Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Since it’s St Patrick’s Day, we thought it was a great day to add our entry for Downpatrick on our world guide where, argueably, he’s buried under a massive stone in the chuch graveyard.

Naturally, there’s nothing on over here for St Patrick’s and we were hoping to get over to Dublin for the parades but, yet again, didn’t quite manage it between one thing and another.

As it happens though, by far the largest parade is in New York!

After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series.

So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on.

However, I’ve been thinking of doing a blog for the listings sites which is quite different. For one thing, it’s a blog with quite a narrow remit ie to write about the listings sites themselves. More significantly perhaps is that I’m planning to do it as a blog consisting of a collections of series right from the start. Today starts off the series on marketing your property which will be an ongoing thread but there’ll be several other threads intertwined through the blog as time goes on.

It’ll be a while before that becomes apparent though as it’s not going to be a daily blog by any means (there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that).

Yeah, I know, boring.

However, interestingly our strategy of simply buying the cheapest available machine nearly four years back and replacing it when it was at the end of its life does appear to have been the correct one. The original one cost us around EUR 200, worked perfectly for over three years and has been replaced with another one at around the same price.

Sounds expensive? Not really. The next one up from both costs nearly 50% more and given the heavy workload we’ve been putting the machine to over the last four years I don’t believe for a minute that it would have lasted any longer.

Now, in theory, we could have gone for the extended warranty but, frankly, I don’t think they’d have honoured the agreement on the basis that we were using it for industrial scale washing (which we were).

Incidently, that extra 50% gets you quite a lot of washing programmes but doesn’t mean that the machine can actually do any more work. If you look along the washing machines on sale near you, you’ll find that all but the very expensive ones can only cope with 5kg loads.

It’s obviously impossible to name a single bank which you can choose simply because no single bank operates in every country of the world.

There are some general pointers as to how to go about choosing your bank though.

One school of thought is that you should choose the local bank with the most branches in the area which you’re moving to. That’s a reasonable approach in that for most countries there’s a charge to use ATMs that aren’t owned by your own bank so it may save you on ATM withdrawal fees. However, be wary of local banks that don’t operate internationally on a widespread basis or that don’t attract many foreign customers as you can come unstuck very easily through not having local banking practices explained to you. This even applies in many cases where banks operate English speaking branches: they might well speak English but often banking terms don’t translate well.

The other school of thought is that you should choose a bank based in your own country but with branches in your new country. This can work well in that the banking staff should be more familiar with the banking practices that you’re used to and sometimes offer good deals on money transfers to/from your home country. So, for example, if you’re American then the best choice is usually Citibank as that operates as a local bank in many countries yet retains an American feel in every location in which it operates and offers good deals on transfers between Citibank accounts in other countries. However, if you’re British, you might think that HSBC would be the way to go yet because it bills itself as “the world’s local bank” it tends to follow local banking practices more than British ones although it does offer transfers to your HSBC accounts in other countries.

Don’t forget that you don’t need to choose a single bank. One combination that works very well is a local bank with low charges and lots of branches combined with an international bank to handle your global transfers.

Reading the original research presentation of google highlights a number of points where the weakness of the algorithm can still be exploited and those cracks are starting to become very obvious.

One thing that they never allowed for was that once money came into the equation then people would pay to manipulate how their site was ranked in terms of pagerank. As we’ve seen late last year that has now become a significant problem for google and so they have begun to crackdown on the payment for links beginning with sponsored posts. How effective that will be given that there are now over 600,000 (yes, six hundred thousand) directories offering links is hard to say but sales of links are sure to remain with us in one form or another.

Then there’s the assumption that people would use large letters and bold fonts to highlight what was important on the page. As is plain, this is easily manipulated and is on quite a widespread basis in some quarters.

They even neglected to consider that some people would simply click on their own pages because clicks are a factor in pagerank (they know if you’ve installed the google toolbar). That’s quite noticeable if you “legitimately” do it when developing a website and one assumes that many more people are doing it for less innocent reasons.

That they’re having problems is obvious: they shouldn’t need to crackdown on the blogs and yet they appear to need to do that.