Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

One thing that’s very noticeable in Valencia is that everywhere you see employment vacancy signs which implies quite a strong local economy.

As in other places in Spain there’s building work going on just about everywhere but it doesn’t seem so intrusive as it does in some cities (notably Madrid) with many quiet areas around the city. There’s more of a laid-back feel about the city too: everyone is certainly going somewhere yet they’re not going at the hectic pace you often see in Barcelona.

With the building work, there’s certainly money to be made in property speculation of course and the apartment we rented was owned by a relatively young Spaniard.

And the banks? It seemed like almost wall to wall banks in most of the central area of the city. Both more branches and a much wider variety of banks that I’ve seen anywhere outside London. They’re all competing for business too with many offers available on loans, credit cards and so on.

In times gone by TV shows appeared, ran for a season or two and you never saw them again.

It’s different now of course. There are repeats of shows on all the time but, of course, not always of your very favourite show that you’ve not seen for years. Because of that, there’s a small number of specialised DVD sales sites that gather together recordings of the various cult or semi-cult TV shows from the past and provide them at relatively low cost considering the number of hours of programming that some shows run to.

Funnily enough, the further you go back, the longer tend to be the series runs available for shows. So, way back in 1960 One Step Beyond ran for 98 episodes and even Lost in Space runs to 83 whereas Dark Skies only got to 20.

What you’ll not see on these places usually are the mainstream shows as the production companies put out the official DVDs of these themselves. The semi-cult shows that you see from these places are those that just don’t have the following that the production company would need to make it worthwhile rolling out a DVD release.

Buying from a specialised shop often means that you pay a little more for the same product than you would from a supermarket. After all, the supermarket operates on the basis of “pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap” which is an excellent way to go for standard items like beans and whatnot.

However, move into a specialised area like sat nav and you sometimes need that little bit of expertise even when you’re sure that you know what you’re doing.

For example, we bought a TomTom on Christmas Eve in El Corte Ingles. That’s a fairly upmarket department store and therefore there are specialised departments for such things so it’s effectively in-between the supermarkets and the specialised stores. In practice, they were quite happily selling units that had a fault. Fair enough, they obviously can’t go around opening all the boxes and testing them but any that were returned went straight back on the shelf to be sold again. Stupid, eh?

So, we returned that one and bought the next model “up” in a supermarket for ‚€20 more. Unfortunately, although the shop was close to the French border they are piled high with models that can’t be used in both Spain and France as it’s the one model from the range that doesn’t use a memory card (which isn’t obvious as they cover up the relevant information on the box with their security label). So, we’ve to return to Spain this week to see about getting a refund for that too.

Perhaps we’ll get one third time around!

One of the problems that we have these days is that sometimes there’s just too much choice of little gadjets available.

Take the Palm series of handhelds for example.

Now, you can pretty much discount the Z22 as a teaser product or toy as it’s basically just there to fill in a gap at the bottom end of the market and not, in my view, a really serious contender.

Move up about 50% in price and you get to the likes of the Tungsten E2 shown here. That gives you a pretty wide range of funcions with everything from a sensible SD card slot to hold movies and whatnot to Bluetooth. You can even surf on this if your phone has bluetooth too.

However, add another 50% in the price and you’ll get the TX. This little baby has a much bigger screen and adds wifi to the list of functions (along with a massive list of capabilities).

Both will let you work with MS Office text and spreadsheets and you can even exchange e-mails with them.

Just to complicate your life even further, you can get the TX on ebay for much the same price as the E2 in the shops.

I find myself in the peculiar situation of having finished all the foreign language segments of my modern languages degree and so have “just” one more course in the english language to do next year.

That completes the degree but I’d like to do something following it so have been tossing around a few ideas over the last few weeks since I’ll need to sign up for the first course of the next degree before next summer and won’t really have a whole lot of time to think about it once I get going on the english course next month.

One easy option, or at least easy choice, would be to complete the Diploma in English which means doing one more english course following the one I’m about to start. I’ve already eliminated the “art of engligh” course as being something that I’d not really be able to stick at which leaves the english grammar course. To be honest, I’m not really fired up about english grammar so that’s looking doubtful at the moment.

I’d also quite like to do their Creative Writing course but that seems to mean that I need to do the humanties course first. I’ve already read all but one of the recommended books for the humanities course so that’s a possibility I suppose though, again, I’m not really fired up about it either.

Which leaves the chemistry or physics degree that I’ve always meant to get around to doing. That’s also a realtively easy choice in that they both start with the same course so it puts off the choice of final degree for at least another year. I’ve heard really good things about that so chances are that I’ll run with that.