Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

We were thinking of buying our car in the UK this time in that we’re sort-of expecting to be there fairly soon.

Then we looked at the prices.

How many times have there been European investigations into the overlly high car prices in the UK and yet still the price difference we found was around 30% or more on exactly the same car. Well, perhaps not exactly the same. Sure, the steering wheel is at the other side but then we bought a Japanese car and seeing as they drive on the left themselves, the European version should cost more as clearly it needs to be modified into a car for driving on the right.

Last time we bought a car there were differences in the specification in that the French car didn’t have a CD player nor radio whereas the UK model did. However, adding a CD/radio would have added, at best, £200 to the car (the French car was fully wired for it) yet the UK model cost something like £2000 more.

Must be time for another European investigation into UK car prices.

One of the hardest parts of blogging when you’re starting out is the complete lack of feedback that you get.

In many ways, at the start it feels very much like you’re writing to yourself because of that. The other problem is that with the lack of feedback, many new bloggers lose the initial enthusiasm leading to the massively high rate of attrition that blogs have in the first three months.

Once you clear that three month hurdle, it seems to get easier though most blogs still aren’t getting much feedback even by that time. What’s different is that by that time you’ve just become too stubborn to stop writing regardless of whether or not anyone seems to be reading it.

However, if you do want some feedback, the easiest way to do it is to mention one of the main blogging sites. The likes of technorati and feedburner do read blogs, or at least the posts that mention them. In fact, I was quite surprised to see that somebody from Feedburner replied to a post I made months ago but then, if you think about it, blogs are their business so they need to read blogs.

If it’s not sunny, that’s the most common question that we get asked.

It’s also the hardest one to answer.

For instance, right now the weather forecast is saying that it’s sunny when it most definitely isn’t. How come it’s so wrong? Simple really: we’re mid-way between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean and the weather station is on the coast.

So, once you get out of the main Summer season, it’s quite common for the weather here to be very different from that on the coast. That’s not to say that we get cold weather as such because ordinarily it’s t-shirt weather for 10 or 11 months per year. However, it may be cloudy here when it’s not on the coast. And if it’s cloudy here, it’s probably pretty chilly in the mountains.

You don’t need to go as far as the mountains for it to be chilly though. The Winter usually starts on the western side of the village of St Paul de Fenouillet. Rather strangely, it can be t-shirt weather on the eastern (and higher!) side of the village and snowing on the western side at the same time.

Google certainly seems to think so as they’ve been trying out photos placed beside the normal type of adsense ads that you see here in addition to the increasing numbers of photo and even video adverts that you’ll have seen on various sites you’ve looked at over the last year or more.

So advertisers like to see photos in their paid posts too. We’ve been really bad at doing that but as the average payout for our posts increases, you’ll gradually see us adding more of them as we move into the Winter.

Once we get the computer upgraded, we’re toying with the idea of taking on some video posts as well, though the payment will need to be somewhat higher for those as they sound like they’d be quite time consuming to do.

Let’s face it, many people just aren’t at their best in the mornings. How come then that when someone has the idea of having a meeting over a meal to launch some new initiative that it’s pretty much always a breakfast meeting that’s organised?

The latest initiative to reduce unemployment locally is a breakfast get together between the employers and the potential employees in the town to the west of us.

OK, I can’t see the French going for a business meeting over lunch and people usually want to get home at the end of the day, but a breakfast meeting isn’t overlly realistic. For one thing, it’s a town in the country and therefore the public transport to and from it is far from good. How are these potential employees going to get to the meeting when the time current proposed is before the buses actually start?