Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

I found this little missive carved on the arena in Arles yesterday.

Whilst today, the worst of the grafitti is scraped on with a penknife, in times gone by it looks like they were at it with a hammer and chisel for quite a while. Who was D Leon that he had the time and the inclination to carve his name so deeply into the rock?

But then, it’s verging on being “historic” by now of course and in another century or two may even be deemed worthy of preservation.

School days are a bit of a nuisance for us to be honest as indeed they must be to most parents.

In our case, four days a week (he gets Wednesday off) we have to take James round to school before 9am, which gives us a few hours to get some stuff done (mostly blogging in the Winter as you may have noticed!), then off to collect him from school at 11.45am ie we’ve all of 2 1/2 hours to ourselves in the morning.

The afternoon isn’t much better, of course. To give us a little more time we usually drop him off at 2pm and head straight on for the shops or whatever though often it’s a bit of a race back to collect him at 5pm.

What we’re trying to do is to make the most of the Wednesdays by heading off somewhere when we collect him on the Tuesday evenings. Our first attempt at that was this week and we’d a very nice day in Arles.

Longer trips are more difficult though. In theory, we should set out on Saturday morning for Geneva but that would get us there in the evening and we’d have to go back on Sunday. Instead, we’re hoping to pick him up at lunchtime and head on then (he’s only at nursery school so it’s not a big deal if he misses an afternoon). That should give us all day Saturday and at least part of Sunday in Switzerland which is a nice little mini-holiday for us.

One of the things that’s been happening over the last few months is that the paid posting sites are demanding better standards of spelling and grammar from the bloggers and promising penalties if they don’t get them.

Recently, the advertisers have added some text to the effect that the blogger should check their spelling and grammar and that those with bad spelling will be rejected. Fair enough, except that almost all of those demanding better spelling have spelling mistakes in their own advert (and, in one case, in their mandatory link text!) and impose bad grammar through their poorly though out link text.

Perhaps laughably, it’s not uncommon to find that the link specified doesn’t actually work which shows how little care is put into the advertising from some places!

With all this running around Roman remains that we’ve been doing of late, I’m sort-of half toying with the idea of doing a course to learn something more about that era.

As usual, I should never even pick up an Open University prospectus as there are just too many interesting little courses in it which could keep you busy for several lifetimes. Still… their course on Exploring the Classical World would seem to fit the bill perfectly. The only problem with it really is that it’s a 60 point course which requires a fairly full committment unlike the 30 point ones which can be done as a sideline.

Funnily enough for a level 2 course, it doesn’t have any prerequisites as such other than a wishy-washy recommendation to do the Humanities course which I’ve heard, whilst interesting, isn’t worth doing in terms of being a stepping stone to further course.

Everywhere you go in the world today you’ll find a keyboard in the family QWERTY layout. Except in France.

That’s because the French style keyboard that was developed by Dvorak is a second generation keyboard design.

Way back in the early days of typewriters, the keys jammed frequently and to solve this problem the manufacturers adopted the now familiar QWERTY layout to slow down the speed of the earliest typists. Although the early problems were solved quickly enough, the design stuck across the world despite all attempts to update it with a more logical layout.

Meanwhile though in France, Dvorak came along after those initial problems were solved and developed a keyboard layout which equally balances the workload across both hands and thereby considerably speeds up typing. However, although it would obviously be a doddle to change over to that layout these days by simply changing the keys around and using a different driver, I suspect that we’ll be stuck with QWERTY until the day comes when we’re not using keyboards anymore.