Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

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.

Whilst this isn’t really an out and out financial blog as such I write about various financial topics from time to time as you’ve probably noticed.

What’s odd about them is that any time I write about something financial, I always get a little flurry of incoming links from an assorted collection of blog aggregation services. They’re always blog aggregators rather than real blogs too whereas any other incoming links are almost always from real blogs.

Why that should be the case I’ve no idea but it’s certainly handy in increasing the number of incoming links to the site.

Doing the English component of my modern languages degree as the very last course after years of learning both French and Spanish gives a slightly peculiar perspective.

For one thing, I know a lot of the linguistics words that they’re using but I only know the French and Spanish words for the relevant terms. It’s a little peculiar being able to speak about English using French or Spanish words!

It’s taught quite differently to the foreign language components too and seems, to me, much easier than they were even though, in principle, this course is at the same educational level as the foreign language ones. One very noticeable aspect of this is that I find that I can work on the English well into the evening whereas I couldn’t do that with either the French or the Spanish until towards the end of those segments.

The course starts off with something of a potted history of the English language itself and in particular it homes in one how very old English words and expressions live on in many of the dialects that are spoken around the UK today. Interestingly, some of these are now strongly associated with particular regions whereas they’d have been used throughout what is now the UK several centuries ago. For example, “wee” is very much seen as a Scottish term for “small” but it’s actually an Old English word dating back over 1000 years and one of many where the Scots even retain the phraseology of Old English in their use of it.

It looks like that for a second year running winter has pretty much passed us by.

The trees are already showing signs of greenery and many of the fruit trees are already flowering. Good for us, of course, but it looks like the local ski resorts have had another pretty poor year as there wasn’t a whole lot of snow on the mountain just behind us which is usually completely covered from November through to April.

Just as well we didn’t restock on the heating oil!