Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

We have been incredibly lazy over here on the whole but we’re planning on getting back into the swing of Tai Chi and Tai Combat in the not overlly distant future.

The snag is that when you’ve had a bit of a break from it, it can be quite extremely difficult to get yourself fired up to do exercise classes or even the thought of them for that matter. Not only that, but it’s obviously pretty crazy to start straight into a class at the gym when you’ve not done any serious exercise for a while.

So, the game plan is to ease ourselves back into it again and to start with we’ve already started on a little bit of hill walking which, much to our surprise, didn’t finish us off. After that, we’re going to work up via the treadmills and other machines to a nice gentle class to begin with (definitely not Tai Combat!).

In that insurance companies operate across national boundaries, you’d expect that the standards they adhere to would be international ones. After all, it would be too complicated to run with one set of rules in one country and a totally different one in another, wouldn’t it?

You might think that, but it ain’t so in France.

In France, once you’ve signed up for car insurance with one company it’s not possible to shop around each year as you’d do elsewhere in Europe because to change your insurance company, you must cancel your existing insurance by recorded delivery letter at least two months before your renewal date. However, as you might expect that’s before they’ve told you what it’s going to cost ie you’ve nothing to compare it against the price another company might quote.

We on the other hand are in the “fortunate” position that our previous car was wrecked and therefore could go into another insurance company for the quote. We’re also in the unusual position of knowing what the renewal premium would have been for the little car pictured and that our new and somewhat larger car was around EUR 200 cheaper to insure!

Not that you can totally walk away from the old company of course. You obviously need something to say what the discount you’re entitled to is and that’s what we’re trying to get now with, so far, no success.

What about the payout from GAN for the old car? We were wondering about that too. The car accident happened on May 23rd yet we still have had nothing from them which is why we’re now with a different company.

Most of the time it seems to be Eastern Time, the time on the east coast of America at the moment, at least for us.

However, it is something of a problem as in the 24 hour world of the Internet the time zone used most of the time tends to be in America as that’s where the bulk of the commercial Internet places appear to be. Want web hosting? If you don’t read the small print then chances are your hosting will be somewhere in America which will make quite a difference to the hits that you get if your main customer base is in Europe (the difference can be as much as 10 fold!).

OK, so we might be in a 24/7 world but few offices actually work those hours. Why would they?

Still, it does make quite a difference to us at the moment in that PayPerPost is based in Miami and seems to work roughly 0900 to 1700 Miami time which works out as 1400 to 2300 our time and that’s the timeframe when the paid post opportunities come online. Our original tactic of doing the posts in the morning meant that we effectively got the left-overs from the night before but now that we’ve moved closer to Miami time in our postings, we get a whole lot more money for the same amount of effort.

We’re hoping to keep our programme of mini-holidays running well into the Winter though obviously we’ll need to be more selective about destinations as the Winter kicks in.

At the moment, we still have Albi and Valencia on our short-list. They’re both within a about three hours drive of here which is a perfect daytrip distance. Uzes also looks interesting and there’s still quite a lot in the Nimes/Avignon/Arles area to be seen including the Camarge, Aigues Mortes (“Dead Eagle” but still a lovely place).

Marseilles isn’t much beyond Arles and indeed we managed to get ourselves onto the road to Marseilles last night by mistake. Is it worth going to though? For one thing, I just can’t understand a Marseilles accent but then we don’t talk to many people whilst we’re on our daytrips so that’s no great problem. It’s also got something of a reputation of being a bad area (yes, the whole city!) which puts me off it somewhat but against that I’ve also heard good things about it too.

Monaco at around five hours is a possibility for a weekend type daytrip though it’ll be a couple of weeks before we get a slot for that. In practice though, there isn’t a whole lot in Monaco.

Also sitting at the five hour mark are the likes of Cannes and St Tropez which would be interesting though I’ve not looked into them much as yet. It was quite interesting for me to be in Cannes a few years ago as apparently I’m the image of Jean Marc, one of the French film stars who had been there for the awards a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t realised that at the time so it was pretty confusing for me when a series of girls tried to pick me up in the street though things went downhill somewhat when an old guy tried to do the same thing!

One thing that I always find fascinating is the differing mix of advertisers on the different paid post websites.

You’d think that they would be broadly similar, but that isn’t the case. On some you’ll get loads of different opportunities available whilst on others there are only ever a handful. In practice, that means that I look most often on the sites with the larger numbers of opportunities as it saves me the hassle of logging in all the time to sites that rarely produce the goods.

The mix is quite different too. As you may have noticed, I take quite a range of topic areas for the paid posts, essentially for two reasons 1) they look interesting and 2) if they pay more I’m gonna consider them. Most of the time, I’m quite lucky and the available posts cover both areas.

Still, ‘yall have gotten quite a mix today with computer games, web hosting, holidays, plastic surgery and car sales! A bumper crop as we were away yesterday and didn’t get any done.