Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

One big misunderstanding that many people have is that global warming means that everywhere will get warmer.

Let’s face it, if it were the case that everywhere would get a couple of degrees warmer then many people would be OK about some low lying areas of the world disappearing under water.

Except, of course, it isn’t quite like that. That couple of extra degrees not only raises sea levels but it also changes weather patterns. Areas that might formally have been great spots for growing crops could easily become deserts and vice versa. Plus there’s the not insignificant matter that weather could also become more extreme: perhaps the flooding that we’ve seen in several world regions in recent years is a forerunner of that.

Everyone stretches the truth to some extent on job applications and, of course, the employers know that and allow for it.

But, what if you stretched it so much that you started writing that you could do X when in reality you couldn’t quite do it?

Obviously, it’s one of those situations where “it depends” is the only possible answer. Clearly it’s going to be a problem if X is absolutely key to doing the job but probably it’s a pretty minor thing if X falls into the category of “we thought we’d ask for somebody that could do X but don’t really expect to get someone who can”.

Naturally too the requirements of some jobs aren’t possible. I’ve seen the equivalent of “must have 40 years Unix experience” when Unix wasn’t around 40 years ago so nobody can fulfil that. Actually, it’s surprisingly common to see that kind of requirement in technical jobs (see http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080229.html and http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080301.html).

It has taken AGES but finally Foreign Perspectives is over onto the new hosting service. Well, I hope so anyway as the last attempt a month or so back didn’t work out due to several technical hitches which I think I’ve resolved this time.

One big problem I find is that the blog has been on the go so long long (just into it’s fourth year!) that it’s very big and the photos that I’ve collected over that time amount to megabytes. Combine that and you end up with all kinds of time-outs when you try to use the normal (read: easy) ways of moving it.

Anyway, fingers crossed it’s operational now.

Whilst it’s great to have WordPress available free, what’s not so hot is that now and again you hit little bugs in the software that you can’t do a whole lot about.

For example, at the moment, I’m continually getting “MySQL server has gone away” which is a time-out thing. There is a fix for it but unfortunately not for the version of WordPress that I’m running at the moment so I’m going to have to upgrade to a newer version soonish.

Ordinarily, I’d have upgraded right away but I want to move the blog to a new hosting service too and I’m having problems with the blogs that I’ve already moved so I’m going to try and live with that “server has gone away” message for a while yet as I don’t want to do the upgrade on the old hosting service.

One of the oddities of blogging is that it’s very easy to change the overall look of a blog without affecting the content at all.

Now, on the whole outside the regular readership most people arrive on a blog by way of a search engine of some sort. Some are blog specific, some are generic like google but either way they don’t see the site until they click on the search result ie it doesn’t really matter what the blog looks like as far as these people are concerned.

It’s different once they get to the site of course and if you want to keep them as regular readers you’ll need a look that’s appealing to them. Oh, and some interesting content of course.

Anyway, now that I’ve spruced up the template for Foreign Perspectives, I’ve picked up several new subscribers which is one plus point for the new template.