Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

With all this running around Roman remains that we’ve been doing of late, I’m sort-of half toying with the idea of doing a course to learn something more about that era.

As usual, I should never even pick up an Open University prospectus as there are just too many interesting little courses in it which could keep you busy for several lifetimes. Still… their course on Exploring the Classical World would seem to fit the bill perfectly. The only problem with it really is that it’s a 60 point course which requires a fairly full committment unlike the 30 point ones which can be done as a sideline.

Funnily enough for a level 2 course, it doesn’t have any prerequisites as such other than a wishy-washy recommendation to do the Humanities course which I’ve heard, whilst interesting, isn’t worth doing in terms of being a stepping stone to further course.

Everywhere you go in the world today you’ll find a keyboard in the family QWERTY layout. Except in France.

That’s because the French style keyboard that was developed by Dvorak is a second generation keyboard design.

Way back in the early days of typewriters, the keys jammed frequently and to solve this problem the manufacturers adopted the now familiar QWERTY layout to slow down the speed of the earliest typists. Although the early problems were solved quickly enough, the design stuck across the world despite all attempts to update it with a more logical layout.

Meanwhile though in France, Dvorak came along after those initial problems were solved and developed a keyboard layout which equally balances the workload across both hands and thereby considerably speeds up typing. However, although it would obviously be a doddle to change over to that layout these days by simply changing the keys around and using a different driver, I suspect that we’ll be stuck with QWERTY until the day comes when we’re not using keyboards anymore.

You need to be pretty organised in packing for a last-minute mini-holiday.

The best plan is to reset the contents of your case shortly after you get home from the previous holiday. That usually amounts to just taking out all the clothing but leaving in all the essentials such as your passport, a few credit cards, driving license, electrical adaptors, and so on.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easily done as that if you vary your “holidays” by going on business trips as well as those will generally require a slightly different range of essentials. Likewise, if you constantly go to different countries then things like guidebooks and phrasebooks will, of course, need to be changed.

Still, the principles remain: keep the passport, driving license and at least one credit card in your case and you will probably be able to buy the rest. On the guidebook front, you can keep a very general guidebook in it too eg the Lonely Planet Western Europe guide will cover a vast range of short break holiday destinations.

Malin over at Infektia has been getting a bit innundated by junk comments of late as indeed have I.

Why? Surely they should all be killed by Akismet? Ah, well, yes, but Akismet relies on bloggers reporting spam comments and adds the relevant senders to its database thus stopping future ones. However, the number of spammers is more than likely going up and perhaps bloggers are just deleting the spam rather than reporting it thus Akismet doesn’t learn as well as it used to.

I’ve also noticed another type of spam in the sense that since I started writing paid posts and thereby started writing a whole lot more than I used to, increasing numbers of the posts are being picked up by “spam aggregators” ie aggragation services that simply run a search for, say, “loans” and list the posts from all blogs that come up. In many ways, this is even worse than spam comments as it makes the whole “blog authority” scheme even more worthless than it was becoming courtesy of various large scale mutual linking schemes that are around these days.

Anyway, I guess we need to wait for WordPress to come up with some way of weeding out the spam linkers.

We’ve finally gotten around to booking a hotel for this evening in Arles.

The game plan is that we collect James from school at 5pm and keep driving ’til we get there. Most of the way is motorway and it’s a hotel just off the motorway exit so we should be there in about 2 1/2 hours or so.

What’s in Arles though? It’s one of a small group of towns at the western end of Provence which had a heavy Roman influence. There’s quite a sizeable amphitheatre in the town along with numerous other Roman era relics. Looks like it’s quite lively this time of year too as a number of the hotels were full when we tried to book this morning.

Also in the area is the Camargue nature reserve which we passed through many years ago on the canal boat. We might get to see that tomorrow afternoon on the way back here.

This is something of a scouting trip too in that we’re intending to go somewhere this weekend as well and will likely pass that way yet again. As usual with our mini-holidays, the location and length of it hasn’t been decided yet but currently in the frame are Albi and Valencia which didn’t make it today due to the weather, and perhaps Geneva and/or Lausanne which are around six hours drive but would be useful scouting trips for our proposed Christmas break in southern Germany.