are planning a vacation in Paris you’ll find this film somewhat helpful.

Yesterday I went downtown to see a movie at the Cinema Center of Williamsport. This was the first time I’ve been to that theater. It is across the street from the Sun-Gazette. I parked near Lycoming College and had to walk many blocks but I saw that I could park in the nearby strip mall. I saw the movie The Watchmen and the trailers for the new Terminator and Star Trek films which look like they’ll be awesome.

On Friday, I had to drive out to the FedEx office to pick up a package they would not leave on my doorstep without a signature. I thought it would be my plane tickets but it turned out to be some euros which I bought online. You can use your credit card to get foreign currency at https://www.foreignexchangeservices.com/. According to my Paris For Dummies book, airport ATMs are notorious for being broken when you need them the most, so I figured I would need some cash as soon as my boots hit the ground. I’m supposed to be picked up by Trafalgar Tours because I was billed for airport transfers but I know better than to not have a back up plan.

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My Research On France

Posted on 3/4/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

I’m going a bit overboard in my preparation for my vacation to Paris, France. I’ve already read three books on French customs, behavior, and attitudes. But those books are intended for people who plan to live or work in France. You really don’t need to know anything about diner party etiquette if you are just going there on a one week vacation. I doubt that any bourgeoisie are going to invite me to diner. I’ve never been invited to diner in the United States and I would not dream of inviting anyone to diner at my house.

But I have learned a lot more about France. You may think you know a lot about a foreign country from watching their movies and reading their literature and studying their art but once you decide to visit a country and start to do some research you discover there are many aspects of the culture you didn’t know. I don’t read much international news so I didn’t even know who the current French president is, Nicolas Sarkozy. France also has a prime minister, François Fillon, although he seems relatively unimportant.

I used Google Street View to take a virtual tour of the area around the hotel where I’ll be staying, Hotel De la Tour Eiffel, 17, rue de l’Exposition – 75007 Paris. I was able to determine that it is next to the Romanian Embassy and there is a Moroccan restaurant across the street, Restaurant Le Petit Bosquet. France had many colonies in Africa which is why you’ll find Moroccan restaurants in Paris.

I would like to explain why this vacation is really exciting for me. I’m not a Francophile but some aspects of French culture have had a big influence on me. After I left college I fancied myself an intellectual and read a lot of literature. I’ve read a few books by Jean-Paul Sartre, more of his plays than his philosophy, the novels of Henry Miller and some of the diaries of Anais Nin. I’ve read a few novels and short stories by Ernest Hemingway although I don’t worship him like most people do.

But in regards to literature, I’m really into some of the French poets; Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, and Stéphane Mallarmé. I have an extensive collection of books on each of those poets. My Rimbaud book collection contains more than 100 volumes and is probably the largest such collection outside of an university. I’ve adopted Rimbaud’s theory of voyance as my secret personal mythology. I prefer the romantic notion of the poet as a profoundly inspired mystical genius to the modern notion of the poet as a craftsman who pursues a career of literary criticism and teaching classes in creative writing. When I go to Paris next month, following in the footsteps of my literary hero, I will see the city through the eyes of a visionary and I will allow the strange environment to permeate my unconscious until my mind seems completely foreign to my habitual identity and I become another.

I hope to visit the Village Voice Bookshop while in Paris and buy a book on Arthur Rimbaud to add to my collection. I suppose the Shakespeare & Company bookstore has more literary significance but I’m not that fond of Hemingway and it is further from my hotel.

I’ve also studied the French art movement, Surrealism, and read many books on the subject. I recently visited the Museum of Modern Art and saw many famous works of  Surrealist art there. I’m sure there were many French tourists in the museum that day as I heard some people speaking French but I’m so unaccustomed to seeing tourists that I probably thought they were just New Yorkers speaking French. I was also under the mistaken impression that busy New Yorkers were on their cell phones as they viewed the art work when in fact they were listening to audio tour devices that describe the paintings and sculptures in your native language.

