Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Just as suddenly as it arrive, the grape harvest is over and with it the bands of grape pickers are gone from the villages and their little clusters of caravans and vans.

This year the difference wasn’t quite so marked as just about all the wine growers bought the grape picking machines last year so they don’t need anything like the number of pickers that they did in years gone by and therefore the little campsites were much smaller.

With the arrival of assorted Eastern Block countries into Europe this year, the mix of pickers changed quite substantially as indeed has the face of the workforce elsewhere in Europe over the last year or so.

Since we use two bakers, we get two bills, of course.

However, as we use one of the bakers mainly for the weekend and the other mainly for during the week, you’d think that the bills would be substantially different. Funnily enough, there’s actually very little difference in them which is quite peculiar.

The reason why they’re fairly similar is that we’ve been getting growing numbers of Spanish staying during the week whilst the weekend is normally reserved for the British. The Spanish rarely take breakfast but the British nearly always do, so the weekend bill generally ends up higher than the mid-week one.

How come the Spanish don’t take breakfast though? Well, they’ve become used to the normal level of French breakfasts and it just ain’t enough for them so they eat elsewhere for breakfast for the most part although any that have seen the breakfast we put out have often wandered in and started eating which is something of a complication for us as we only get the croissants etc. if the people have ordered breakfast the night before.

We had quite an interesting family staying with us for a few days.

The older parents wanted to move to France and therefore everyone was over on a scouting trip for about a week. Now, that’s a sensible thing as they wanted somewhere that their grandchildren (thankfully not also in tow) would like and a trip together gives everyone a chance to throw in their 2 cents.

However, the downside of this type of group is that it’s difficult to reach an agreement which everyone can live with.

The parents (in their 70s) wanted to buy somewhere small that they could look after easily enough. The grown-up children were more interested in spending a bit more and getting somewhere as an investment.

It is actually possible to get a solution for such a seemingly divergent set of criteria but what’s required is that everyone sit down together and state what they really want rather than leaving a whole lot unsaid as seems to have been the case with this particular group. With such a meeting, it’s usually possible to come up with a specification containing the essentials and the desireables which can then be used to aid an estate agent in finding your ideal property.

Even if you don’t have a disparate group, it’s useful to draw up a specification like that as you’ll be much more likely to find your ideal property than if you don’t have that.

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.

The computer we bought today will be the last major purchase on our part for a while although I imagine that I could talk myself into getting Office 2007 for it rather than using Office 2003 that we already have. The new computer comes with a limited time edition of it so I’ll likely have a look into the cost of a student upgrade as they’re usually sensibly priced.

We’ve a slide scanner and digitizer pencilled in as our next IT purchases.

The slide scanner will let me use the massive library of slides that I’ve built up over the years rather than having to license photos for Whole Earth.

The digitizer is to let me improve the quality of maps used on our listings sites and to bring them all in-house. One limitation that we have at the moment is the totally over the top price to license maps for some countries: no license and you’re stuck with the very basic maps that the CIA put out in their World Factbook.

Snag is that a decent digitizer can run to hundreds of pounds and it’s something that we’d use relatively rarely: after the initial burst of usage, we’d probably only be getting it out of the box once or twice a year.