Dijon is, of course, famous above all for its mustard and I couldn't resist buying a couple of different flavours to cook with when I get back home. 

Dijon Palais des Ducs

Dijon Palais des Ducs
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

This panorama shows the Palais des Ducs in Dijon. The picture is formed from five separate photos taken hand-held with the little Contax camera then stitched together with Canon Photo-stitch software.

Dijon proved to be a very pleasant city to visit - in fact the highlight of our trip so far. In contrast to Beaune (which we visited later in the day) which has become highly commercialised and almost entirely ruined with retails chains allowed to replace the fine old shop-fronts with the aluminium and glass affairs they prefer to show off their wares, Dijon has become a far more pleasant place than I remember from my last visit (about 18 years ago!) with pedestrianised streets, a healthy food market in Les Halles, excellent shopping and a good range of restaurants.

Relaxed

Relaxed
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

After a couple of days fairly heavy driving (traffic jams in Holland and the search for our hotel making the first day far longer than it was supposed to have been) it was bliss to arrive at our first gite and put my feet up with a glass of Burgundy's best!

Pasteur - in Arbois

Pasteur - in Arbois
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

A statue in Arbois celebrates Louis Pasteur. Best known for his work with micro-organisms and the pasteurisation process that bears his name, Pasteur also discovered the secret of producing consistently good wine. Before his research, batches of wine would almost randomly turn out sour (ggod enough for vinegar, at best). He discovered that good wine relies on use of the proper yeast during fermentation - and then, heat treatment (the pasteurisation process again) to kill off that yeast to prevent the wine from souring in the bottle.

You could argue that he lay the foundation for the prosperity of every wine maker since. And, as a town reliant on the wine industry for its very obvious prosperity, who better for the good burgers of Arbois to celebrat in their town square?

Arbois

Arbois
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

Leaving Strasbourg, we headed down the autoroute toward Mulhouse then to Besancon where we turned off the motorway onto cross-country N-roads. Besancon looked very interesting as we passed through (sadly having no time to stop) with a fort on the edge of the escarpment above the town and pleasant gardens and roads in the town itself.

The road south from Besancon - the RN73 - proved to be a great driving road with a succession of fast swoops and sweeping bends accompanied by truly stunning scenery - definitely a road to bank for a future car rally - just watch out for "les flics" if you decide to drive it at any speed!

The road heads over the western edge of the Jura mountains and through the Jura wine region. By chance (it was lunch time) we stopped in the town of Arbois which proved to be very pretty. We spent so much time walking around that we missed lunch completely and had to resort to buying bread and pastries from one of the boulangeries - not a bad turn of events as it happens as they were delicious.

Strasbourg - la Petite France

Strasbourg - le Petite France
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

August 3rd, 2007: Our ultimate destination for the first week of this trip is Burgundy - about 450 miles from Amsterdam. Deciding to drive through Germany (and a fine decision it was too - the opportunity to show a pair of Porsches a clean pair of heels during one 160MPH blast along an unrestricted autobahn providing all the justification I need) we turned off the autobahn at Koblenz to drive down the Rhine Gorge.

Short on time (thanks DFDS again) we had no time to stop at any of the castles or even any of the towns proper but it proved an enjoyable enough break from the pell-mell pace of the motorways.

Arriving in Strasbourg, finding our hotel - in the Petite France old part of town - proved too difficult for us, our GPS and even the locals we asked, all of whom expressed their dismay and told us what we had already discovered - the pedestrianisation of the area has blocked all the roads you would normally choose to take to get to the hotel which we could clearly see.

Eventually, I gave up and walked through the streets to the hotel and asked the bell-hop. The answer it seems is that everybody's GPS maps are wrong - you don't ask for the hotel's published address, you ask for a square somewhere else in town then ignored the warning signs and drive down a canal embankment - et voila!

How very Gallic that it's not the hotel's directions to guests that is wrong but everyone else's GPS maps!

Ho hum ... Strasbourg itself is a delight - and la Petite France in particular. We enjoyed a romantic stroll along l'Ill (that's an L, an apostrophe, an I and two more Ls) and ate in a pretty restaurant on its banks overlooking the light show played out on the old buildings.

Leaving the Tyne

Leaving the Tyne
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

August 2nd, 2007 - the first time I've sailed out oft he Tyne. On our way to France for our summer holidays, we decidedto take the Newcastel to Amsterdam crossing instead of my more usual Hull-Rotterdam. It was certainly convenient driving just a few miles to Newcastle to get on board - and, let's face it, start the holiday.

On board, the staff were friendly and efficient but, though DFDS had obviously spent money tarting her up, the old ship showed her age by being so noisy (in fact, our cabin vibrated with noise) that sleep proved difficult thereby negating the whole point of taking an overnight ferry service. Arrival in Amsterdam was met by very slow unloading and border controls - added to the later than normal arrival (9:30am) this meant we weren't on the road until 10:30 - losing over two hours against a Rotterdam arrival.

I'm looking forward to sailing back into the Tyne when we return - but not the boat. Future crossings will surely be courtesy of P&O from Hull.

Fame at last

One of my photos of the White House taken last summer has been chosen by Schmap to illustrate its on-line guide to Washington DC. Schmap looks like an interesting publishing exercise - an admittedly quick look suggests that most if not all of its material is user contributed or taken from "free" sources on the 'net - eg; maps from yahoo, pictures from Flickr (though the authors do take the time to ask permission from photographers who usually deny commercial use fo their photos - like me).

Schmap is an interesting example of a 'mash-up' - a web site created by combining feeds (ie, bits of) taken from other web sites and resources in the hope of making something greater than the sum of its parts.