I also like French films. One of my favorite French films is Vagabond starring Sandrine Bonnaire. This film is about a beautiful girl tramp (clochard) who is found dead in a vineyard. She is the personification of the independent spirit which just wants to be free from society so you could say she represents some aspects of the French soul.

I hope to buy some rare French films on DVD in Paris even though they will be in Region 2, PAL format and won’t play on American DVD players. However, they should play just fine on my iBook because I’ve bought other PAL DVDs that I can view on my Mac. I also like the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer although I should buy more Eric Rohmer films because I think I’ve only seen a few including Pauline at the Beach. A lot of my French movies are on laserdisc.

But as I’ve said, I was surprised by how much I did not know about France given all the French books, movies, and art history I know. None of that teaches you much about the modern nation and everyday life. I wasn’t even familiar with the arrondissements of Paris!

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Book Review – ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Posted on 2/27/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

I recently finished reading the book ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking by Andrew Siemer. I consider this book to be one of the more important books to read because I’m very interested in building social networking web sites and ASP.NET is my area of expertise. However I’m currently devoting a lot of time to PHP and the Elgg social networking web application because most ASP.NET web applications are not open source so they don’t have many developers working on improvements.

ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking: Andrew Siemer: Books

ISBN: 1847194788
ISBN-13: 9781847194787

Andrew Siemer seems to be keeping up with technology. Not only does he use ASP.NET 3.5 in his web application, but he uses domain-driven design concepts, LINQ to SQL, and open source tools like Lucene.NET, MemCached, StructureMap, and NUnit. Therefore you may feel a little lost if you haven’t been following the rapid changes in the ASP.NET framework. If fact, you will even need to expand your knowledge beyond the ASP.NET framework to take advantage of the other technologies he introduced into his project. I’m not actually up to speed on LINQ, ASP.NET 3.5, or any of the open source tools he used but I just consider this a bonus because I learned a lot in addition to the material specifically about social networking.

As far as developing a social networking web application is concerned, the main benefit to be gained from reading this book is from the database schema and application design considerations that are analyzed. Even if you are not going to use ASP.NET you will learn how you might design your database tables to meet the project requirements. This is often a big stumbling block in creating a web application from scratch. It is often interesting to see how someone else approaches the application design. For example, Andrew Siemer choose to store record counts in his tables to avoid running aggregate queries to get the record counts. He argues that this is more efficient which may be true. He used StructureMap to create loosely coupled objects in his application.  StructureMap is a dependency injection framework and allows you to swap out a class and plug in another. While I could argue that this adds an unnecessary layer of complexity, it does make sense for a social networking web application which needs to meet the special needs of various niche communities. Social networking web applications need to be extremely flexible and customizable because the community of users will have many feature requests and suggestions for improvements. They will not be very happy if you lock them into a rigid environment. It is not clear that this web application will become an open source project but if it does, then StructureMap will make it possible for other developers to replace part of the application in favor of something else if they’d rather take a different approach.

However, I don’t think the author has studied social networks closely enough to anticipate all the requirements. For example, he does not provide a means for members to customize their profile though CSS. Elgg also lacks this feature at the moment and it will prevent users from expressing their personality on the site.  Andrew Siemer also skims over media galleries which he only implements as an user file management system with a photo gallery. In my opinion, vlogging is the only media that really creates an effective sense of community. You really need to experience the vlogging community to appreciate this. Therefore I would really like to find a social networking web application that has genuinely integrated video sharing into its system. I’m sure the author would consider this to be a whole other topic which requires another thick book to cover and Elgg certainly doesn’t have this but I still consider it to be essential. But even aside from that, the comment system he designed does not allow for threaded comments. This will not seem like a big deal until you’ve seen a really active community where a lot of interaction takes place. Vloggers do a ridiculous amount of commenting because YouTube made this the easiest way to respond to a video.  Without comment threading, people have to indicate their replies to previous comments using the @ sign. I consider this to be an awkward user hack for a poorly designed application.

