Welcome to Paris–Mostly

I’m here in Paris as part of the Nokia Windows Phone Jumpstart tour. Should be great fun. It starts tomorrow. Our hotel is just across the road from the tower in the picture, which is really nice. With a bit of luck we might find time tomorrow to go up it.

But I have learned one thing about travel, and that is “Don’t go abroad with a brand new, recently imaged” laptop and expect for stuff to keep working”. I tried to log in to Facebook and it said “Aha! Not seen this machine before and Rob seems to have changed country. I’ll lock him out”. Not a huge problem in the great scheme of things, but very irritating all the same.

I logged into the Facebook site to try and fix the problem and Facebook went “Aha! We are in France, I’ll give Rob the French version of the site and no obvious way to change this”. So now I’m being asked security questions in French about things I’ve never told it. The last five characters of my driving licence? As if? So I plump for a Facebook innovation, passwords by pictures. This was even more disastrous. I have quite a few friends, and many I have never actually met in person. So I don’t know what they look like.

Towards the end Facebook threw in the towel I reckon, and showed me some pictures of family members. That worked and I’m now back on line again. But my Flicker account steadfastly refuses to work. They’ve made it so secure it is unusable.