I read an awesome book recently that made me rethink many things about location, work, and business. It was Tim Ferriss' book which I highly recommend.

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"The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" (Timothy Ferris)

I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought I would use the trip as an opportunity to try working somewhere other than Vancouver - to see if it's really possible to relocate and still work? Of course, in Ferriss' world, you only work 4 hours a week. Unfortunately I didn't get to experience THAT part of the plan.

It worked. Here's how I did it.

I moved all of my landline numbers into a Vonage account about a month prior - personal home phone, company land-line from San Francisco, company land-line from Vancouver - the works. I set up one voicemail box for all of the numbers and forwarded that to Simulscribe which transcribes voicemails to email (and does a pretty darned great job at it). Then I set up the cell to roll-over to the same Simulscribe address.

Once in Paris, I plugged in the phone and Vonage box. And realized that whoops - you can't plug 110V devices into 220V. I had fried BOTH of them. Or so I thought. It turned out that fortune favours the stupid. One of the plug converters was fried so it never passed any current through.

So I bought some transformers (220V to 110V step down transformers) for my other various chargers, bought a couple of plug converters (for the Apple power supply and the new phone that I bought) and plugged it all in. It took a couple of tries but after a call to Vonage tech support, the Vonage box was up and running on the local DSL connection and voila - my phone was plugged in and ready to receive calls at any of my numbers.

I have to admit that it was freeing (and a bit strange) to have people look at my calling code and say, "OH! You're in Vancouver!" and then have to explain that no, in fact I was in Paris, ten hours ahead of them! The sound quality was as good as it is in Vancouver, which is to say, on par with the regular plain old telephone lines that I had before.

There was only one glitch and that was more to do with the Siemens phone than anything else. It would ring but only at the moment it was actually ringing, could you hit the "ACCEPT" button. In between rings, it didn't look "pick up able". Weird.

But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter - have equipment, will travel.

I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL... Or maybe Costa Rica....

Not sure what to say. Too many conflicting emotions as I sit in Heathrow waiting for my flight back to Vancouver. Maye I will later.

I'll be listening to this all the way home. I got it from a very dear friend who means a great deal to me.

"Breathe Me" by Sia (the soundtrack to the final six minutes of Six Feet Under shown here below.)

I decided to get out for a run in the cold sunny weather today and ran around Ile Saint-Louis:

It was a crisp beautiful autumn day. I was the only runner in shorts, and one of the only runners out at ALL. There don't appear to be many runners in Paris. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

On the way back home, I ran through a back alley and found this great cathedral.

And a few blocks from home there is a little shop with this sign. I liked the sign and thought that it was worth taking a photo.

There are a lot of tiny little shops near our place that have art in them. Wait what on earth is that in the window??

It's a bust of Michael Keaton's Batman. Creepy.

Today was my first weekday in the city. Unfortunately, there are no Crossfit gyms here in Paris. Seems like a business opportunity to me. There are about 30 gyms in downtown Paris, 22 of which are one chain.

The first gym I found was actually a combination gay sauna, bar, and weight room. All in one. Not quite what I was looking for. On to the local mega corporate chain Club Med - owned by...Club Med. Lots of neon, a lot of space, a ton of machines and almost no free weights in site. And it was also $36/day! Next, I went looking for the local Univers Gym. I never did find it. But while I was looking for that gym, I found this building facing a back alley. It looked like something from the future - possibly a set for Gattaca or Minority Report:

And then right across the street was an entry way that took me from the future all the way back to the past:

  Inside a massive park was this man sitting with his feathered friends:

After wandering in the park here for a bit, I headed back to the other side of town to try to find Body Gym.

On the way, I passed through the Place de Bastille, a very large roundabout with this in the center:

It was ever more impressive zoomed in:

Eventually I found the gym.  I almost didn't go in. The front entrance was all graffitied (graffited?) over. But once inside, the owners were friendly, the gym had real people working out hard, and they had free weights, a somewhat old change room, and the whole place looked like it needed to be...closed....or renovated. Perfect! And the price was right too. Managed 10 sets of "Cindy" (5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 squats) in 20 minutes. That was about all I could do today between my minor jetlag and my bum cramps from the flights over.

Once the workout was over, I wandered home feeling like I was going to be sick. I'm sure that was the workout and not the jetlag which is gone by now.

As night fell, the neighbourhood seemed to get LOUDER as people came home from work. This is the view out of the window. It's pretty funny to watch. It eventually settles down though by bedtime.

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