Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Somehow or other I seem to be about to run off the end of my modern languages degree and have started to think about what I’ll do next.

I’m not quite sure how I got to this point as all I really wanted to do was to be able to speak French better and six years down the line it looks like I’m on the home run with the modern languages degree.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about several different plans as to what I might do after this one is out of the way of which the major options are

1. sit back and relax (there’s a lot to be said for this option!);
2. get going on German (out of curiosity as to whether a Germanic language would be easier to learn than the Romance ones);
3. do the creative writing course (always useful for blogging!);
4. carry on with the English courses and do the degree in English (not too keen on the literature choices with this though);
5. get going on the science degree that I always meant to get around to.

I really don’t know which one I’ll go for at the moment. Technically, I am already signed up for both the English and science degrees at the moment in that I’ve already done one course for each but there’s not commitment to complete either. The creative writing option seems quite scary to be honest and as it’s a full credit course it would be awkward to schedule in with the graduation ceremony as indeed would other full credit English course options. There’s a half credit science course which would do quite nicely though and the German would be a relatively easy fit too.

My thinking at the moment is that perhaps the science half credit course would be an idea as it would give me a fairly easy year and let me choose a full credit option in either English or science the following year.

It’s taken three days and in the end I had to send an e-mail to their sales department saying that I wanted to cancel the hosting account to get any action. Now they’re saying that they are expediting the work on it.

It’s still not working though and, supposedly, they’ve now been working on it for around half a day.

I’m persisting with the cancellation as I’m wondering how long it will take them to get around to getting the account fully operational (I’m assuming that I’ll find more things that they’ve not set up properly).

I thought that I’d run with powweb as our main hosting platform in America on the basis that Brooke uses it and she always seems to know what she’s doing computer-wise.

Not a good move as it turned out.

Uploading the databases and HTML was very easy and much faster than expected. But nothing worked… it took them a day to find out that they’d not installed the PHP software for me.

Then things seemed to work. In fact, everything worked fine ’til I tried some pages that use encoded characters (for the French e-acute etc.) and none of them worked. That was two days ago and they’ve still not worked out how to fix the problem so I’m now in the process of cancelling the account with them.

Why the different experience? Well, Brooke has been with them for years and up to April 2006 they were one of the best places around so any teething troubles that she may have had were sorted out under the old regime. In 2006 they were taken over by Endurance and from then on the support had rapidly become worse. That’s not reflected (yet) in most of the review sites as they generally take account of all reviews so, of course, most of them predate the 2006 takeover.

Anyway, I’m off to try another place over there now.

Interest rate changes by central banks are peculiar affairs.

For one thing, the banks aren’t actually obliged to respond by lowering interest rates although, usually, they do so by a similar amount. It’s usually a similar amount rather than exactly the same amount though which affects people differently: it’s common for banks to drop interest rates on savings accounts by a little more than the cut the central bank announces and loan rates by no more than is announced.

That sounds like they’re ripping you off, and to some extent they are, but what kicks in is the effect of their own administration on the processing of the loans and savings. Even if the central bank cut rates to zero, there would still be a charge for loans as that represents a risk to the bank, and savings rates would drop to zero or possibly a little below that as obviously there is a cost to processing savings too (they’d probably introduce charges rather than negative interest rates).

High interest products tend to represent higher risks so the rates on those aren’t always cut at all following a rate cut announcement.

And, of course, if you’ve a fixed rate loan then the payments on that will stay the same.

Several years ago I made the move from US based hosting to UK based hosting because of the extra traffic that you tend to get when your site is hosted in the same location as your main customer base.

That particular move worked really well in that I ended up with around 30x (yes, thirty times) the traffic that I’d had on the original American hosting service. That’s with no changes in the website apart from where it was hosted.

Ironically, now I’m looking to move some sites in the opposite direction as they now have more of a global audience than the collection of sites from a few years ago did.

Now, the big question I’m wondering about is whether I’ll get a 30x jump in traffic in going the other direction?