Although this is a thick book, 556  pages, most of the content is code listings so it won’t actually take you too long to read it. Building a social networking web application is a huge project which a solitary developer could hardly manage alone so just reading this book is not going to get you there. If you think about it, a social networking web application is actually a collection of web applications. There is the blogging application, the forum application, the groups application, the messaging application, and the media gallery application; not to mention the hundreds of minor details to attend to including security. In my opinion, it is quite hopeless to tackle such a project without an open source community of active developers. Andrew Siemer’s work is very impressive and sophisticated but it is still incomplete.

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Elgg Languages

Posted on 2/23/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I examined how Elgg supports foreign languages for web site internationalization. I discovered that Elgg does not check the browser’s language setting. Instead you have to set the language for the entire site. This means that you cannot create a social networking site which supports two languages.

Then I explored how PHP supports localization. You can set the locale using the method setlocal(LC_ALL, ‘fr-FR’); This allows you to display dates in the French format. It will also format numbers using French notation. French notation usually uses two decimals, comma (‘,’) as decimal separator, and space (‘ ‘) as thousand separator. To format currency you need to use the money_format method which is not supported on Windows. But I found some code for a method which does the same time. To get the time in Paris you need to set the time zone TZ to Europe/Paris.

After that I studied language settings in various browsers. There are really two settings you need to change. The language preference merely indicates which language you prefer to use for viewing content. It is up to the web site to detect this setting and redirect you to web pages in that language or dynamically generate HTML with strings in that language. I discovered that very few web sites bother to do this. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook will honor your browser language settings and display in French.

However, changing the browser language setting will not change the language indicated in the user agent string. I found that only Firefox and Opera really allow you to change that. I had considerable trouble getting Internet Explorer and Safari to use French rather than English so I gave up. In Firefox you need to enter about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Then enter general.useragent.locale in the Filter textbox and change en-US to fr-FR. The User Agent string will then indicate that the browser language is fr-FR:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Opera also lets you change the preferred language for web pages but to go a step further you need to download the ouw960_fr.lng file and copy it to the C:\Program Files\Opera directory. This will change the entire user interface to French and the user agent will become:

Opera/9.63 (Windows NT 5.1; U; fr) Presto/2.1.1

Tomorrow I will learn how the web server and server side scripting can use the Accept–Language request-header to deliver content based on the browser language settings.

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ASP.NET 2.0 Culture – Web Site Internationalization

Posted on 2/22/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Last night I watched the movie Paris, Je T’Aime, a collection of short films set in various arrondissements. This is undoubtedly one of the best recent films to see before you travel to Paris. I especially liked the short film 14e arrondissement (XIVe arrondissement) – written and directed by Alexander Payne. It is a brutally honest and mundane vignette about a middle-aged American mail carrier from Denver on vacation in Paris who is sad that she has to experience it alone. It is narrated in her atrocious attempt at French. This will probably be embarrassingly similar to my experience!

However, this blog post is about the technical issues of web development for international sites. I’ve never been asked to give any consideration to foreign languages or cultures in my work because I haven’t worked on any major web sites that are intended to serve the world market. I’ve mostly done back end administration sites which certainly don’t need to be bilingual. Web developers have enough headaches just making sure web sites appear the same in every browser without worrying about a number of foreign languages in addition to that.

Fortunately ASP.NET is slightly more advanced than other web development frameworks in this regard. If you want your web page to format dates, times, and currency for France you just need to set the culture in the page directive:

   1: <% Page Language="VB" MasterPageFile="~/Default.master" Culture="fr-FR" UICulture="fr-FR" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="Langue.aspx.vb" Inherits="Langue" title="French Culture Test Page"  %>

The Internet-standard string that identifies the French language is fr-FR (French in France). fr-CA would be French in Canada. This changes the display of full dates to something like mercredi 18 février 2009, short dates to 18/02/2009, short times to something like 15:21, and currency amounts to 56,95. Notice how the full date automatically uses the French words for the weekday and the month without any effort on your part. The short date places the day before the month in the European fashion. The time is in military time because the French do not use AM and PM. And the currency uses a comma instead of a period and automatically added the Euro symbol.

