Foreign Perspectives

The photo shows the kind of weather we were expecting to get this February but in reality that photo was taken in January 2006.

Naturally, everyone went out and bought snow chains after the snow that you see in the photo. In fact, that is the only day that we have had snow in three years. All that snow landed in a matter of hours one day in January last year, was completely gone the next day and a few days afterwards we were back into the t-shirts.

This year we’ve not had any snow yet and have been in the t-shirts almost every day since February last year. Even the usual wind that comes mainly in the Winter in this area has kept away so we’ve been eating lunch outside nearly all of the time. Even more peculiar is the sight of the locals sunning themselves in the cafés around the town when ordinarily they wear really serious Winter clothing from mid-September through to the following May but with temperatures regularly over 20c for ages, even they are starting to adjust their habits.

Since we’re now equipped with snow chains, we were hoping to head out to one of the local ski resorts a few times over the Winter but even they have only been opened relatively recently compared to the more normal November to March. Net effect is that instead of ski-ers staying with us we’ve had normal tourists looking for somewhere a little warmer than more northerly parts of Europe.

Every time that I raise this issue, someone quotes their bank manager as having said that it’s perfectly safe to hand out your details in this way and that it’s impossible to take money out using only those details. Haven’t these people even heard of direct debits? After all, a direct debit uses exactly the same information as you quote to receive money. Now, I’m not suggesting that a fraudster is going to set up a direct debit and then withdraw money from your account using it but there are a number of very similar ways to do that. For example, if you care to give me YOUR bank details, I could set up a one-off transfer by simply looking up the address of your bank and faxing them the instructions to do that. You might think that wouldn’t work as they check the signatures, but actually they only check a small percentage of the signatures so it almost certainly would work. Then people say that it must be safe because the electicity company quotes their details for payments so how come someone hasn’t cleaned them out by now? They haven’t because they quote the number of their collection account and collection accounts reject electronic withdrawals.

Since a small business doesn’t have the option of a collection account the safest thing to do is to quote a savings account number as you can’t withdraw money electronically from a savings account.

In the English speaking world the two are quite separate. India clearly isn’t an Anglo-saxon culture yet they speak English and even Hong-Kong remained very much a Chinese culture even when it was a British colony. Yet, the French would seemingly argue that both India and Hong-Kong are Anglo-Saxon.

Even the French world has examples of the separation these days. France24 put out a full English-language news service yet it is still quite clearly a French channel. Perhaps the most interesting example though is of the TV series Nikita which although based on the French film of the same name was made entirely in English yet still came across as a French series.

The other thing that I found odd was that they seemingly considered all English speakers to be Anglo-Saxon which I suppose is reasonable if you start with the premise that language and culture aren’t separable.

It was also a little strange to come across a group of people from a fairly major language grouping who were so defensive about their language. You’dt from a group speaking very much a minority language, not from speakers of one of the top 15 world languages. For instance, they have a law that says all government services must of be offered in French. OK, it’s France so you would expect them to be in French but why should that require a law?

Each time a new entry is added various services such as Feedburner, Technorati and more specialised services like PingOMatic inform all the other news-type services that you’ve done that. The net effect of this is that you get the equivalent of a new listing every time you add an entry which can both produce an immediate flurry of hits on the blog and also helps the more gradual building up of hits from the normal search engines.

What’s also quite different from a normal website is that you get feedback and comments on what you said. For instance, a few weeks back I was speculating as to how many people were reading this blog, I was very surprised to have a reply from the Feedburner people themselves. There’s also much more interaction between the various bloggers than there is between people running up normal websites.

One “problem” with a blog is that you really have no idea how many people are actually reading it. The likes of feedburner return a count as to how many people are potentially subscribed to the blog but that doesn’t count those subscribed directly via the e-mail subscriptions and, on the whole, there doesn’t seem to be any 100% reliable way of counting those who reach entry.

What has really surprised me though is that somehow or other this blog has managed to get into the top 1/2 million blogs already which is pretty good going I think considering that I’ve only been doing it properly for six months or so.