Foreign Perspectives

Archive for May, 2008

Most of the time you don’t really notice the rate at which technology moves along but when you dig out a piece of not-that-old technology and try to bring it up to date you can really be surprised.

Take my old SuperVHS tapes for instance. I was recording my holiday trips on those for nearly ten years and thought that it was time I sat down and got them copied onto the computer before the old SuperVHS player packs in and I lose them.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now but only just got around to making a serious start on the task a few weeks back thanks to a new version of a TV to PC interface I bought recently for another purpose. The first surprise was that although the new device is much smaller than the PVR that it replaces, there’s now no noticeable delay after you press the record button and when it begins recording. Well, it was bound to be faster so I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me.

What’s more amazing though is that although each 45 minute tape takes up around 1.2GB, that’s no longer a large chunk of disc space. At the time I bought the SuperVHS camcorder, the largest amount of space that I had available was 20MB (in 1993); the machine that I’m typing this on has 200GB ie ten thousand times the storage capacity. I originally thought that I’d have to copy the “tapes” onto an external drive but in fact the internal drive has more than enough space to hold all of them.

Shouldn’t I be copying them off onto DVD? I will be in due course but I think it’s more reliable to keep them on the internal disc and make them part of the normal backup process. There’s much more chance that I’ll be able to view them years from now if I do that: on DVD chances are that 1) they could get scratched and rendered unreadable and 2) DVDs may become obsolete and therefore unreadable in perhaps as little as 10 years.

And I did buy that new external drive but then I buy a new one every year as part of my normal backup plan. 250GB in a nice pocket sized drive is fantastic.

That’s the rather peculiar comment of some Germans who stayed with us.

Since German is a distant relative to the English language, English is much easier to speak for them than French and therefore we always start off in English with any German guests (learning German is close to the top of our “to do” list at the moment). Once we recognise where guests come from we try to speak to them in the most appropriate language at our command and we’re very confused by the comment of these non-French speaking Germans that stayed with us a few weeks ago.

OK, sometimes people like to practice their French on us but these people admited to not speaking any French!

Whenever you’ve a peak of bookings, you’re sure to have a peak of cancellations too.

Today for instance is a public holiday here which means, among other things, that the buses aren’t running. So, right on cue, we received a call this afternoon from someone who can’t reach us today. Since the cancellation conditions state that you need to cancel one day in advance, this would normally mean that we’d be billing him for the room tonight but we managed to pick up another booking for his room so he gets off without paying.

As there’s also a bank holiday on Monday, we’re pretty full at the moment and have just found out that the above guest doesn’t have any transport of his own and that a part of four walkers is coming to stay on Saturday night. That leaves us with five people checking out on Sunday who we now know don’t have any transport until Tuesday as there won’t be any buses or taxis on either Sunday or Monday.

I suspect that both lots may want (well, need) to stay another couple of days.

The English language course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being one of the hardest of all the courses that the university do.

Yet, although I’m getting consistently in the 90% mark for assignments, I’m starting to find that it’s one of the most boring courses that I’ve every done. If nothing else, that knocks down my theory that I always got good marks in subjects that I liked!

Having said that, it’s boring because of a peculiarity of the way in which the degree programme that I’m following is constructed. It’s a modern languages degree which most people would take to mean that it’s about foreign languages. Well, it is, mostly but you have to do one English language course to meet the degree requirements. The snag with that is that the French and Spanish programmes which I’ve already completed covered a good deal of the topics that are now being covered in the English course, albeit in different words.

So, for example, the current section of the English course is about learning English as a foreign language. I’ve covered learning Spanish as a foreign language (ie how to learn it as a foreign language rather than just learning it as a foreign language) already and although there are obviously differences in how English is learnt as a foreign language, it feels very much as a repeat of the Spanish segment.

Similarly, there was a section of the course on marketing English. I’ve already done that in the MBA.

Anyway, net effect of that repetition is that it looks likely that I’ll have completed the course by the end of June rather than the official end-date of September.

Whilst there seems to be a vast number of WordPress themes around in reality many of them are simple variations of a single theme.

Consider for example the theme I’m developing over at SevaTeem. I’ve started using early versions of it on various blogs to see how it flies. If you didn’t know that, you might think that the theme at A Time of Magic was completely different but in fact the only differences from that currently on SevaTeem are that the text is white instead of black and the background is different.

All being well, I’ll be releasing the theme to the world in a few weeks time so you’ll be able to play around with it yourself and perhaps create variants that even I wouldn’t recognise.