You could also set the Culture and  UICulture attributes to “auto” and get the same effect if your browser language is set to fr-FR. However changing your browser language can have unintended consequences as every web site you visit may redirect you to a French version of the site or display some things in the French format. It does give you a good way to test sites for internationalization. It is surprising how many sites use country flags to direct visitors to translated pages when they should just use the browser’s language settings to determine this.

If you want to dynamically replace strings with foreign words or phrases then you’ll have to do a lot more work. ASP.NET 2.0 provides a standard way of accomplishing this using local resource files. First you have to create an ASP.NET Folder for this. Right click your project in Solution Explorer and select Add ASP.NET Folder, select App_LocalResources. Then with an ASP.NET page in design view, select Tools > Generate Local Resource. This command automates the creation of a local resource file for the default culture. It also adds meta:resourcekey attributes throughout the page and creates corresponding string values in the local resource file to act as targets for meta:resourcekey attribute entries. That should give you the English version of your page.

To create a French version of the page you’ll have to create a local resource file containing French resources. You need a resource file named Default.aspx.fr.resx for Firefox and a resource file named Default.aspx.fr-FR.resx for Internet Explorer. When you open the resx resource files in Visual Studio you’ll see a lot of name / value pairs where the name will be the name of a web control and the value will be the foreign words you want to appear there.  If you want to localize static content you can use the special ASP.NET tag asp:Localize for anything which does not get referenced in the code behind page.

   1: <asp:Localize ID="Localize1" runat="server" meta:resourcekey="Localize1"></asp:Localize>

PHP does not have a standard way to do this kind of localization. You’ll find various methods for replacing language specific strings in different web applications should they be language aware. For example, Elgg uses a language folder where you place PHP files, each defining an array of phrases for a particular language. Then your other PHP files must use the key name to get the array value which will be a string in the target language. This is very similar to ASP.NET’s approach but other PHP web applications use entirely different methods.

I will be doing additional research on this topic as I spend more time brushing up on my French.

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Vacation In Paris, France

Posted on 2/21/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

I’m very excited about my upcoming vacation to Paris, France! I have booked an escorted tour with Trafalgar Tours in order to avoid the stress of making my own arrangements. They take care of the hotel reservation, provide travel to various sightseeing destinations, and provide a tour guide. I hope this will minimize my interaction with the locals because I don’t speak French and I’m not sure I could find my way around on my own. I will be staying at the Hotel De la Tour Eiffel which is not far from the Eiffel Tower. The tour includes a cruise on the Seine, an excursion to Louis XIV’s Palace and gardens of Versailles, and a visit to the Fragonard Perfumery and museum.

The global economic crisis makes this a bad time for extravagant travel but I think the IT industry is virtually recession proof. Programmers and web developers are not expected to find themselves unemployed for very long. This trip is very expensive but after going on two cruises last year I’m more familiar with the costs. I won’t be going on two vacations this year and I’ve already paid off last year’s travel expenses.

France is my favorite foreign country and I’m been studying French culture for years. I’ve read a lot of French literature (mostly poetry in translation), learned a lot about French art (especially Surrealism) and I’ve seen French art in museums. I’ve also seen a lot of French cinema. I have an entire bookshelf of textbooks for learning French. Unfortunately I have not read any of them and only bought them for nostalgia’s sake and to browse through! That’s right, I don’t speak or read French and I cannot understand spoken French. I’m somewhat familiar with the language and I have a small vocabulary but my fascination with France has not extended to learning the language.

