Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

For the second time in a month 1and1 took it upon themselves to take all my sites hosted with them offline.

Each time it cost me over $100 in lost income so I’m in the process of moving everything to a much cheaper and, so far, more reliable hosting service. One thing I’ve also decided to do is to put a few things in place to make it easier to switch to a backup service at short notice. As it was, I was able to move OurInns over to what will shortly become our main hosting service (EUKHost) but I’ll be starting to build that capability into the hosting setup of the remaining domains too over the next couple of weeks.

One thing that stopped me moving everything over is that I use 1and1 as the registrar for a number of the domains. On the whole, using your registrar as your host is simpler but usually isn’t a good move and I ended up in that situation for various historical reasons and I’ve been thinking of a bit of a tidyup for a while now.

The other thing that held me back from establishing a true contingency hosting site is simply that I’ve an awful lot of information online courtesy of the listings sites. The transfer that’s going on whilst I write this is over 200MB for instance and that’s not including the databases associated with that information. Quite a scary amount of information, isn’t it?

Step one of my move is “simply” moving the data which will probably take me the rest of the week to get through as I need to setup the databases on the new hosting site which always takes a little while to do.

Step two will be going through the domain registrations and rationalising them somewhat. One thing I’m considering is a move to iPowerWeb for the registrations which at $6.50/year is less than the $9.99/year that I’m currently paying but also comes with whois privacy which would be handy.

We thought we’d do some research on the Santa list today so it was off to Media Markt which is a fairly large general electronics cum electricals store in Girona.

Quite nice prices on a couple of items but some others that we were looking for were out of stock and we ended up just picking up a couple of DVDs. Then it was into the cattle pen that they refer to as the tills (the layout needs work!). No matter how many people they have on, it always takes ages to get out once you’ve bought something as they’ve just too much sales floor space in proportion to the number of checkouts.

By the time we’d reached the car, J & J wanted to see the DVDs which was just as well as one of them turned out to be devoid of the contents (quite how, I don’t know as it was a sealed package). That is about the worst possible nightmare you could imagine as it means going to customer service, or rather joining the queue for customer service.

Naturally, the number of customer service people is far below what is required of a store of that size so it was an hour (yes, a whole hour) of queuing just to get a DVD swapped.

We’d forgotten to hand out one of the presents for the last birthday (or was it Christmas?) of one of the little guys and came across it yesterday.

They’re just 3 and 5 so it’s only got 24 pieces. Well, had, now it has 22 and the 5 year old is almost ready to kill his brother who managed to lose those two pieces!

Do you ever wonder why you buy presents that need all the parts to work?

I used to think that there was a limit as to how bad an accountant could be. After all, they’re members of professional organisations which aim to keep standards high and strike off those who fall too far below the accepted norm.

Perhaps that’s true elsewhere in the world, but not in France.

Our “accountant”, for want of a better word, still hasn’t finished the 2006 accounts despite telling us just about every month since April that they’d be ready “next week”. We gave them a couple of weeks, called and were told that they needed just one more piece of information to complete them.

Once supplied, by magic another piece of information was now missing.

We were even told last week that the accounts would absolutely definitely be completed by Monday. Yup, one more piece is missing. Just one this time: a single cheque.

So, we’re off to see them tomorrow.

Unless you’re a “house person” or an “apartment person” there are many factors that you need to take into account in making the apartment/house decision.

Is this going to be your home or are you buying it for an investment is perhaps the most important question. On the whole, investment properties are generally assumed to require apartments rather than houses in that they’re usually aimed at a transient population who don’t want the hassle of looking after a garden. This isn’t always the case though and in areas where there is rapid price inflation of property which isn’t accompanied by a similar rise in salaries then you could be better looking at houses as families often find themselves priced out of the market in such circumstances. This is good for property investors in that you get a more stable base of rental clients than is typical in most areas.

That paragraph provides the first part of the answer for you too. If your stay is likely to be of a short duration such as for a university course or for a short-term contract then clearly apartments are the way to go. That avoids all the hassle of looking after the surroundings of a house and yet you can still get lovely surroundings in some of the apartment developments.

Have you any children or planning to have them? If they’re fairly young, usually it’s best to be looking at a house in that they’re usually larger in comparable circumstances. Of course, that extra size means more initial expense. For example, in the estate which we bought our property the two bedroom houses are around 15% more expensive than the two bedroom apartments.

Rent or purchase? If your move is temporary then rental is the way to go and that will usually push you towards apartments as there are usually more apartments for rent than houses in most areas.

Purchasing implies a longer term stay but if you are moving into an area distant from where you currently live you can find yourself with a choice between a rental apartment in an ideal area or a house purchase into a less than perfect area. If this applies to you and you need to move relatively quickly the thing to do is to rent the apartment in the ideal area first and make your purchase when a suitable property appears on the market. Despite what people think, you don’t need to move directly from one permanent home to another.

City or country? Whilst you get both houses and apartments in cities, you usually only get houses in the country. Therefore if you hope to live in the country, whether it be miles from anywhere or in a small village, then you will almost certainly have to choose to live in a house.

That’s just a brief overview of some of the main deciders; I’m sure that you can add to that list!