Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

One of the things that I thought would be hard to do with the graphics pad was the business of looking at the screen yet drawing with the pen on the pad.

In fact, it doesn’t seem to require any adjustment at all. Within a few seconds I was drawing away no problem at all.

Simple things are very simple with the pad but there’s a lot more capability that can be brought into use with the pad that I have. For one thing, the heavier you lean on the pen, the heavier the line becomes. Vista adds a whole bunch more functionality too but I’ve not even scratched the surface of that yet.

Retouching photos looks like it will be somewhat easier too though, so far, I’ve not attempted that with the pen yet.

One of the surprising things is how naff many computer shops are when you’re looking for something even marginally out of the ordinary.

We decided to upgrade the maps on the listings sites a while back and when I saw the prices being asked for what was, in almost all cases, a fairly primitive map for use online I figured that the best route would be to buy a graphics pad and run up custom maps myself. After all, they’re not particularly intricate for the most part but with custom maps it would be nice to be able to add special features to the maps – points of particular interest for example.

So off I went to untold numbers of computer shops and the best that they could come up with was a fairly naff A5 pad at best and in most cases just the A6 version which is rather small to be drawing maps on.

In reality there’s only one graphics pad to go for and that’s the Wacom Intuos range yet not one single computer shop had them so I ended up ordering from Amazon.

How to get started is something that stops many people from running a blog to begin with or pushes them onto the relative deadend of one of the blogging sites.

However, it doesn’t need to be like that because it’s really quite easy to start a blog with your own domain and can cost as little as $45/£25 per year. Going down this route gives you a LOT more control over your blog.

Won’t it be terribly complicated? No, it’s pretty simple really and there’s a series on how to do it over on MumsFinance.com so I’ll not run through all the details here. The basic steps are:

1. register a domain;
2. sign up with a hosting service;
3. install the blogging software;
4. start writing your blog

You might think that step 3 is going to be very complex but it’s described in easy steps in the series.

To be fair, that’ll get you a very basic looking blog but it’s best to start simple. Once you’re happy that everything is working fine you can look around for different themes (the appearence) for your blog but it’s not essential to do that and many blogs run with the simple default theme.

Google’s widespread dropping to zero of the pagerank of sites that accepted payment for links has kicked off quite a debate on the issue on various sites including their own webmaster blog.

For technical reasons, they would much prefer that all links between sites on the Internet are purely for altruistic reasons with no payment or other persuasion used. That was, to some extent, the case when Google Inc started up and when the initial university research project that led to the creation of Google Inc began but that’s eons ago in Internet time.

As we all know, the Internet is full of commercial sites these days with numerous sites selling everything from books to bookings for holidays. With this in mind many personal sites are approached by commercial ones asking for a link and offering money for it. Sure, there are commercial sites that ask for a link with no money on offer, but they don’t usually get too far unless they particularly stand out from the crowd in some way.

And then there are various types of directories that abound these days. I have a particular interest in the accommodation directories in that I run several of them myself. Much as I never considered these as selling links (and my sites don’t) it would seem that in Google’s eyes even the likes of Gites de France is selling links. After all, they charge something like EUR 1000 per year for a listing and isn’t that just selling a link?

Sure, GdF and the many other accommodation listings sites have a lot of text around that link but at the end of the day, how is that different from a blog that accepts sponsored posts?

As usual when there’s a Spanish holiday, we were pretty much completely full over the last couple of days and yet nobody took a breakfast!

In some ways that suits us as it gives us a bit of a break from the need to get up very early to do the breakfasts.

But why don’t they take them though? They certainly take breakfasts in hotels in Spain so why don’t they take them in France? Although it’s hard to give a definitive answer I suspect that it has a lot to do with the absolutely pathetic excuse for a breakfast that you get in most French establishments although funnily enough the price is the same or even higher than for breakfasts in the Spanish equivalent and in Spain you get a very full breakfast for that money.

So, it’s probably down to the French not really “doing” breakfast as a proper meal.