Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2007

Our main busy season is, of course, in the Summer months when we don’t have school runs to do.

However, we generally get a bit of a jump in occupancy towards the end of September which takes us almost up to Summer levels. Snag is that we are also in the midst of school runs at that time which complicates scheduling no end.

Naturally, when you’d rather people stayed a little later in the morning that’ll be the day that they decide to head off early and that’s where we get our problems as their departure time usually falls right in the middle of the time that we’re off to leave James to school.

Even more complicated is when I’m off to do my Open University exam. At the moment, we don’t have many people over that period but, of course, Sod’s Law applying to such things we’ll probably end up full of awkward guests for Wendy to deal with.

Thankfully it’s the end of the grape picking season locally now and things are back to normal…. no more security guards in the shops and no more grape pickers hanging around everywhere.

Why the security guards? Simply because with the arrival of the grape pickers, the crime goes through the roof.

As well as that we’re able to get croissants in the shops again in the mornings.

They’re not completely gone as some vineyards have still to be picked but the numbers are right down to perhaps a handful of pickers in the area now.

We were thinking of buying our car in the UK this time in that we’re sort-of expecting to be there fairly soon.

Then we looked at the prices.

How many times have there been European investigations into the overlly high car prices in the UK and yet still the price difference we found was around 30% or more on exactly the same car. Well, perhaps not exactly the same. Sure, the steering wheel is at the other side but then we bought a Japanese car and seeing as they drive on the left themselves, the European version should cost more as clearly it needs to be modified into a car for driving on the right.

Last time we bought a car there were differences in the specification in that the French car didn’t have a CD player nor radio whereas the UK model did. However, adding a CD/radio would have added, at best, £200 to the car (the French car was fully wired for it) yet the UK model cost something like £2000 more.

Must be time for another European investigation into UK car prices.

One of the hardest parts of blogging when you’re starting out is the complete lack of feedback that you get.

In many ways, at the start it feels very much like you’re writing to yourself because of that. The other problem is that with the lack of feedback, many new bloggers lose the initial enthusiasm leading to the massively high rate of attrition that blogs have in the first three months.

Once you clear that three month hurdle, it seems to get easier though most blogs still aren’t getting much feedback even by that time. What’s different is that by that time you’ve just become too stubborn to stop writing regardless of whether or not anyone seems to be reading it.

However, if you do want some feedback, the easiest way to do it is to mention one of the main blogging sites. The likes of technorati and feedburner do read blogs, or at least the posts that mention them. In fact, I was quite surprised to see that somebody from Feedburner replied to a post I made months ago but then, if you think about it, blogs are their business so they need to read blogs.

The computer we bought today will be the last major purchase on our part for a while although I imagine that I could talk myself into getting Office 2007 for it rather than using Office 2003 that we already have. The new computer comes with a limited time edition of it so I’ll likely have a look into the cost of a student upgrade as they’re usually sensibly priced.

We’ve a slide scanner and digitizer pencilled in as our next IT purchases.

The slide scanner will let me use the massive library of slides that I’ve built up over the years rather than having to license photos for Whole Earth.

The digitizer is to let me improve the quality of maps used on our listings sites and to bring them all in-house. One limitation that we have at the moment is the totally over the top price to license maps for some countries: no license and you’re stuck with the very basic maps that the CIA put out in their World Factbook.

Snag is that a decent digitizer can run to hundreds of pounds and it’s something that we’d use relatively rarely: after the initial burst of usage, we’d probably only be getting it out of the box once or twice a year.