Foreign Perspectives

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Is it just me, or does everyone out there think that Vista is rubbish?

I’ve a nice new Vista ready computer that came with Vista Business installed yet it will only run for about two hours before it hangs up. Not only does it hang up, but it stops working in a very peculiar way: when I start using it, many keyboard shortcuts work yet after an hour or so they stop working.

And then, there’s the updates. Every single time I need to reboot it (which is easily three times a day) it has more software updates to install.

Now that the “two hours” before it hangs seems to be reducing, I’m seriously looking into scrapping it altogether and installing Linux. The one thing that’s stopped me doing that so far is that I’ve a lot of information inside Outlook which I don’t think would transfer into a Linux setup but since Outlook constantly stops working anyway, I figure that I’m going to lose all that information sooner or later anyway so I’ve started looking into dual boot options to easy the transition.

I think Microsoft have squarely shot themselves in the foot with this one: not only is the file format not compatible with older versions but the keyboard shortcuts that we’ve all learnt don’t work and to cap it all the software is the most flakey that I’ve come across for many years.

Popularity: 44% [?]

If that sounds like you then one option that you could consider is a payday loan.

The online payday loan market is massive, but what’s a payday loan anyway?

Basically, it’s a short term loan that’s given to you with the intention that it’s repaid out of your next paycheck. In practice, that means that it can seem quite an expensive option if you look at the annual interest rate that you’d pay but, of course, you’re only borrowing the money over a period of a few weeks.

Since it is a fairly short-term loan, it’s pretty easy to get one and you just need to meet a few simple criteria:

1. You need to be over 18 and living in the United States. 
2. You need to have a regular income of at least $1000 per month ($800 if the income is from a government scheme);
3. You need to have an active savings or checking account that can receive the money.

The process of getting the loan is usually very fast and most sites offering the scheme are “faxless” these days (ie you don’t need to fax them any documents).

As the costs are quite high for these loans, it’s best to investigate other possiblities first.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Ah, now, that’s the question, isn’t it?

The original idea for the plan was hatched when google started offering to let you label sites as being targeted at specific countries. As a trial, we popped the twins of some sites on either side of the Atlantic and monitored them to see how things went.

Naturally, the profile of the site visitors changed depending on where they were notionally hosted. So, an American site would obviously pull in more Americans and a European site would pull in more British. However, the google trick only works for google of course and we sometimes get significant traffic from other search engines and, as always, there’s a lot of traffic that you can’t pin down to a specific source.

In the meantime, we were running down the sites hosted on our original European host which was going to save us something like $20/month once that exercise was complete (European hosting services are mostly complete ripoffs). So, we pencilled in some of that to establish a beach head in America. In fact, for under $100 a year we managed to get both a primary and a backup hosting service!

Obviously, the new sites won’t do overlly well to begin with so our little experiment will need to run for at least a year before we’ll know if it was a worthwhile experiment. Somehow I think that it will: already we have picked up one new property listing in America and they’ve already got a booking from us!

Popularity: 54% [?]