I only get a few seconds of fame so wait for my name and piccie to appear in the Schmap widget here or look at the photo they used on Flickr here.

5-4-3-2-1

5-4-3-2-1
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

To Beaulieu for the UK Maserati Club "Spring Event" - now named after the sadly missed former club president, Cameron Millar.

One intriguing part of the weekend was the appearance of examples of all five types of Quattroporte, including the ultra-rare Series II with the V6 and Citroen hydraulics that was painstakingly tracked down and is now lovingly owned by Edwin Faulkner.

Yes, that's me next to the blue QPIV

Maserati 4CS

Maserati 4CS
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

Adam Painter was at GPLive "demonstrating his (or is it still Ken's?) 4CS.

Sir Stirling Moss

Sir Stirling Moss
Originally uploaded by George Perfect

Got the opportunity at GPLive to interview Sir Stirling Moss on his experiences in various Maseratis over the years - synopsis: he loved the 250F, hated the 450S (in all forms) and greatly enjoyed driving alongside Fangio.

Full interview will appear on the MRC site in due course

Fresh fish

Fish bowls
Originally uploaded by George Perfect.

In most of Europe and the U.S. when we say "fresh" we mean food that was caught/picked/plucked some weeks ago and then preserved by freezing or removing all the fluids for transport to our far away homes.

Even though I've seen it many times before, it still comes as a surprise to see what the Chinese shopper defines as fresh food.

In this fishing village on Lantau island, the morning's catch is sorted into plastic bowls and kept alive by pumping air through the water (you can see the plastic pipes feeding the air in the photo but not the electric pump and attached car battery under the trolley).

To the locals, "fresh" means still alive when bought.

Fresh meat anyone?

Self-service butchery?
Originally uploaded by George Perfect.

In more recent visits to Hong Kong (it was a regular stop-over for me during the 1980s) I've struggled to find any of the old flavour of the place. Wander through the glitzy shopping malls on the island or Kowloon and you could be in almost any developed city on the planet, surrounded as you are by shop after shop selling over-priced designer goods in an effort to pay the naturally exorbitantly high rent.

Heck, even Mong Kok - once home to professionals (photographers who came for the specialist camera shops and hookers who worked the brothels that lined the narrow streets) is now the location for 5-star hotels, computer supermarkets and Starbucks.

So a trip into the New Territories was taken. It's years since I was last in this hinterland of Hong Kong's administrative region and, to be honest, had never really understood why the British Government had felt so compelled to hand the whole of Hong Kong back when the lease on part of the territory ran out. Until I saw what had become of the area I remembered as sleepy villages and gentle farm land.

The whole area is a sea of high-rise apartment blocks with fast train access into Kowloon. All became clear - the "independent" territory that would have remained would have consisted of millions of people with nowhere to work and no way to feed themselves.

Anyway - tucked away in one of the newly developed streets was this "traditional" street market. Traditional, not in the sense of having been there since the Tang dynasty (the street itself looked no more than 30-40 years old) but in the sense that traditional Chinese shopping values remained intact.

Fresh food was piled on stalls all along the street for passers-by to pick up and examine (see the lady in the photo who I watched pick over an entire tray of pork chops until she found one she liked) and the sale of hopelessly useless (as well, it's fair to say, unrealistically cheap) goods.

Needing fresh AA batteries for my camera I bought a dozen Chinese zinc-carbon examples (the best available) from a stall for a few HK$ (around US 5c each) discovering over the next couple of hours that each and every one of them was completely devoid of electricity.

Some things never change. Hong Kong enterprise - gotta love it!

XP Media Center

Let’s cut to the chase – Windows Media Center (at least in XP guise – I haven’t tried Vista) is, if not quite a disaster, a long way from being capable of acting as a reliable living room device. Even ignoring the product’s shortcomings (restrictions on the number of tuners it supports; poor support for digital terrestrial television in UK/Europe among them) the darned thing crashes far too often.

Being (humbly) pretty good at setting up my PCs and strict at avoiding the installation of software that causes so many reliability issues, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to give a “three-fingered salute (aka Ctrl-Alt-Del) to my PC and the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) is almost never seen in these parts. Media Center (sic) reset all these expectations by frequently requiring the use of Task Manager to shut it down when it froze and far too frequent reboots of the entire machine.

That’s not to mention Microsoft’s habit of releasing “security updates” to the operating system itself that cause the PC to reboot all by itself – a more than annoying activity when it interrupts a film or sports program you were recording overnight.

Problems with Media Center include:

• The program is so tied to Microsoft via its Internet connection that almost any disruption to the network connection causes a crash.
• Miscellaneous and meaningless errors: eg, the program frequently refuses to record a program showing in the guide, claiming that “the guide does not contain information on this program” – even when it patently does – stopping and restarting the Media Center shell allows the recording.
• Microsoft doesn’t think people outside Seattle watch TV. Specifically, the program’s ability to tune in digital broadcasts in UK regions is at best patchy. Reading independent web sites reveals similar problems in many regions along with the registry hacks(!) necessary to allow or force the tuning software to work with local broadcasts.
• It supports at most two tuners – unless you’re prepared to hack the registry (and do so every time it downloads an update). In this multi-channel age, it’s far from uncommon to find several appealing programs broadcast across different channels in the same peak viewing slot and with DVB-T tuners available for a few measly pounds/dollars it’s hardly unreasonable to expect support for four or five.
• Playback of a recorded DVB-T program within which signal quality fell causing dropouts causes a crash necessitating a complete reboot of the machine.

I could go on (and on, and on …) but suffice to say that I have given up with Microsoft’s Media Center and replaced it with something rather better.