Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

Although there are loads of categories that you can list a blog under, “soapbox” isn’t one of them.

That’s a shame really as many blogs would sit very neatly under that particular category. After all, there are a great many bloggers who would have been standing on their soap box in earlier times. It’s not just the preachers these days of course as everyone and their dog has something to say nowadays. In fact, once you’ve kicked off one blog, you get to the point eventually when you’d like to say a bunch of stuff which doesn’t fit under the heading of the original blog.

Which is a long way of saying that I now have my very own “soapbox blog” over at The View from Arnold.

James’ nursery school is in the throes of producing a film based on the Arabian nights tales.

Well, we think it’s on that as James is less than forthcoming about his role in the production beyond mentioning the other day that he had to hand a lamp to two of the other children in his class. We’ve also seen various shapes of swords laid outside for the paint to dry and there was a photo of the little girls in Arabian nights type costumes in the newsletter last week.

Anyway, we’ll know soon as opening night (probably day I expect) is in a few weeks time.

Launching a new blog is a peculiar thing to do in many ways.

This blog for instance has been running for a little over four years now. From before that time I’ve had a domain sitting around which I basically just used for e-mail so I thought that I’d use it as something of a soapbox for a change.

It’s odd in some ways as it seems like forever since I started a blog totally from scratch.

What’s involved?

Well, registering the domain is the first step normally but I’d done that 10 years back for the new blog. Next is to get some hosting but then I’ve that already done. Then, it’s loading the software which takes about 20 minutes and another 20 or so to get the various plugins sorted out.

At that point, it’s ready to go but it looks pretty plain so you end up spending ages searching for a decent template for it before making that historic first post.

After that, you need to register it all over the place eg at FeedBurner to handle the subscribers, Technorati to get some blog type stats. Then you’ve to start adding it to blog aggregation services to pick up a little traffic although you can short-circuit that process by using one of the manual submission services to do it for you ($23 well spent).

Then it’s down to the slog of writing posts with no feedback from an audience for the first few months (which is why most blogs stagger to a halt after 2 or 3 months).

Oh, at some point you need to pick a topic for your blog too. In this case, not so easy as “soapbox” usually doesn’t appear as a blog category!