Category Archives: Villa Roquette

Your Flexible Friend in the Real South of France

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book your b&b or apartment in villa roguette online now

Your Flexible Friend in the the Warm Heart of Languedoc, the Real South of France

I’m talking about our home and B&B, Villa Roquette, not Carole or me, although we will bend over backwards to make you welcome and help you to discover the most interesting region in France.

We have designed our accommodation to be flexible for your wishes. Our apartments and our Bed and Breakfast accommodation can be arranged to give individual private rooms all with en-suite bathrooms,showers and private entrances, or we can combine units to give one, two three or four bedrooms suits or apartments for bigger family units. All with air-conditioning (and central heating for winter evenings).

We offer you either self catering, or B&B – with evening meals if you wish.

Our dates are flexible, whether you stay for one night, a few days, a week or for a few months, you can arrive and leave at any time on any day of the week.

Stay with us on a flexible plan where you use us as your home-base for your trip, leave your luggage (husband, kids etc), but only pay for the nights you stay. You can leave your car in our secure parking and use the wonderful (and inexpensive) French rail network to visit other areas and cities (Paris is under 4 hours and the last thing you need in Paris is a car) – we do all the driving, to and from local rail or airport connections for you. Spain is only an hour away, so you could take the train to Barcelona. or take advantage of the great deals from Beziers airport (only 20 minutes from us and we do a shuttle service) to other Euopean capital cities.

All guests have the free use of bicycles, golf clubs, swimming pool, barbecue areas, terraces and gardens, beach and picnic items plus lots more..

You can book online now, or contact us for any special wishes.

We are keeping our old prices for as long as possible, as a newsletter subscriber I guarantee that you can book at this years prices until January 31st.

Do come and share our home with us, we would love to see you here.

Tony and Carole

When Does Winter Begin

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We live here, in Villa Roquette, in the sunny heart of the Real south of France.

Summer is easy to recognise, hot shimmering days, flourishing vineyards and cafes festooned with garlands of people (blah… that is enough soppy copy).

Winter is a time vaguely between Autumn an Spring and the exact start is sort of forgotten, shoved aside as an irritating interruption with Christmas and (more importantly for the French) New Year as focal points of a wobbly ellipse of time.

I looked up the “official” start of Winter – not surprisingly there are several – the astronomical winter is from the winter equinox (around December 21 for France) – but this is later than the traditional date of November 1 (All Saints Day or Samhain in older ideas) – The Chinese fix it around November 7.

If winter is the coldest three months of the year, then for us this would start around the endish of November – for me it starts when we like to turn on the central heating for a couple of hours in the morning and evening and is confirmed when we light log fires in our living room to cheer up the darkening evenings.

So I can now state with certainty that officially winter started today – chimney is swept, boiler is cleaned and calibrated, logs have been gathered for the fire and the central heating was switched on this morning.

Now I can announce our winter special offers for Villa Roquette.

We still have our “Rose Apartment” available from the beginning of December and can offer B&B in our “Olive” and “Sunflower” suites.

Villa Roquette availability book now

Our prices are already very very competitive (low) and we are not raising them (well at least not until next year) – but, if you wish to escape for a short break, or stay for a few months and share some winter sunshine – then make me an offer and join us in  Villa Roquette – you will be made very welcome

Secure Passwords and Your Will

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A couple of recent articles I stumbled on , one in the Telegraph about people leaving Internet passwords in their wills, and the other I literally stumbled on in Stumbleupon  about strong passport security have created a new project for me.

During the last seventeen years of working on Internet websites, using servers, hosting services, software development, social networks and all that stuff – I have ended up with thousands of passwords. At any one time I guess I have about ten popular ones in my memory, all use eight or more characters and a combination of numbers and upper/lower case letters. All are fairly simple to discover if someone has some basic skills. To get adequately secure  I would need to replace them all with strings of over 24 characters.

To remember this, for me, would be impossible, I already write most down in a notebook, which if I lost it would be awkward. My browsers kindly remember most for me, but if the computer crashes (which they do and have done) – or if an unauthorised person gets on my network or keyboard, then the whole thing is useless.

The other aspect is, when I am dead, some of the stuff I have in various clouds, accounts and hard drives is needed to be accessed safely and simply – not that I have important or valuable stuff, but clients bookings, payments needed to be made and the pennies in paypal etc, need to be dealt with.

Putting passwords in a will is daft as you should be changing passwords regularly (I bet you don’t 🙂 ) – and do you want to give your accountant or lawyer access to you bank account after you die?

The PasswordCard idea seems elegant, highly secure and when the proverbial piano lands on your head, the person you trust only needs to know four things – a symbol a colour, how many characters you have in your password and the direction of the string (and to have your card of course).  This information can be written down, but without the card it is useless and the card without this simple knowledge is also useless.

I am sure there are things I have not thought about, but I guess PasswordCard will think of these before I do. Or perhaps you will and comment to me 🙂

I do not plan to change all my passwords to one, I may have two or more cards or use different combinations on one card