Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

If you’re travelling over the Christmas period and haven’t booked yet, then don’t hang around when you see a decent price as it’ll not be there for long.

Just about all the discount airlines operate load balancing software which means that as the plane fills up the prices rise automatically. Actually, it’s as the plane appears to be filling up that this happens so you shouldn’t constantly check the prices of a particular flight directly with the airline as this will have the effect of making the price rise.

Hotels aren’t so bad but the cheaper hotels and the cheaper rooms within a particular hotel tend to be booked first so the longer you leave it, the higher the price you’ll have to pay.

Buses usually don’t do this but those aimed at tourists tend to. For example, a route I priced recently has risen from the normal EUR 38 to EUR 134 this morning.

The one area where you’re usually OK is with trains but even if they don’t raise the prices (and many franchised lines will) they’ll fill up over the peak holiday seasons.

Not so long ago, e-books were very much a niche market but times change.

Ebooks are a pretty major outlet these days and the range has expanded far beyond the original list of classics and self-publications to include mainstream publications. Sadly some of that has brought along almost bookstore pricing in some cases which does seem a bit much given that it clearly doesn’t cost the publishers as much to sell you an electronic version of a book as it does to sell you a paper one.

Stories abound about the lives ruined by the latest slapdown by google.

I’ve just read of two people losing their jobs because of it. The drop in pagerank is a theoretical thing for google yet now two people are on the dole because of it and they didn’t violate google’s terms of service because, contrary to google may think, google’s terms of service don’t apply to the Internet as a whole.

But why bother at all? They seem to want the market in paid links to stop essentially because it doesn’t suit their algorithm to have paid links. In their ideal world the only links provided are those that are “natural” ie when someone links to a site that they’ve come across and think is great rather than a site that they’ve been paid to link to. In their ideal world, advertising just wouldn’t exist. Well, except for adsense from google, of course.

One of the things that I thought would be hard to do with the graphics pad was the business of looking at the screen yet drawing with the pen on the pad.

In fact, it doesn’t seem to require any adjustment at all. Within a few seconds I was drawing away no problem at all.

Simple things are very simple with the pad but there’s a lot more capability that can be brought into use with the pad that I have. For one thing, the heavier you lean on the pen, the heavier the line becomes. Vista adds a whole bunch more functionality too but I’ve not even scratched the surface of that yet.

Retouching photos looks like it will be somewhat easier too though, so far, I’ve not attempted that with the pen yet.

One of the surprising things is how naff many computer shops are when you’re looking for something even marginally out of the ordinary.

We decided to upgrade the maps on the listings sites a while back and when I saw the prices being asked for what was, in almost all cases, a fairly primitive map for use online I figured that the best route would be to buy a graphics pad and run up custom maps myself. After all, they’re not particularly intricate for the most part but with custom maps it would be nice to be able to add special features to the maps – points of particular interest for example.

So off I went to untold numbers of computer shops and the best that they could come up with was a fairly naff A5 pad at best and in most cases just the A6 version which is rather small to be drawing maps on.

In reality there’s only one graphics pad to go for and that’s the Wacom Intuos range yet not one single computer shop had them so I ended up ordering from Amazon.