Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

As the number of people writing paid posts goes up, the quality of some of the new writing appears to be going down.

One consequence of this is that a number of the sites offering paid posts have started adding quality markings to bloggers or are in the course of implementing schemes to let them do that. Interestingly though, the quality of spelling and grammar that the advertisers use is also going down. In fact, in most cases those saying that they will reject posts with bad spelling or grammar display the very worst examples of both themselves.

That bad spelling and grammar even extends to the links that you are required to use. In a growing number of cases they don’t work yet we have to use the link as specified or the post gets rejected.

Perhaps the worst source of these is PayPerPost although that’s probably a side-effect of them having so many paid posts on offer.

One we’re about to do has the conflicting requirements that they’ll reject posts with spelling mistakes yet the link that I have to use has a spelling mistake in it which in turn is reflected in their website!

It took a while but now that James has stopped saying that “Daddy’s doing his French” and gotten the hang of “Daddy’s doing his Spanish”, it’ll soon be time for him to be saying “Daddy’s doing his English”.

This time next, all being well, I’ll have just completed my Modern Languages Degree and so ’tis time to think of what to do next…

A very long time ago, I’d a choice between doing a Computer Science degree and a Chemistry one and chose the computer route seeing as it was easier and the pay was better. So, I thought I’d have a go at the other route and not too long after Easter next year I’m planning on enrolling for the first course of said chemistry degree which looks pretty interesting and should keep me out of trouble for the next six or seven years.

On the other hand the physics degree looks quite interesting too although it sounds a whole lot harder at this point. Still, both French and Spanish sounded impossible to me seven years ago so who knows?

Blogs from accommodation providers are fascinating things to read.

In the blogging world, they quite simply can’t use “in your face” marketing and therefore usually end up producing blogs that people want to read. Obviously they are broadly in the area of “accommodation news” but that remit is stretched very widely!

For instance, there’s the story on the air conditioned bus stop in Dubai.  OK, it’s there because these guys have accommodation listings there but it’s interesting anyway, isn’t it?

Or, what about the top destinations for uni grads? This gives a very nice top 4 list of locations. Interestingly, this reflects the fact that the producers of this particular blog are from Australia in that “uni” is Ozzie for university and, of course, the graduation time elsewhere isn’t the same (school/university years run February to December there rather than September to June elsewhere).

Most of the time we just take it for granted that American is pretty much the same as English and at least that we know the differences (color not colour, check not cheque, etc.) but some differences in interpretation can cause problems.

The main problem we have is with our pickup and dropoff service. This is a service that we offer for the likes of walkers who frequently arrive at the airport or rail station without cars but who’d like to start their walking in our area (it’s very popular for that).

Most of the time our guests are couples and we’ve only once had a family arrive wanting a pickup. Therefore we don’t need to get a minibus or similar and can easily do the pickups and dropoffs in our car, sometimes with the aid of the trailer for the luggage.

Critically, from the American perspective, it isn’t a “shuttle service” and we never use that phrase in any of our marketing because we’re just not setup to offer such a thing. Yet, consistently, the Americans read “pickup/dropoff service” as “shuttle service” and thereby have an expectation of its capability that we just aren’t equipped to fulfil.

For instance, a few weeks ago, despite several e-mail exchanges a large group arrived wanting to book the shuttle bus for the nine of them. Earlier, we had one couple who wanted to catch the shuttle to and from the city every day and, were none too pleased when we weren’t able to collect them from the town a couple of times during their stay.

I’m just getting settled in with the new laptop (Toshiba A200) which is something of a major upgrade from the last one weighing in at 200GB disc, 2GB RAM and 1.86GHz dual-core (which isn’t the same as Core Duo in case you were wondering).

Unfortunately, Microsoft in their wisdom saw fit to not bother testing Outlook 2003 running under Vista. It worked quite nicely yesterday but has now totally given up on me so I’m in the process of downloading yet another patch in an attempt to sort it out.

Sadly my trusty Norton speed tester dating from way back in 1996 won’t run under Vista so I’ll have to find something similar to carry on my unbroken record from the computer I had way back then. Suffice to say that it’s a LOT faster than the Toshiba A5 that it’s replacing.