Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

If you’re in the market for something to scan medical cards you really need a specialised scanner as you’ll spend ages getting them scanned using a standard scanner.

The Medicscan scanner offers you all the features you would expect of a specialised scanner and all you need is a USB port on your computer to use it. Both the scanning and the image processing are automatic and start as soon as you insert a card into the scanner. To save your time, the image processing takes place in the background so you’re not left waiting around for that to be done.

Once you’ve got it into your system you’ll not need to be constantly referring to photocopies of the cards as the scanned image can be pulled up right in front of you whenever you need it. Naturally both sides of the card can be scanned.

The ScanShell 800N is a small-footprint, twain compatible, A6 color scanner with 600DPI scanning resolution for sharp and clear images. What’s “twain compatible”? That just means that it’s compatible with just about all scanning software. Since it’s USB powered, you don’t need yet another power socket to plug it into either which, as we all know, seem to breed!

James doesn’t go to school on Wednesdays so we are planning on going somewhere or other whenever we hit a Tuesday night and don’t have any guests booked in.

Anyway, the first of these little trips is tomorrow all being well.

Where to though?

Well, the game plan is to pick him up from school at 5pm and start driving so we don’t want anywhere more than about three or four hours drive of here. Therefore the initial short-list is Albi (of Toulouse-Lautrec fame), Arles (for the Roman history) and Valencia (‘cos it looks nice and is warm).

So far, it looks like Arles and Albi are out on weather grounds so ’tis off to Valencia (or some point south anyway) tomorrow.

OK, I’m not there yet, but at least it seems to be heading in the right direction.

As we’re edging into the Winter here, it becomes more and more appealing. We’ve obviously a lot less to do during the day and, possibly more importantly, I’m not doing the studying as the Spanish course is finished.

So far, it would appear to be quite a good fit with our normal activities as we’re busy in the Summer when there are relatively few paid post opportunities yet don’t have much to do in the Winter when there seem to be a lot more paid opportunities available.

The castle at Chantilly is one of the small collection of spectacular chateaux in the general Paris region. Yet, there’s a whole lot more to it than that as you can see from our Whole Earth entry on it.

Perhaps surprisingly, the castle houses one of the foremost collections of historical paintings in France and yet it receives relatively few visitors for that collection.

It’s easy enough to get there from Paris and very worthwhile too. Not only do you get a chateau, there’s the magnificent gardens and the artwork thrown in too!

Even aside from the money aspect, I quite like a lot of the paid posts that come along.

For instance, I’ve written a whole stream of them about various holiday destinations and I love writing about stuff like that. I’ve even started up Whole Earth Guide so I can write more of it!

The finance related ones have been fairly thick on the ground here too as I can usually talk the leg off a table when speaking about finance as many people will attest to!

But now and again you get surprises.

For instance, today, PayPerPost just offered a very nice looking African safari post. At least it looked quite nice at first glance. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to go on a safari? Second glance revealed though that they want you to promote a place that guarantees you’ll kill a set number of endangered species.

Now, aside from the moral aspect of that, it’s actually illegal in that PPP is based in America and therefore subject to American laws.

I’m not blaming them on putting it on because I’m sure the whole process is quite automatic and after all it’s Sunday so chances are that they’ve locked the door and left the computers in charge but it just goes to show the range of things that you can get ie you can’t just start typing away with a post before you read what they’re actually wanting you to write about.