Metadata Win

It only took me many hours, huge amounts of patience, multiple re-readings of various how-to blog posts and a hell of a lot of luck but I have finally managed to transfer all my music and all my metadata to my new computer. The credit for this belongs entirely to this iLounge article, but I definitely get points for perseverance. After all, I had already copied 11Gb of music from my laptop to my portable hard drive once last week--how was I to know that in order for this to be a success, I needed to yield my music folder taxonomy to Apple?

After re-reading the posts several times and making sure I had plenty of copies of all my choons, I embarked on the lengthy process--the instructions were somewhat too heavy on the background info for me and as a practised skim reader, I was worried I would miss out an important step. Eventually, though, I opened iTunes on my new computer, tweaked the settings accordingly and watched with glee as all of my choons, along with the play counts, ratings and playlists magically appeared. Unfortunately, at that stage, none of the files themselves would open and much as I love my metadata, it's not much use without, er, data. With a bit of fiddling and guesswork, I managed to get iTunes to notice that my files are now on the hard drive of my new computer. Hooray!

Meanwhile, I am in the process of transferring 15Gb worth of photos onto the new computer from my portable hard drive. I use Picasa to manage and lightly edit my photos and as Picasa is made by Google, it is awesome and so the process was completely pain free and didn't require me to find any how-to blog posts. I know I often complain about Picasa but on the file management front, it is awesome--Apple should really introduce Picasa's "file watching" into iTunes rather than insisting that it knows how to organise music libraries better than its users and if they think otherwise, tough shit. Picasa also likes metadata and tries to help the metadata-mogul as much as possible; plus, its new face recognition is pretty impressive, even holidays in the South of France tend to result in the faces of statues and friezes being identified as real peeps...

Le Queuing? C'est Quoi?

The two last flights out of Nice tonight are both London-bound: one to Gatwick and another (mine) 10 minutes later to Luton. Naturally, the airports put the flights at neighbouring gates such that 55 minutes before take-off, the waiting area is a zoo, with keeno passengers queuing early for the Gatwick flight encouraging Luton passengers to do the same. I don't care where I sit on the plane but as I'm carrying my luggage on, I don't want to be last on in case there is no room for my bag; a window seat would be good too but I'm not overly fussy. Equally, my bag is heavy and I don't want to wait in line for 40 minutes.

The adjacency of the gates meant I saw three people get to the front of the wrong queue before being sent back. Great organisation, airport! Meanwhile, the Easyjet staff at Nice are a lot more fascist than at Heathrow when it comes to "only one bag per passenger on the plane." I see that they do this to stop people taking the piss by saying, "well, this is my carry-on bag and this is just my handbag/laptop case" but it really slows don boarding. For example, I want my handbag and laptop under my seat for the flight but my duffle bag needs to go in the overhead locker so when I get to my seat, I have to spend two minutes blocking the aisle while I sort out my luggage.

The upshot was that I got a window seat and locker space but we are supposed to take off in three minutes and our full flight is barely even two-thirds-boarded. Also, the stewardess just announced that the lockers are full! Wow! I would say bring back BA, all is forgiven, but I think the French are probably more to blame than Easyjet...

R but No R

Well, my little winter break in the sun is about to come to an end and while there has been much activity and plenty of relaxation, I don't feel particularly rested, mainly because the boiler in our Cannes flat is located in the spare bedroom, which means that when anyone wants to have a shower in the morning, they have to come in to turn it on and it is very noisy. Never mind: fun has been had and the sun even came out yesterday morning and stayed for the weekend.

Yesterday, we drove out into the Estérel mountains for a walk. It was bright and sunny but very windy and I was forced to wear my shiny, white trainers with my otherwise stylish outfit as none of my other footwear was suitable. We sheltered in a little rocky cove for some soup and then headed back town for assorted running, leaping and shopping. Dinner was at Astou, one of the nicest fish restaurants in town. The oysters and jumbo prawns I had for my starter were very good; the faux filet I had for my main course, not so much (not rare enough and far too fatty for my taste), but I had to have it as I hadn't had a steak yet this holiday.

