Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Not so long ago, the only IT seminars put on locally were those by the BCS and usually only about once a month over the winter months with very much the same faces seen at every one.

Roll that on a decade or so and there seem to be seminars coming out of the woodwork everywhere. This week there were two quite different but equally good ones.

First off was a very interesting perspective of how agile methods are used in CME. Although broadly aimed at the development community, it had enough background for others in the IT community to pick up on it. This was one of those from the BCS series and oddly, despite there being hundreds if not thousands more IT jobs locally now, the number attending was much the same as it has always been for BCS events. That unchanging number is a bit sad really as some other non-BCS events can have hundreds of people at them these days, so why not the BCS ones?

The next day was something of a marathon ISACA one on COBIT that ran on for around two hours. That’s something of a specialist field so it wasn’t surprising to see just a handful of attendees for what turned out to be a surprisingly comprehensive overview of the COBIT methodology. The ISACA events are quite frequently attended by a hundred or more people but it does vary from topic to topic and speaker to speaker.

Over the course of a year there are quite a number of such talks. By far the best attended are generally the ISACA and BASH ones representing the IT security and IT development communities with a continual stream of niche ones at Farset Labs.

These days there’s really no excuse if you’re using simple wallpaper that everyone else has to decorate your home.

How much better to display a selection of your own photographs instead? You’ve probably not thought about that before as the normal commercial photographic printers just cater for the typical album size prints and don’t have the equipment to produce a trully impressive work of art for your wall from your photographs.

However, you don’t need to limit yourself to the photographic shop round the corner these days as it’s very easy to transfer a photograph to a printer anywhere. Not only does this open up the possibility of much larger prints but you’ve also the option of printing on various types of “paper” from the usual glossy (not really suitable for large scale photos) through to canvas if you’d like an almost painting like quality to your print.

Particularly for the larger sizes, printing photograph on canvas is really the only way to go. If your image is from a compact digital camera more than a year or two old then it’ll go “blocky” on normal photographic paper if you try to run off a print at the larger sizes but on canvas this disappears into the texture of the material you’re getting it printed on.

What about the subject for your photo? That depends on you. I’m quite taken with this photo that I took of Cordoba and I’ve a heap of similar scenic photos from that particular trip. On the other hand, all scenes would make for a dull home I suspect and it’s probably best to mix them up with photos of the kids and so on. One thing to watch on the landscape photos is that if you’re not careful they can date quite quickly if you’ve included people in them as dress styles change surprisingly quickly sometimes (unless the people are in native dress of course).

Last, but not least, don’t forget that you can update the photos now and again too.

Although it’s actually possible to see all the highlights in a single, very hectic, day, it’s much better to spread the trip out over about a week as there’s an awful lot to be seen.

What we did was very much the whistle-stop tour with an early morning flight over then a short bus tour of some of the highlights which were mainly the Colosseum that you see here and the Trevi fountain. However, we needed to part company with the bus at that point as they were heading off to the shops whilst we wanted to see the Sistine chapel and as much as we could fit in after that which turned out to be quite a lot as we managed all but the Spanish Steps on our list and could have fitted in that too if I’d not been vetoed (“We’ll miss the bus!”).

However, that’s the crazy way to see Rome. Much more sensible is to do the above over three or four days and spend the rest of the week checking out some of the other wonders of the city. For most people that means staying in a hotel but to really get the most of your time it’s better to look towards self-catering as that’ll give you a much more Italian feel to your holiday.

Las Vegas is one of those places that seems to have everything that you could possibly be looking for in a holiday.

Las Vegas golf vacations are no different with courses set in fantastic scenery like this at Paiute Resort. That’s just one of many courses that you can book golf packages with via the Las Vegas Golf Authority which offers great deals on all of the top courses in the area.

One big plus point of golfing here is that Las Vegas is close by all of the resorts so it’s easier to persuade the family that it’s a great place for everyone to go to.

We tend to book hotels 1) a little out of season 2) not much in advance and 3) that have “family” or triple rooms which has an interesting effect on the choice that’s available to us.

Booking a short period in advance tends to increase the price of course yet because we’re aiming at times slightly out of season that increase is almost cancelled out. For example, applying all three criteria we could get into the Hotel Delgi Imperatori in Rome for all of €125 a night tomorrow which is peanuts for Rome.

It’s much the same in other cities too but you need to take account of the local holidays. If you’re looking for a hotel in Barcelona for example you could get the ApartHotel Mariano Cubi for €190 tomorrow. In fact that’s not terribly good value for the simple reason that November 1st (last Thursday) was the local equivalent of a public holiday therefore the Spaniards will have taken off the Friday too and so it’s gonna be an expensive period to aim for.

Realistically you almost certainly won’t be aware of the times of the local holidays (and you should avoid UK holidays too) but it’s usually easy to spot them simply by browing one of the hotel sites. Doing that, I can easily spot the Spanish holiday because they’ve only three places available for tomorrow and, of course, the same technique works for other holiday periods.