Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

You need to be pretty organised in packing for a last-minute mini-holiday.

The best plan is to reset the contents of your case shortly after you get home from the previous holiday. That usually amounts to just taking out all the clothing but leaving in all the essentials such as your passport, a few credit cards, driving license, electrical adaptors, and so on.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easily done as that if you vary your “holidays” by going on business trips as well as those will generally require a slightly different range of essentials. Likewise, if you constantly go to different countries then things like guidebooks and phrasebooks will, of course, need to be changed.

Still, the principles remain: keep the passport, driving license and at least one credit card in your case and you will probably be able to buy the rest. On the guidebook front, you can keep a very general guidebook in it too eg the Lonely Planet Western Europe guide will cover a vast range of short break holiday destinations.

Malin over at Infektia has been getting a bit innundated by junk comments of late as indeed have I.

Why? Surely they should all be killed by Akismet? Ah, well, yes, but Akismet relies on bloggers reporting spam comments and adds the relevant senders to its database thus stopping future ones. However, the number of spammers is more than likely going up and perhaps bloggers are just deleting the spam rather than reporting it thus Akismet doesn’t learn as well as it used to.

I’ve also noticed another type of spam in the sense that since I started writing paid posts and thereby started writing a whole lot more than I used to, increasing numbers of the posts are being picked up by “spam aggregators” ie aggragation services that simply run a search for, say, “loans” and list the posts from all blogs that come up. In many ways, this is even worse than spam comments as it makes the whole “blog authority” scheme even more worthless than it was becoming courtesy of various large scale mutual linking schemes that are around these days.

Anyway, I guess we need to wait for WordPress to come up with some way of weeding out the spam linkers.

We’ve finally gotten around to booking a hotel for this evening in Arles.

The game plan is that we collect James from school at 5pm and keep driving ’til we get there. Most of the way is motorway and it’s a hotel just off the motorway exit so we should be there in about 2 1/2 hours or so.

What’s in Arles though? It’s one of a small group of towns at the western end of Provence which had a heavy Roman influence. There’s quite a sizeable amphitheatre in the town along with numerous other Roman era relics. Looks like it’s quite lively this time of year too as a number of the hotels were full when we tried to book this morning.

Also in the area is the Camargue nature reserve which we passed through many years ago on the canal boat. We might get to see that tomorrow afternoon on the way back here.

This is something of a scouting trip too in that we’re intending to go somewhere this weekend as well and will likely pass that way yet again. As usual with our mini-holidays, the location and length of it hasn’t been decided yet but currently in the frame are Albi and Valencia which didn’t make it today due to the weather, and perhaps Geneva and/or Lausanne which are around six hours drive but would be useful scouting trips for our proposed Christmas break in southern Germany.

If you’re in the market for something to scan medical cards you really need a specialised scanner as you’ll spend ages getting them scanned using a standard scanner.

The Medicscan scanner offers you all the features you would expect of a specialised scanner and all you need is a USB port on your computer to use it. Both the scanning and the image processing are automatic and start as soon as you insert a card into the scanner. To save your time, the image processing takes place in the background so you’re not left waiting around for that to be done.

Once you’ve got it into your system you’ll not need to be constantly referring to photocopies of the cards as the scanned image can be pulled up right in front of you whenever you need it. Naturally both sides of the card can be scanned.

The ScanShell 800N is a small-footprint, twain compatible, A6 color scanner with 600DPI scanning resolution for sharp and clear images. What’s “twain compatible”? That just means that it’s compatible with just about all scanning software. Since it’s USB powered, you don’t need yet another power socket to plug it into either which, as we all know, seem to breed!

James doesn’t go to school on Wednesdays so we are planning on going somewhere or other whenever we hit a Tuesday night and don’t have any guests booked in.

Anyway, the first of these little trips is tomorrow all being well.

Where to though?

Well, the game plan is to pick him up from school at 5pm and start driving so we don’t want anywhere more than about three or four hours drive of here. Therefore the initial short-list is Albi (of Toulouse-Lautrec fame), Arles (for the Roman history) and Valencia (‘cos it looks nice and is warm).

So far, it looks like Arles and Albi are out on weather grounds so ’tis off to Valencia (or some point south anyway) tomorrow.