Today, we caught the boat out to Ile St Honorat, which was a bit of a mission in itself as there was some bike race in town today and the Croisette was partly closed off to traffic (policed by a lone policeman who got very annoyed every time a pissed off Frenchman got out of his car to move the carefully erected barriers so he could get through), which meant the bus down to the port was very late. Eventually, though, we got to the marina and made it out to the island. It was a beautiful day and very warm in the sun. We went into a little castle, with multiple floors and balconies providing plenty of Escher-like vistas and space for leaping. There is a monastery on the island and the monks maintain a shop where they sell wine (not quite like this one) and sweets shaped like monks--I'm not too sure about the appropriateness of suckable monks, but what would I know? Then, there was just time for a long lunch at Cresci, on the sea front, a final run in the sun and some packing before my very late flight. With luck, I'll be home by half-midnight...

Non C'è Due Senza Tre

Much as I enjoy visiting the Cannes flat in summer, the charms of the town in winter are somewhat more limited. The cooler weather means no sunbathing, many of the bars close for the winter (meaning you can only have a cocktail if you are willing to pay 15 euros for it in a hotel) and a lot of the shops and restaurants do their refurbishments during the town's quietest time of year.

We came across our first fail on Wednesday night. Having just arrived, we hadn't done a full shop and so the plan was to go to Pizza Jean-Jean--a takeaway pizza van in our hood (Palm Beach), which apparently serves very good pizza. We tried calling Jean-Jean to place an order but only got through to his voicemail, in which he helpfully said he was closed on Mondays from November to March but didn't mention anything about Wednesdays. So, the Brother and I were dispatched to Jean-Jean's regular parking space. After all, he could have been so inundated with orders that he was too busy to answer the phone. Alas, Jean-Jean wasn't there at all. Plan B was to walk back along the Croisette to our favourite Italian restaurant, Vesuvio, which also does take out. Alas! Vesuvio was closed for refurbishments. Plan C was to acquire an onion from the Casino with which Maman could whip up some delicious pasta sauce (along with whatever was in her larder).

Nice as the pasta was, once I have been thinking about eating a nice pizza, nothing else will really do, so we had to go to Italy where--surely--we would be able to find some decent pizza. Of course, it started pissing down last night and was still chucking it down this morning. Nonetheless, the plan had been made so to Italy we went. It was very scenic driving through the misty mountains above Nice and then along the winding, coast road, through the tunnels and into Italy. Stop one was the picturesque village of Dolceacqua, full of pretty, narrow lanes, an old castle and an ancient bridge. There wasn't a single other person to be seen and the few pizzerias we found were all closed so it was a relief to come across Il Borgo, which luckily did gorgeous, coal-fired pizza with thin, crispy bases and plenty of prosciutto on top. Delicious.

The rain worsened over lunch and the Italians in the restaurant were bemused by my reiterations of the phrase non c'è due senza tre, which, of course means "it never rains, it pours" (but not in the literal sense), which was interesting for my family but probably made no sense to the Italians. I was very happy to parlare italiano, though. On the way back home, we stopped at Ventimgilia, near the French border, which was seriously boring on a rainy Friday afternoon. The shops were full of cheap, discount crap, fake designer handbags and duty-free booze. It definitely wasn't our kind of town so we drove on home, which meant the sun came right out, producing a gorgeous rainbow over the Alps. And it was a good pizza...

Hacks in the Belfry

It's good to know that wherever you go in the world, local news never gets any better. In an attempt to améliorer my French, I've been reading the local paper, Nice-Matin, this afternoon and like the Nowheresville Evening News (not released in the evening, definitely not newsworthy and most stories only have tenuous links to Nowheresville), not a lot happens.

On today's front page, we have... "Le monde en 3D à Monaco" (about a new exhibition in Monaco that is entirely in 3D; you can, for example, obtain your own 3D portrait), "Cannes: Grands travaux au Caffe Roma" (one of the cafés on the Croisette has to lose 1m of its terrasse because it is blocking too much of the pavement) and, my personal favourite, "Mougins: Une webcam sur le clocher du village" (webcam installed in the bell tower in Mougins).

Mougins has always been one of my favourite villages in the quartier, mainly because of its name, which I pronounce "Muggins" even though it's really "moo-zhan." The article about the bell tower takes up almost a whole page inside. The camera will provide tourists with a 24/7, 360-degree view of the village and surrounding countryside and takes two minutes to complete its rotation. The paper reassures its readers that there will be "aucun voyeurisme" -- don't worry, folks, the camera is high enough that people stalking Mougins peeps via the interwebs won't be able to make out individual people or cars. Also, the reporter signs off by warning people not to bother trying to dissemble the camera or pull any pranks because it's been disguised so even if they manage to climb to the top, they won't be able to find it.

