Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

We’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the latest versions of both these satnav systems over the last couple of weeks ie the sensibly priced Tomtom One v3 and the Garmin Nuvi 250W.

On a first comparison, the Tomtom seems the better of the two in that the menus offer a lot more options compared to the Garmin model. However, the majority of those extra options are to do with things like changing the voice and various non-navigation related features. There’s also a range of display related options letting you add the current speed, max speed, time remaining and so on where the Garmin just shows your speed and projected arrival time and next turn. OK, so you’ll play around with all those extra options but realistically the arrival time (or the time remaining) plus your next turn is all you actually need and, in general, that’s the theme for the Garmin: it gives you the information that you need without all the extraneous information that the Tomtom provides.

One key difference though is that the Tomtoms don’t have a memory card slot whereas the Garmin do. With the increasing range of maps available these days and all the extra detail that comes out with each new version that’s a builtin obselence on the part of the Tomtom which is going to cost you dear sooner or later. For example, if you get the Tomtom One single-country version you’ll find that you’re stuck with the map that’s preloaded because the machine hasn’t got enough memory to load any other countries. In the equivalently priced Garmin you have an SD slot which would let you load maps of a continent if you wanted to. If you buy Tomtom UK and would like to add the European maps for the holidays, you can’t.

Incidently, on the map pricing front, it’s probably better to spend the extra £30 upfront to get the European maps rather than run with the UK only ones. The European maps, of course, include the UK. If you’re going for the Tomtom, you have to make this decision at the outset but you could add a memory card for the extra maps in the Garmin.

Overall, I prefer the current Tomtom software but that lack of a memory card means that you’ll be throwing it away in a few years when the maps grow too large when paying £5 or so will get you a very large memory card these days and upgrade your Garmin to hold much larger maps.

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.

Not so long ago the talk was all about how we’d all be working from home by now and it all seemed terribly practical if you listened to the sales pitches but then I’m sure the flying cars did when that idea was pitched in the 1960s as transportation for the 1990s.

Realistically, the majority of people will always need to be “at work” in some way. Certainly, it doesn’t seem likely that there’ll be portable steel mills around anytime soon that would be suitable for home use and I can’t really see car manufacturing getting going as a cottage industry on any kind of large scale.

However, there are an increasing number of jobs where it doesn’t really matter where you are when you’re doing them. Whilst, blogging isn’t my main job (yet) it obviously doesn’t matter where I do it from so long as I have a half-decent Internet connection to write the stuff with and there are a lot of jobs in that category such as telesales and the like. Service and software industries in effect rather than manufacturing. Clearly we will always need a great deal of manufacturing capability around but for many service industries it doesn’t matter where you are in the world these days as ADSL is available right out in the sticks in many countries.

Naturally, for those of us working from home it’s cheaper in many ways for us. No more commuting to work for a start although that can be counteracted by having to heat your home of course (unless you’ve set yourself up on some idyllic beach).

Is it for you though? If it’s just you at home it could easily get very lonely and naturally there isn’t the office banter that you may have gotten used to.

I got the Nikon SB600 flash as a Christmas present but have only just started using it a little bit.

Whilst the flash itself is light enough, adding in the four batteries makes for a pretty heavy chunk of gear to lug around when it’s attached to the camera itself. It’s an awful lot faster recycling than the on-camera flash with all those extra batteries and, of course, the more serious lamp that it has means that I should be able to use it much farther back from the action than I could with the oncamera flash.

I always think that people are incredibly optimistic about the ability of their little flash units on their compact cameras to illuminate entire stadiums sometimes. Still, at least it’s not so bad as it was in the good old days of film and they can just delete the image when it doesn’t turn out.

Must see about reading the instructions for this one at some stage as there’s lots of buttons and, of course, it links in with facilities on the camera too.

In theory this’ll get published right on the stroke of midnight but since I suspect that there’ll be quite a lot of people timing posts for that particular time I suspect that it’ll appear a little later.

Well, it’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?

When we kicked off the year we were in blissful ignorance of the money to be made from sponsored posts yet now it looks like it’ll be quite a substantial chunk of our income in due course and we’re making a point of branching out with new blogs these days. Meanwhile, our listings sites have gone from strength to strength will both rising numbers of entries and rapidly rising numbers of bookings for those listed too. We’ve even moved into online guides which’ll be a focus for 2008.

Marketing all the above has been something that we did much more actively in 2007 and it’s paid off rather well so we’ll be restarting that in January 2008.

What about Mas Camps? It’s still plugging along of course but we’re hoping to be moving to pastures new in the course of 2008. Where, we don’t yet know although we’re hoping that James will be starting in a new school in September so we hope to get things sorted before the summer is upon us.

I’ve picked up a university Diploma in Spanish which leaves me one more course to do in 2008 to complete my modern languages degree (one phrase I never expected to be using!).