Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

I’ve been planning on upgrading the maps on our range of listings sites but hunting around the various places providing maps for websites quickly made me realise that it would cost far, far too much to buy the maps that I’d need. In that market, $100 per map is a typical price and I need something like 5 to 10 maps per country that I extend into.

In that paper maps are more like $5 a country I figured that going down the digitizer route was the way to go. Not only would this be substantially cheaper but I’d be able to add features to the various maps reasonably easily eg tourist attractions or specific towns and villages.

So, I started looking for a digitizer. Although these have been around for quite a while, it’s a fairly specialised device so you need to search in a reasonably large computer shop to find even one of them and that one is usually at the toy end of the range. Online, it is naturally different but the prices are something else or at least the range certainly is.

You can get an A4 tablet for anything from $75 or so through to $1000 for a start. Now, in practice although A4 sounds like what you’d want an A4 surface makes for a very large digitizer and it would appear most people go for the A5 size and for the most part the Wacom brand. However, even that’s not a whole lot of narrowing down as Wacom produce a whole heap of the things, many of which are very close in price.

In this particular market you don’t always seem to get what you pay for in that the price ranges of products aimed at the home and professional markets overlap considerably. So, for example, of the Wacom Graphire Wireless A5 Tablet and the Wacom Intuos3 A5 Tablet, either one can be the most expensive depending on the store yet reading the specs, the Intuos is clearly the one to go for.

Now, all I need to do is save up for it ‘cos I figured that it would be more like $50 than $300!

We’ve a little supermarket just beside us which we pop into quite often.

Now, you’d think that if you’ve only one item to get then it would take less time to get it than it would when you’ve a whole trolley to get. Except that it never works out like that.

Sure, you might have people in front of you but even if you remove that factor it still takes almost as long to get one item as it does to get most of a trolley load. Today for instance, I was just behind one old guy who’d maybe a half dozen items yet it took nearly 10 minutes to process those as he ran off to get something else while he was waiting then asked the checkout operator to get something for him which took her ages and, of course, he had to hunt for his money when she finally got through all the items.

If I’d been in the longer queue, I’d have been away quicker!

We’ve got our Danish group back again this evening.

It’s an interesting aspect of the development of our bookings that we are starting to get picked out by tour groups this year. This’ll be the fifth time that the Danish tour leader will have been here on one of her New Age tours taking in this region. It seems to be quite a popular area for that type of tour, this particular one having a Mary Magdelene theme.

Anyway, that’ll keep us pretty busy this evening as they want meals through to lunchtime tomorrow.

Not really a milestone like 1000 or anything like that but it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was struggling to get into triple figures with the posts and now four figures is a milestone that seems to be looming up very fast indeed.

Of course, it was quite different in the days of the first 100 posts as the blog was primarily a means of letting friends & family know what we were getting up to each week. Just one post a week was a hard enough target to meet sometimes yet several times recently I’ve manage 18 posts in a day!

Starting towards the end of the Summer of 2006 that changed somewhat as we moved to ForeignPerspectives.com and the content became much more general as we moved into the Winter of that year.

The latest change has, of course, been our discovery that people will pay us to write stuff which is what’s really taken the number of posts up, particularly since July of this year.

We’ve our first hotel booked in Geneva and it’s cheap enough though that’s because it’s just outside Geneva and is actually in France. In fact, it’s quite common for expats working in Geneva to live in France simply because it’s so much cheaper.

That’s not an option for our second stop as Interlaken is right in the middle of Switzerland.

What’s particularly surprising to me are the child policies and non-ensuite rooms. Switzerland has the image of being a very child friendly place but many of the Interlaken hotels rule themselves out for us by charging up to SF30 per child whereas elsewhere it’s common for children to be free. Also, shared bathrooms are commonplace whereas elsewhere in the world ensuite rooms are very much the norm.

Still, we’re still looking….