Linguistic Inconsistency

I've been learning French for over 20 years and Italian for about nine and yet while my written French is pretty fluent and better than my Italian, my spoken Italian far outstrips my French. This might be because I was taught Italian by a native Italian speaker and French by a Hungarian (via Yorkshire) and it might be because the Italians are always so bloody shocked and excited to find someone who actually knows their language that they are infinitely more welcoming and encouraging of my efforts than the French. It may also be because Italian is a fairly easy language for an English speaker in terms of its phonetics: no nasal vowels or diphthongs or uvular rs and it is fairly phonetically regular (i.e. each letter tends to be associated with only one sound, unlike in English or French); the only tricky part is the trilled r but that's not a problem for me.

In any case, I still get nervous when speaking to French people and my perfect grammar and mastery of the subjunctive, preterite, conditional and the pronouns y and en go out the window, and so today in Cannes, I kept quiet until lunchtime when we went to a little restaurant called Da Laura, which is run by a friendly Italian family (Laura and her family, funnily enough). Although it was a bit confusing switching between French and Italian, it was so much more relaxing to be able to speak in Italian; my Italian vocabulary might be much smaller but my fluency is greater.

I think the native speaker teacher point is the key one here. I did, of course, have a French assistante for 40 minutes a week for the last three years at school (shared with seven to nine other pupils) and at Cambridge, I had a weekly supervision with an assistante shared with one other person, but it was already too late. I started Italian at the age of 16 and got my A at A-level after two years and it really helped that the classes were conducted entirely in Italian from the start and that we had an Italian teacher (even if I now have a Sardinian accent and swear like a Sardinian/Sicilian).

Metadata Fail

I bought a new laptop today and, shockingly, it isn't a Vaio. I've been really happy with my little Vaio over its four loyal years of service but its 60 Gb hard drive was becoming an increasing pain (not to mention the fact that it was split with 40 Gb on the C drive and 20 Gb on the D, meaning that my music was on one drive and my photos on another); as was its mere 1 Gb of RAM and general air of "getting on a bit." If I were rich, I would have replaced it with a new Vaio but they are too pricey. I've also been tempted by various netbooks but as my laptop is my primary computer, I need something more substantial. So, the Samsung X120 it is--as light as a Vaio, not much bigger and about one-third of the price.

I picked my new baby up at the airport on the way to Cannes today--the tax-free price was £440 or so, which was £60 cheaper than Selfridges and about £30 cheaper than Amazon. Until earlier this week, anyway, when Amazon hiked their price to a shocking £520! The upshot was that I now have a shiny, new computer. The problem was that while I didn't want to bring my old laptop with me on holiday too, I did want to be able to load my old files onto the new computer--mainly my music but also my photos. As I am hugely organised, I loaded all of my music files--including the iTunes database information--onto my portable hard drive, which I brought with me. When I put the files onto my new computer, however, none of my carefully entered metadata was copied across--no ratings, no "date added to library" field and no records of the number of times each track has been played. As I use all of these pieces of information to create the majority of my playlists, having to start from scratch for 2500 songs is a very unappealing thought.

After a bit of Googling, I discovered that I probably didn't copy the files onto my portable hard drive correctly. Or, rather, iTunes has a really annoying feature that is supposed to make life easier for users who never need to worry about the mechanics of how their music is organised but actually makes life a lot more difficult when they want to move a file into a different folder or want to move their whole library onto a new computer--especially when the new computer is running a different operating system and using a different version of iTunes. Basically, I'm screwed. At least, I need to wait until I get home and then open iTunes on my old computer and click a button that will allow iTunes to automatically organise my music in the way it wants to, which means it will move all my files to locations of its tuning. Once I've done this, I should be able to transfer everything to the new computer (give or take a bit of tweaking of file paths bearing in mind the new OS).

In the meantime, I can't sync any new podcasts onto my iPhone because iPhones can only be synched with one computer at a time and if I sync it with the new, empty version of iTunes, I will lose all my other music. This means a week without podcasts for me. Error. Much as I loathe Windows Media Player, at least it allows you to leave your music in the "My Music" folder without causing any problems should you dare to get a new computer. I'm going to keep on Googling for another solution but the outlook is not good.