Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

We’ve still not ruled out somewhere in the direction of the Alps for our Christmas break as we quite liked the area the other week.

As usual for us, we were looking for last minute Alps hotels which, for the most part, means looking at RatesToGo. Why? Well, that’s one of the sites that specialises in selling the final couple of rooms in the hotels that they list. Courtesy of the way that expenses work in hotels, it’s in their interest to fill those last couple of rooms and often that means that you get a substantial discount on the RatesToGo site vs the rate that you’d get even when booking directly with the hotel.

One minor hassle with the site is that because these are usually the very last rooms available in the hotels listed, you can’t hang around deliberating about your choice of hotel because chances are it’ll be gone if you do. For example, the rather nice Eurogroup Hotel Le Royal Ours Blanc is already gone. That’s a good example though as the site doesn’t just have the dregs of hotels listed: many luxury hotels use it to sell their final rooms too ie the bargains that you see are quite genuine.

Several hours on and we’re still waiting for the replies from the villas in Majorca that we’re hoping to stay in over Christmas.

That’s the one thing that I really hate about booking self-catering places. At least with a hotel you can just click on their site and it’s booked. With self-catering there always seems so much more administration to go through and, for the most part, for no good reason.

Still, at least we have sort-of settled on a place to go (assuming that the flight prices don’t go against us whilst we’re twiddling our thumbs, of course).

Testing websites can be quite difficult once you go beyond the simple online brochure type of website.

For one thing, unlike most “normal” computer applications, you have untold millions of untrained people who can access your site and therefore you need to make sure that you try equally stupid things along the way of your testing as they are sure to do in “real life”. Clearly internet connections go down for instance and you need to allow for that, but what about the speed of their connections? One or two sites that I’ve tried out lately have consistently timed out on me no matter what I’ve done because my connection just isn’t anything like the speed that the writers of the site assumed that it would be.

Once you get into databases it’s a whole different ballgame too. For one thing, you always need to be able to let a number of people update your database simultaneously which in itself requires a different style of programming than that which is sometimes taught in the schools. What’ll work on a closed corporate network isn’t necessarily acceptable on an open Internet one.

Even after your site is up for a while, you should make a point of trying it out now and again. Actually looking it as your customers will see it. Remember they don’t necessarily have the 25″ widescreen monitor that you have and, even today, are more than likely using resolutions of 1000×800 or less. Watch the fonts you use too as many that you get with your computer aren’t available via the Internet; newer computers don’t always support the fonts on the older ones either.

We should be sitting in the sun today but instead we’re freezing with a biting wind blowing quite a gale as I look outside from our conservatory towards the hillside.

Aren’t conservatories wonderful things? This isn’t even a sponsored post and I’m praising them anyway!

Seriously though, it really shouldn’t be as cold today as it actually is. We should still be able to use solar power to heat the water but it’s simply not a runner at the moment.

Although people can often assume that global warming would mean exactly that, in fact it wouldn’t as global warming would change the climate in ways that aren’t necessarily fully understood. Yes, some parts would be warmer and perhaps the earth as a whole would be, but in that transition to a warmer earth some areas would have severe changes to their weather patterns.

Now that we’ve started looking at the detailed costings, we’re thinking of the tradeoff of the £30 each flight vs just driving there.

Going in the car is a whole lot simpler of course in that there’s none of the hassle of weighing luggage and juggling stuff from one case to another that you get into with airline trips. A minor downside is that it’s about six hours drive from here to Alicante but then it’s nearly three hours to Barcelona airport so it’s not a whole lot further.

Much simpler to organise too in that all we need is the accommodation and no worries about flights nor airport parking.