Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

I was a bit taken aback by the very high takeup from our e-mail to Scottish B&Bs and self-catering places a couple of weeks ago. So many took it up in fact that I’m going to have to implement a redesign of the site for Scotland that I’d not planned on doing ’til next year at the earliest.

So, I figured that the takeup would be broadly similar in Northern Ireland. Yet, although I’ve mailed a similar number of places (allowing for NI being smaller), the takeup is only about 10% of that for Scotland. Less than that actually as I’m still getting new entries for Scotland from the e-mail of a few weeks ago.

The wording is identical too so I’ve no idea why the takeup should be so abysmally low: lower even than the notional 1% that I should have received.

I’ve been “hit” yet again by StumbleUpon for a post in the same subject area ie on The France Show.

As before, there are the usual hundreds of hits and diddly in terms of adsense income from them as, on the whole, StumbleUpon people tend to be looking for something fairly specific (which is pretty ironic given the nature of it, of course).

What I keep meaning to do is to use StumbleUpon in some way as I feel sure that there must be some way to keep the arrivals on the site in some way. So far though I’ve not sat down and done more than think a little about it.

Ideas welcome!

The prices of digital cameras have had a gentle drop over the last couple of years mainly because they have added features and resolution as otherwise the price drop would have been quite dramatic.

If you just want a general purpose camera then you can get excellent ones around £100 or so these days. Even £30 gets quite a reasonable camera if you choose carefully.

However, the problem that all of these cameras have is that they are relatively slow in taking a photo. At the £30 level you press the button and it can be half a second or more before the image is fully recorded so photos taken with these cameras will generally look a little wavy unless you hold them very still. You definitely can’t photograph moving objects with them.

Move up to £100 and that half second delay drops significantly. There is a delay whilst the camera stores the image but the image is completely captured in one go so you don’t get the wavy lines. No problem with moving objects anymore. Spending more generally gets more megapixels which will let you print larger images.

However, if you try taking a photo of something like a car race you still have problems because of the delay in the camera capturing the image. There won’t be any wavy lines but chances are the car won’t be in the frame completely. If this type of photography is what you like to do then you will probably need to move towards one of the SLR digital cameras which start around £300 or so. There’s quite an overlap in the price range of top end compact digital cameras and SLRs and the two have similar capabilities but the speed of image capture is considerably different and, of course, the SLR cameras let you change the lens.

Typically around the £100 to £200 mark spent on a compact digital camera will get one that will suit most people. If you’re into sports photography you’ll need to take that up to £300 for a digital SLR.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been getting going on my direct mail campaign aimed at increasing the number of entries on the B&B and self-catering listings sites.

The second use of the mailing list for Scotland pulled in quite a considerable number of properties over the last two weeks. So much so that I’m going to have to implement the planned restructuring of the site well ahead of schedule.

For reasons which escape me, the England mailing hasn’t pulled in anything like the number that Scotland did. Something to explore the reasons for before I do the next one in 2008.

However, for the first time, I’ve targetted Northern Ireland. Early days yet of course, but it looks like the takeup will be relatively low. The size of the mailing was pretty much similar to that for Scotland but, so far, I’ve only received about 1/4 of the response. Still, perhaps some more will come in over the course of the weekend.

I see that the Information Commissioner would like breaches of the magnitude seen this week made a criminal offense.

But if it were so right now, who would be the person being arrested by the police? Would it be the “junior official” who appears to have made an error in using a courier firm rather than the Royal Mail. Yet, at the time he would have been told NOT to use the Royal Mail as they were planning to go on strike that week.

In such instances, the instructions are to use courier services instead and that’s just what he did.

Many people have said that such a junior official should never have been responsible for so many records yet that’s the reality of day to day operations in large government departments. Quite junior people need to be able to work with all the records in that way. Surely no-one is expecting the head of HMRC to run the programs that process the various benefits himself?

Short of getting in the car and driving down to London with the CDs, just how could he have gotten the information to London? Yes, there is encrypted e-mail between government departments but it’s just not up to e-mailing two CDs full of information. After all, normal e-mail systems usually can’t even e-mail a single digital photograph these days.