Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

It seems like ages since I’ve knocked airport security…

I bought a bunch of electronic gadjets whilst I was over in Belfast so figured that the best plan was to put all of it in a single case on the basis that it was sure to require some additional searching. What I’d not allowed for was that they’d want to search the other case too, hence almost 30 minutes in airport security resulting in me nearly missing the plane.

I should have went earlier I hear you say. Ah, but they wouldn’t let me into the security area any earlier. I went through as soon as I was allowed to as I knew that they need to do some additional searching of the case.

It really is getting qute crazy these days. Everyone is carrying more and more electonic bits & bobs but the airport security people just don’t seem to have moved on in being able to deal with it nor in their training as to what they should really be looking for. Despite the lady and gentleman making a slow and methodical search, they still missed checking two items which they should have checked (and, no, they weren’t small items either).

How come they missed them? Well, both items would have turned up on the scanner but the guy running the scanner doesn’t do the searching and so things are missed when they shouldn’t be.

After promising people for ages that I was going to upgrade the maps on the listings sites, I’ve finally gotten around to making a proper start on it as you can see from the first edition of the new map of Europe that appeared on the site this afternoon.

That European map is long overdue as I’ve been adding a couple of countries each year as I’ve gone along which had made the original format less and less viable. I say that it’s the first edition because I’ll need to add a couple of countries further east than those on the map here and, of course, there’s the entries in China and Thailand.

So, in practice, that map is merely stage one of the sites going global with the maps but that’ll need a bit of restructuring of the database so it’ll be a “while” before all of the planned changes come online.

Still, a good start with the graphics pad I think. Next up is France which needs some tidying up and then Spain which needs a lot of tidying up.

If you’re travelling over the Christmas period and haven’t booked yet, then don’t hang around when you see a decent price as it’ll not be there for long.

Just about all the discount airlines operate load balancing software which means that as the plane fills up the prices rise automatically. Actually, it’s as the plane appears to be filling up that this happens so you shouldn’t constantly check the prices of a particular flight directly with the airline as this will have the effect of making the price rise.

Hotels aren’t so bad but the cheaper hotels and the cheaper rooms within a particular hotel tend to be booked first so the longer you leave it, the higher the price you’ll have to pay.

Buses usually don’t do this but those aimed at tourists tend to. For example, a route I priced recently has risen from the normal EUR 38 to EUR 134 this morning.

The one area where you’re usually OK is with trains but even if they don’t raise the prices (and many franchised lines will) they’ll fill up over the peak holiday seasons.

Not so long ago, e-books were very much a niche market but times change.

Ebooks are a pretty major outlet these days and the range has expanded far beyond the original list of classics and self-publications to include mainstream publications. Sadly some of that has brought along almost bookstore pricing in some cases which does seem a bit much given that it clearly doesn’t cost the publishers as much to sell you an electronic version of a book as it does to sell you a paper one.

Stories abound about the lives ruined by the latest slapdown by google.

I’ve just read of two people losing their jobs because of it. The drop in pagerank is a theoretical thing for google yet now two people are on the dole because of it and they didn’t violate google’s terms of service because, contrary to google may think, google’s terms of service don’t apply to the Internet as a whole.

But why bother at all? They seem to want the market in paid links to stop essentially because it doesn’t suit their algorithm to have paid links. In their ideal world the only links provided are those that are “natural” ie when someone links to a site that they’ve come across and think is great rather than a site that they’ve been paid to link to. In their ideal world, advertising just wouldn’t exist. Well, except for adsense from google, of course.