Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

February 9, 2025

Taking calls on Speaker in a French station will get you a €150 fine

Filed under: General/News — Suramya @ 10:05 AM

I find people who watch videos, listen to music or have phone conversations with their phone on speaker mode to be quite annoying but unfortunately it is a fairly common behavior across the world. I have read online that some folks have started carrying cheap disposable headsets that they hand out to folks who are doing this. I personally just ask them to put on a headset if they are next to me. (Had to do that in a flight where a guy next to me was watching a movie on speaker). The french have a different way of handling it which I quite like: they just fine the person. 🙂

A few days ago a passenger on the French rail network SNCF was issued a €150 fine for using his phone on loud speaker within a train station. He was asked to switch-off the speaker but instead argued with the official so was issued a fine.

The passenger, named only as David, told French TV channel BFM that he was on the phone to his sister while waiting at Nantes station when the SNCF staff member told him to switch his phone’s loud speaker off, or risk being fined.

When he argued, he was served with the €150 fine, which has been increased to €200 because he did not pay it immediately. David says he intends to hire a lawyer to contest the fine.

SNCF confirmed the fine, although its version said that David had been in a waiting room of the station.

A company spokesman told Le Parisien that he was issued with the fine for disturbing other passengers, saying: “If he had played music at a high volume, it would have been the same thing.”

It would be awesome if we can have the same thing in India as well. I doubt it will get implemented in trains but I definitely want it for Airports and flights.

Source: Slashdot: French Train Passenger Fined $155 For Using Phone on Speaker

– Suramya

August 26, 2020

Relaunching Suramya’s Book Review Cafe

Filed under: General/News — Suramya @ 11:15 AM

In 2010 I created a section of my website dedicated to book reviews but over the next few years that section was removed from the site. I honestly don’t remember why that happened but my best guess is that I was updating the website theme, never got around to migrating the section and then just forgot. I reviewed 71 Books during the time the site was active and looking at my logs if I had continued to review every book then I would have reviewed over 1500 books to date. 🙂

I finally revived the site over the past few days and instead of using the custom website that I had created with a bare-bones CMS system, I have switched over to WordPress as its a lot easier to manage/maintain WP sites. Migrating the old reviews was a painfully manual process where I had to export the data from the DB and then format it correctly for WordPress. Most of it I was able to automate but the Affilate links had to be manually updated and it was painful to say the least. But finally I am done and all the old reviews are imported into the updated site. Going forward I will be adding the book reviews to the site regularly.

There are some changes to the rating system that I have implemented for the reviews going forward to make the ratings easier to understand and more consistent. In the past I used a scale of 1-10 for the ratings but I will be using a scale of 1-5 (5 being the best) going forward.

Let me know if you have any questions/comments about the site or would like to give feedback on features that I should incorporate.

– Suramya

PS: This notice is duplicated on my main Blog as well.

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