Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

We’re definitely planning on going somewhere this evening and as we’re going by car it needs to be within around three or perhaps four hours drive of here.

As of this morning, we have three places in the frame:

Valencia, the front runner from yesterday, has now dropped out as it’s supposed to be raining there tomorrow. No big problem though as we had it pencilled in for later in the year when it gets colder here yet is still quite warm there.

Albi, the former haunt of Toulouse-Lautrec and what looks to be quite a charming little village is also out as the weather is looking a little dodgy there too.

Which leaves Arles looking good. The weather forecast is fine for there and there’s quite a lot to see in the general area too. I’m not sure if we’ll have the time to see it but the Camargue nature reserve is supposed to be really good.

OK, I’m not there yet, but at least it seems to be heading in the right direction.

As we’re edging into the Winter here, it becomes more and more appealing. We’ve obviously a lot less to do during the day and, possibly more importantly, I’m not doing the studying as the Spanish course is finished.

So far, it would appear to be quite a good fit with our normal activities as we’re busy in the Summer when there are relatively few paid post opportunities yet don’t have much to do in the Winter when there seem to be a lot more paid opportunities available.

Even aside from the money aspect, I quite like a lot of the paid posts that come along.

For instance, I’ve written a whole stream of them about various holiday destinations and I love writing about stuff like that. I’ve even started up Whole Earth Guide so I can write more of it!

The finance related ones have been fairly thick on the ground here too as I can usually talk the leg off a table when speaking about finance as many people will attest to!

But now and again you get surprises.

For instance, today, PayPerPost just offered a very nice looking African safari post. At least it looked quite nice at first glance. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to go on a safari? Second glance revealed though that they want you to promote a place that guarantees you’ll kill a set number of endangered species.

Now, aside from the moral aspect of that, it’s actually illegal in that PPP is based in America and therefore subject to American laws.

I’m not blaming them on putting it on because I’m sure the whole process is quite automatic and after all it’s Sunday so chances are that they’ve locked the door and left the computers in charge but it just goes to show the range of things that you can get ie you can’t just start typing away with a post before you read what they’re actually wanting you to write about.