Now that I’m actually going to visit the country, my perspective has changed and instead of merely consuming their cultural products in translation I am doing some research on France itself. There are many little cultural differences to be aware of. For example, electricity in France runs on 220-volt, 50-cycle AC current. I’ve bought some European plug adapters to charge my electrical devices. Their time zone is Central European Time (CET) which puts them 6 hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone (EST). Their currency is now the Euro, not francs. I’d like to exchange some dollars for Euros before I leave but I’m not sure you can do that. They format their dates differently than we do so I’ve added a French calendar widget to my notes to familiarize myself with that. A French or British calendar begins with Monday and puts Saturday and Sunday at the end of the week for a true weekend. The French do not capitalize the days of the week or months and the day comes before the month in a date: 07/02/2009 would be February 7th 2009 and not July 2nd 2009.

Fortunately, the Internet makes it easier to explore France. I encounter many foreigners on the World Wide Web but not many French due to the language barrier. I know many English speaking foreigners on social networking sites including English, Canadian, Australian, and Irish vloggers, bloggers, and programmers. Not many Indians though even though they speak English in India and many Indians are working here, especially in the IT industry. The English frequently vacation in France and some Canadians speak French so I should probably ask them about the country.

But the French are nowhere to be seen unless you go looking for them. I’m familiar with DailyMotion.com which is sort of like France’s answer to YouTube. You can find a lot of French videos there as well as many videos from other European countries. However, the French do not vlog. I’ve seen many of their videos and they usually just create a photo montage of their friends with some pop music in the background.

There are French versions of major web sites like Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube, and Wikipedia. You can also find a lot of French television to watch over the Internet although it is mostly news programs. Google Street View is a fantastic way to go on a virtual tour of Paris. You can see a lot of architecture and examine the street signs and store windows to see what French words you are likely to encounter while walking down the street, avenue, and boulevards.

My trip is in April on the Easter weekend which may or may not be a good time to visit Paris. I will be blogging extensively about my trip. I’ll also be going French crazy so I’ll probably blog about how to make your use of the Internet more of an International experience. For example, web developers should know how to localize their web applications for foreign languages but few web sites really bother. I shall tie my current craze into that professional consideration in order to keep on topic.

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Elgg Widget – Amazon Wish List

Posted on 2/16/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Last week I finished work on a simple Elgg widget for displaying your Amazon Wish List. http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/rsrobbins/read/20493/amazon-wish-list-widget I started this project quite some time ago but got stuck on some jQuery AJAX errors. I’m doing a lot more work on Elgg now so I decided to get this out of the way.

Elgg Amazon Widget

I recently installed Elgg on my iBook G4 to get some experience on running it on a different platform. I’ve been using Apache 2.0 and PHP 5 on Windows to do my development work. Elgg requires the mod_rewrite module to work properly so you can’t run it on a Windows IIS web server. Over the weekend I tried this Rewrite module for IIS http://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/Download.html. This seemed very promising but the widgets don’t work correctly so I think I will stick to Apache for now. Installing Elgg on my iBook was slightly more difficult than usual because MySQL isn’t using its default port number on that system. It is getting tiresome to keep my various installations in sync so I may just use the Mac version to test installation steps for plugins or to document the installation process.

I’m currently working on comment threading for the blog plugin. This is going pretty well. I have created a new ElggObject for the comments to replace the annotation method of handling comments. I’ve also worked out the code for displaying these ElggObject comments. I’ve been using my bare bones plugin template for this work and I’ll soon attempt to integrate it into the default blog plugin. I’m also working on a WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR export view for Elgg. This will make it possible to export your Elgg blog posts to WordPress. But I should really work on an import script because I need plenty of blog posts for testing purposes.

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PocketPC And iTouch

Posted on 2/15/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

I recently bought some 2032 watch batteries for my PocketPC because I have not used it in months and lost all my programs. Fortunately I did not lose my MP3s because I store them on my Secure Digital card. I decided to document the programs I like to have installed in my notes. I made note of the files required and the steps that need to be followed to install these programs. It seems likely that I’ll need to repeat the entire process some time in the future. However, I did discover that you can back up your PocketPC to a PC so I did that.

