You can't avoid it. October and November is the month for strikes. It's like Easter and comes every year. Today it's SNCF and RATP on strike. For what else? Pensions. On my way to work this morning I saw, more cars on the road. Longer lines and packed trains that ran every 10-15 minutes instead of the normal 2-5 during rush hour. All the velibs were taken. Lots of bike riders today. But what can you do? I was lucky to catch the train after waiting 15 minutes for one. Some of my coworkers haven't been lucky and had to stay home since transportation is a problem.
I was also told this is the reason Paris lost the bid for the Olympics. The committee came here and there was a strike. Off course, when they got to London things were operating smoothly as usual. That's 1 for the English.
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has a post on uTorrent. One of my favorite bittorrent clients. I've been using it for almost 3 years. It's slick, silent, and unobtrusive. What good software should strive to be. The software I'm working is not that. It's complex and intuitive. uTorrent is the best of both worlds. My wife likes it because she can subscribe to a few RSS feeds and get up and running in 2 clicks. I like it because I'm a tuner. It gives me real time information on my traffic, statistics, and error messages. It's tuned to the point where I rarely have to touch it.
Start the computer, wait.... Everything starts automagically. Check the download folder if you are looking for something in particular. When it's done it will be waiting for you. That's it! I occasionally get a phonecall about a program that has disappeared or not in the write place. It happens when an unfamiliar file format is downloaded (for example *.mkv) and doesn't know where to put it.
Did I mention it's light. except for hits on the disk cache I rarely see any activity. 2MB - 20MB is all that's required. Usually, I have a windows update that will interrupt the process but it never complains (except if the disk is full)