Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

I’m just about to start the final course of my modern languages degree and although it’s actually the English course whereas all the others were in foreign languages, I’m finding that I’m dreading that first tutorial just the same!

Still, at least I shouldn’t find myself wanting to ask a question yet not knowing what the words are which can happen sometimes in the foreign language tutorials. It’ll be the very first tutorial that I’ve done in english for over 15 years so I’m sure it’ll feel a little bit peculiar.

In fact the first tutorial is a couple of days before the official starting date for the course so I’m not sure what we’ll be getting up to in it. Also it’s supposed to be an e-learning course so I’m not sure why there are any in-person tutorials at all although to be fair there are only four of them listed whereas normally there’d be something like twice that number for a course at this level.

In years gone by people might think you a little crazy to buy a professional SLR but at least you could keep taking photos with it for many years to come and indeed I still have my Nikon F3 bought shortly after they came out in 1980 and it takes photos just as well now as it did then.

Digital cameras are a different matter though.

I’ve a couple of photos taken with a professional digital camera way back in 1997. The £2000 camera used to take them was the top of the line at the time and yet these days the 640×480 resolution would be laughed at as even the cheapest of digital cameras can better that.

It’s the same today too. You can spent £3400 on a new Nikon D3 and bask in the luxury of 12.8mp images. On the other hand you could spend around £400 on a Nikon D40X and have pretty respectable 10mp images. That’s not to say that the extra 2.8mp isn’t worth having but rather that chances are that the successor to the D40X will probably cost around the £400 mark and offer it potentially as soon as next year; certainly two years on and the D40X’s successor will have a good deal higher resolution than the D3 and more than likely still be around 10% of the price.

So, as with computers, the best strategy is probably to buy the cheapest DSLR in the range with a view to replacing it in, say, two or three years time with the latest edition of the same model.

All the mobile phone companies offer to move your existing number from another provider thus letting you retain your existing number.

Unfortunately, that service doesn’t yet exist for e-mail addresses. That wouldn’t be too bad but many people tend to just use the e-mail address provided by their ISP so if they move house or change ISP you lose touch with them. Others seem to flit from one freebie e-mail provider to another pretty much all the time thus making their e-mail address pretty much useless.

It doesn’t need to be like that though. All you need to do is to buy a domain (costing as little as £5/year) which’ll come with an e-mail facility. This frees you forever from being tied to an ISP and telling people that you’ve changed your e-mail.

Which is how come I’ve had the same e-mail address for ten years now.

If you’re looking for a house in the UK at the moment, it’s pretty much the ideal time with lots of bargains around.

Usually to get a “bargain” you need to look for something well off the beaten track or needing some work done to it but at the moment that, for the most part, doesn’t apply. Whereas normally prices in the UK are usually firm, at the moment many people are open to negotiation so you’re quite likely to get an offer lower than the asking price accepted. Obviously not ridiculously low but you can probably start around 10% below the asking price.

Getting a mortgage is a different matter though as the criteria have been tightened up somewhat of late but if you’re able to bargain down the seller a little then the loan % should also go down and thereby make it easier for you to make that bargain purchase.

Let’s suppose our hypothetical time traveller was by chance able to make a really concrete prediction about what was going to happen say, next Tuesday, and it didn’t happen.

That would prove that he wasn’t from the future after all, wouldn’t it?

It’s not quite so simple as that. If he predicted that World War 3 was going to happen next Tuesday then you’re definitely dealing with a hoaxer. Major events like that which would have a considerable lead-up to them would be fairly definitive evidence that it was a hoaxer that you were talking to. On the other hand, if World War 3 was actually going to happen next Tuesday then chances are that you’d know about it too: such things rarely happen without a lot of preceeding events pointing to them happening well in advance of the event itself.

But what about more minor things? Sports results are a big iffy. For example, if you were to place large bets on the basis of what your “time traveller” said then that could by itself affect the outcome of the game.

And, that’s the problem really. Large scale events would have lots of preceeding smaller events leading up to them and thereby be largely predictable by many people whereas smaller scale events could be influenced by the very fact of the time traveller telling you about them.