You might think it’s a day late, but it did take the BBC a whole day to make it the top Europe story on their website. I’m talking about Milan’s new Congestion Charge – called the Ecopass, here.
And the weather was truly fantastic. On Sunday from about 11.30 a.m. for about 3 hours or so, we sat outside a café, in the sun, without coats, watching the lake and the people, Rufus lying at our feet (having had several long walks already that day).
Mantova, Saturday, 8th September.
We are staying in Residence in Centro, in Mantova, having got kicked out of our previous place (more later). The room is a small flat with its own kitchenette (we can do our own coffee in the morning) and the bedroom on a kind of landing, up some creaky wooden steps. All very nice – except for one problem. The series of ‘flats’ are in a converted outbuilding. The way they have been built means that you can hear a pin drop about 3 ‘flats’ along (not quite, but you get the idea).
Like Second Life, the blogosphere (the world of bloggers) is not real life. It has similarities but is almost like some sort of game to many people. The trouble is that many of the Real-Life people don’t actually know about this Blog-Life. But, it can be compared to the old Wild, Wild West. Laws (and by that I mean the ‘rules of living together’) have yet to be fully defined.
Following Alex Fear’s (although, unfortunately, the blog no longer exists) comment on this post, I thought it would be well to advise the settings I found afterwards.
Had a few problems over the last few days. As you may know by this post, I had the problems with ADSL. At the end of it, methinks, it was almost certainly Alice’s fault (Alice being the brand name for Telecom Italia’s ADSL service and not some random girl; it’s actually pronounced aleechay and not aliss).
Then, 2 days ago, I found I couldn’t send email through Outlook. This meant I couldn’t reply to anything unless I used the web mail site, which is not so convenient, to say the least.
Of course, the first thing I do is search the web with my error and I find that ZoneAlarm may be the cause. Recently it suddenly, without my asking, put a spam filter on my Outlook. Now, actually, I thought this was quite good and I quickly got over my initial reaction of ‘why are you doing something to my machine that I didn’t ask for?’.
So, I have been watching it rather closely since then to see how it goes. I had almost got to the stage where I was trusting it and then, I find, it may be the cause of the sending emails function to fail.
So, how to switch it off? Well the ZoneAlarm console says it IS switched off. A check on the forums shows that it was an accident with one of their updates and that it did cause problems with Outlook and provides a link to be able to switch it off.
So, that’s what I do. But there is only a slight change in the error message that I can display when it won’t send. But then on another part of the forum I find you have to also do something else. Which I do. And the error message changes again.
And then I remember that I read on one of the forums that a persons ISP had suddenly blocked port 25 (used to send mail) except for their own smtp mail function. So I try, just in case. And then it works.
So was the problem Alice or ZoneAlarm or, even, both at the same time?
Either way, I’m now thinking that I will try and find another Firewall product (I haven’t really liked ZoneAlarm since Checkpoint took over) and then, if Wind/Infostrada get their act together, I’ll let them move me after all.
Of course, that almost certainly makes me a little, no, probably completely, crazy, but Alice have annoyed me twice in a week now. Cazzo Alice, and ZoneAlarm is only slightly better!
In the UK, if someone suggests a trip out, where you were going to travel for two hours to get there and two to get back, you would tend to make a day of it. So, for instance, when we lived in Herefordshire and you decided to go to, let’s say Aberystwyth, you would set of at, say, 10 a.m., reach Aberystwyth, have lunch, enjoy the afternoon having a walk around and set off home at 6 or 7 p.m.
OK there’s this site I look at from time to time. It has funny short videos. But this latest one which is about 10 minutes long, is very good and very funny. A little like Groundhog Day but well made in my opinion. Enjoy.
I tried to embed it but it didn’t work so here is the link.
For the main Funny or Die site, go here.
Today, in Milan, the sun turned green! Yes, that’s right, it was only a slight hue of green, but green it was. It was very strange walking around in this slightly green light. It seemed to make the leaves on the trees (yes we have a lot of them in Milan although how they survive in the pollution beats me) much greener than normal. Walking around, people were just staring up towards the sun or there with their hands in front of them, examining them, as if they had some dread disease. It was quite freaky, just like some sort of Science Fiction film. Except that we were here and it wasn’t some film set.
