NonRant: Plus Ça Change...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

No ADSL - again... and our telephone has only just been connected. This, despite having informed France Telecom weeks ago that we were moving; and tomorrow we go to the Mairie (the Town Hall) - at the Mayor's invitation - to officially gripe about France Telecom's lassitude.

Still, there are compensations. Our tower (we now live in a tower) is part of a 15th century chateau - which is built on the site of a 12th century chateau.

The term 'chateau' is far more flexible in French than its English transliteration. To me, the word chateau implies one of two things:

• if prior to the mid-18th century, a fortified castle;
• if after the mid-18th century, a 'belle epoque' style mansion house.

So anyhow... the 12th century ruin is certainly the remains of the keep of a genuine, honest-to-goodness 'raise the portcullis, the Franks are coming' castle. It is now home to the chickens, and Blanchette the goat is put there at night - and the swans live in the moat which surrounds it.

The main house is more like an Italian villa - 3-story, long stone buildings with terracotta roof tiles, facing onto a courtyard with a little lake at one end. nice, but not very 'castle-y'. I don't think they had such a thing as a gentilhommiere in the 15th centuiry, but this would have been the equivalent.

Par contre, our tower is built in a very imposing style, very similar to the towers at, say, Azay-le-Rideau. It has a square footprint (and a moat - now empty) and has one of those circular turrets which houses the spiral staircase.

Here's a visual - I think you will be able to work out which bit is the tower. Nice, but not over the top. the next place we move to will be over the top, I promise.

And here's a close-up of our bit - taken from the courtyard rather from our part of the gardens (our gardens are about an acre and a half, in the top left of the aerial shot). Frankly, I don't think that the photo does the place justice.

I'll give you a hint about the interior (will post photos later)... I am going to try and get a law passed which makes it a death-penalty office to become a politician if you're not taller than our downstairs fireplace - that would eliminate 99.5% of all politicians right there. (hint 2: the fireplace is taller than I am, and is carved from one piece of stone.)

RantAlert: News From the Front...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

The universe sometimes decides to give you a kick in the crotch at the same time as it gives you a gentle nudge towards the light. So, nobody ought to have been surprised at events which have occurred just as I was about to make a glittering debut with another interesting 'distribution channel' for my sometimes-incoherent rantings.

The negative event - the cloud around the silver lining, so to speak - is the fact that my webhosts for RantPRO have upped the ante in our little dispute about costs.

I got an e-mail from the firm (which shall for the moment remain nameless but not blameless), which stated that due to traffic they were moving the site to a dedicated server, and would therefore need to increase the costs associated with hosting the site... they named a new price which was a mere SIX TIMES the old price.

Of course, my response was simply to say "Not on your best day, lads", and invite them to refresh themselves regarding the contract.

Then I found out that the site was switched off completely - and my access to the most recent backup was also refused.

Thus, RantPRO has - for now - gone into hiatus. Oddly enough, the webhosting crowd sent me a new invoice - at the old rate - for the NEXT three months' worth of hosting, on the same day as they claimed that they were not going to reactivate the site. Odd).

And now the good news. As of this coming Monday, I will be contributing a different stream of semi-consciousness (about the Oz markets) for a new venture which has been initiated by the people who bring you The Daily Reckoning. As it stands, I am still not sure whether that means that I can lay claim to being part of Team Reckoning, but suffice it to say that I hope so.

With housing prices - even those around the median - in Sydney now really showing some signs of distress, and with high-leverage, interest-only, about-to-reset fixed-rate BTL (buy-to-let) mortgages making up an uncomfortable chunk of the banks' loan portfolios (and since WhichBank? was the big pusher of equity extraction, you will remember), I think there will be some lively musings from here on out - and of course a re-examination of the earnings multiples that banks ought to carry...

Now that I have fixed the display side of the blog (all of the code to render the blog purty was stored on RantPRO - I had to copy the CSS file into the blog template from out of an old backup of RantPRO), and now that I have finally got a QWERTY keyboard, the old Rants will begin to re-appear starting this week... as well as the musings for the DR crew. thankfully I have been reading vast amounts of completely non-market-related stuff recently (Thackeray, Waugh, Wodehouse) as well as the usual gristly diet of finance-related sites (DR, FinancialSense, 321Gold, and so on), so I am well and truly primed for a torrent of blather.

See youse all soon.