I remember reading about a mobile version of Ning sites back when the Ning Developer Network was worth browsing through but I didn’t think to check it out on my iTouch until recently. You can access the mobile version of any Ning site using the usual web address with a /m at the end:

http://www.vloggerheads.com/m
http://cafezen.ning.com/m

Those links will even work in Firefox but below are some screenshots of how it looks on my iTouch and PocketPC:

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Elgg Plugin Template

Posted on 2/6/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Yesterday I created an Elgg Plugin Template. This really advanced my understanding of the web application architecture of this social networking platform. Before this I was testing out my PHP code using the REST API which is a crude way of going about things. Now I can create plugins that really conform to the Elgg standard. I had to base my plugin on the existing ones that ship with Elgg because nobody has provided a plugin template to get you started. There were several things I had to figure out.

First I discovered how to add a menu item to the Tools menu for my plugin. Then I worked out how to extend the CSS so my plugin could have its own styles applied to its page elements. I also figured out how to create a submenu. Tonight I had to add some code to make sure this submenu only appears for my plugin. I found it was appearing everywhere.

I created one example action. The important part of this exercise was having a new web page in which to try out some PHP code and generate the HTML output. I also used a language file for some strings that may appear in English or another language.

Last night I struggled with Apache and MySQL to get my Elgg web site running on my new Vista PC. Naturally it fought me every step of the way. First I had to get Apache to process PHP scripts. Then I had to get PHP to load the MySQL modules. Then I had to enable mod_rewrite. It was also necessary to run an UPDATE query in MySQL to adjust my Elgg site’s url which changed. Even though I have extensive notes on these topics from when I was struggling with my iBook web applications, it still managed to waste several hours of my time with unexpected complications.

I hope to get going like gangbusters on Elgg now that I have figured out how much of it works.

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Blog Improvements

Posted on 2/4/2009 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I installed the Now Reading widget to my WordPress blog. This is just what I needed, a way to manage the information on what I’m currently reading. Unfortunately my life is so dull that I have nothing to report except the books I’m reading. This widget uses my Amazon Associate account to display the thumbnail so it serves the same purpose as the Amazon Link plugin for Windows Live Writer which I’ve been using. In other words, I may get a little commission if anyone buys a book after clicking on my Amazon links.

I finally noticed that my blog was looking like crap in Internet Explorer 7. I’ve been using Internet Explorer 8 for several months now and I usually view my blog in Firefox 3. I spent about a half hour tracking down the CSS issues that plagued my blog in Internet Explorer 7. I didn’t mind this because it is good exercise in troubleshooting a web design. I documented everything I learned for future reference. The page was too wide because I needed another width property on the wrapper element. And the sidebar was dropping down the page because I needed a overflow: hidden; property on the container div. Now that I think about it these were hardly obvious errors. Even Firebug did not provide any clues on how to fix these problems. I had to do some research on the Internet to figure it out.

I’m getting tired of this WordPress design so I’ll probably try to come up with something better soon. I’d like my blog to look more high tech with maybe some video themed graphics.

Other than that I spent most of the day struggling with AJAX for ASP.NET. I replaced an Update Panel with a WebMethod for better performance. I had to figure out how to get detailed error messages and JSON data back from the WebMethod. It does look like this will be better than the Update Panel way of doing things.

One of my clients has decided to mothball his project so now I’m left with just one client. Actually, this has made me very happy today because now I can concentrate more on just satisfying one client. I’ll also have more time to work on personal projects without feeling guilty. But I don’t want to lose my last client or I won’t have anything to fall back on in this bad economy.

Update: Unfortunately, the Now Reading plugin causes problems with Windows Live Writer so I may need to disable it to use that program. However, being a programming god and all, I may be able to hack a fix for this problem.

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