Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

One of the things that we considered doing was flying somewhere for the short break that we had last week rather than driving there.

Now, on the face of it, you’d think that with all the cheapo flight offers these days it would bound to be cheaper to fly. After all, you can get to loads of places for £10 including taxes these days.

However, even when you look at flight prices including taxes and so on there are many non-flight charges to take into account. For one thing, if you fly, you need to get to the airport at home and park your car which isn’t cheap (£10 a day at least). Then you need to get to the hotel at the other end which’ll either involve a taxi or car hire. Even on an optimistic view for a family of four that’s £40 for flights, £70 for parking and around £30 for a taxi ie £140 just for transport.

Last, but often not least, taking your own car means lots more space to pack stuff and flexibility in departure time too.

Certainly if you’re travelling any sizeable distance in Europe you’d need to add in the tolls (around £100 for a round-trip across France for example) and probably a similar amount for petrol but if you’re just taking a short break to Brittany or Normandy it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper to take the car.

You’d think that I’m getting paid for writing this stuff, but I’m not; I just think they’re brilliant.

Although the OU has been on the go since the early 1970’s strangely enough there doesn’t appear to be any serious competitor for them in the English-speaking world (there’s a rough equivalent in Spain). On first glance it would appear that there are equivalents in America but when you look in more detail at them you find that they do post graduate stuff or skip out the first year or two of a normal course. Even those that don’t do that only offer a limited range of programmes whereas the OU offers a very complete programme, the only major omission being medicine.

How come it doesn’t have any competitors though?

It’s quite hard to say in that these days Internet delivery of the courses means that a university can be anywhere whereas obviously it was harder to launch on a correspondence basis in the 1970s. Where it did have the advantage is that it had substantial government money behind it in the early days and perhaps that’s not been available elsewhere in the world up to now.

It doesn’t always work as such.

Oh, it’ll tell you where you are alright and point you in a direction that’ll get you where you want to go but the problem is that in some areas of which ours is one, the roads that it sends you down are the windy ones and anyone using it to reach us from the south always adds an hour or two to their journey because of this.

The problem is that once you get dependent on a technology like that you tend not to have a fall-back ie maps in this case. So, we found that our Danish guests didn’t arrive at 7pm but were much closer to 9pm and had been following a very “interesting” route to get to us, despite them having been here before.

I’ve been planning on upgrading the maps on our range of listings sites but hunting around the various places providing maps for websites quickly made me realise that it would cost far, far too much to buy the maps that I’d need. In that market, $100 per map is a typical price and I need something like 5 to 10 maps per country that I extend into.

In that paper maps are more like $5 a country I figured that going down the digitizer route was the way to go. Not only would this be substantially cheaper but I’d be able to add features to the various maps reasonably easily eg tourist attractions or specific towns and villages.

So, I started looking for a digitizer. Although these have been around for quite a while, it’s a fairly specialised device so you need to search in a reasonably large computer shop to find even one of them and that one is usually at the toy end of the range. Online, it is naturally different but the prices are something else or at least the range certainly is.

You can get an A4 tablet for anything from $75 or so through to $1000 for a start. Now, in practice although A4 sounds like what you’d want an A4 surface makes for a very large digitizer and it would appear most people go for the A5 size and for the most part the Wacom brand. However, even that’s not a whole lot of narrowing down as Wacom produce a whole heap of the things, many of which are very close in price.

In this particular market you don’t always seem to get what you pay for in that the price ranges of products aimed at the home and professional markets overlap considerably. So, for example, of the Wacom Graphire Wireless A5 Tablet and the Wacom Intuos3 A5 Tablet, either one can be the most expensive depending on the store yet reading the specs, the Intuos is clearly the one to go for.

Now, all I need to do is save up for it ‘cos I figured that it would be more like $50 than $300!

We’ve a little supermarket just beside us which we pop into quite often.

Now, you’d think that if you’ve only one item to get then it would take less time to get it than it would when you’ve a whole trolley to get. Except that it never works out like that.

Sure, you might have people in front of you but even if you remove that factor it still takes almost as long to get one item as it does to get most of a trolley load. Today for instance, I was just behind one old guy who’d maybe a half dozen items yet it took nearly 10 minutes to process those as he ran off to get something else while he was waiting then asked the checkout operator to get something for him which took her ages and, of course, he had to hunt for his money when she finally got through all the items.

If I’d been in the longer queue, I’d have been away quicker!