Foreign Perspectives

If you’re like most people I’m sure you’ve hardly gotten beyond thinking that you’ll either get a few hundred from the travel agent or perhaps just use a card when you get there.

In the first case, you’ll end up spending a small fortune un-necessarily and in the second you could be stuck without any money. In both cases, it’s worth putting a little thought into it and to help you make the best choices I’m putting together a little series on it over the next week or so.

In days gone by it would be maybe £100 to get a car serviced but those days have long since gone and I just paid out over twice that.

In fact, it would have been much more but we’d had the speedo set on trip rather than distance travelled so managed to miss out a service completely. Whilst we did that accidently this time I think we may well do it delibrately next time as I’m sure a lot of people are increasingly doing these days with the spiralling cost of the process.

Is it safe though? If you’d done that 20 years ago perhaps the answer would have been “no” but cars have become a whole lot more reliable over that time yet the service interval hasn’t changed. From our point of view, it certainly doesn’t appear to have made much difference in the running of the car, certainly not £200 worth of difference.

OK, we’ve some new oil in the car and presumably it’s cleaner oil than the stuff they threw out, which I imagine is better for the car. However, is it enough cleaner to make it worthwhile paying £200 to have it changed? I’m sure we could have managed to do that ourselves for maybe £20 tops. I’ve looked at the list of stuff they did and there’s nothing on it that seems really worth paying that much for so I figure that we’ll likely skip the next service too.

In fact, the only thing that might have been worthwhile for them to have done turns out to be a warranty thing which they couldn’t do today anyway and we’ve to go back in a couple of weeks when they get the part.

I’ve been plugging away with the SevaTeem theme off and on over the last month or so and it’s now complete enough to let me try it out on various blogs that I run.

Obviously since I designed it mainly for me, it runs quite nicely on a number of those blogs but one or two have highlighted little things that I’d like to do with it. For instance, An Age of Magic uses a dark background therefore I needed to be able to change the colour of the various fonts used so that added a few options. That sorted out a lot of stuff at a stroke as it also lets me change the background image and not need to dive into the stylesheet to change colours as they’re all laid out on the options screen now.

One or two little “funnies” turned up when I tried to add in various bits of HTML in the sidebars by way of widgets so I’m going to be adding one or two options along those lines or perhaps buildin a widget that’ll deal with those issues.

This blog uses a fixed width so I’m currently working on adding that as an option. SevaTeem is a fluid width theme but I want to be able to use a fixed width as well.

Why all the options? Basically because I want SevaTeem to be the only theme that I ever need.

In times gone by, getting inflation down was always considered to be a “good thing” and it still is but the problem is that the underlying reasons for inflation these days are quite different from those a few years ago.

Nowadays, inflation is largely driven by the oil price either directly through increasing the cost of your own petrol or indirectly through increasing transport costs generally. More to the point though is that it isn’t driven by the banks handing out money as they used to as anyone who has tried to get credit lately will tell you.

Yet, the Bank of England persist in using interest rates as their seemingly only means of driving down inflation. It isn’t working and it won’t work because it’s not bank lending that’s keeping inflation up (as is clear by the “credit crunch” that we’re all experiencing): it’s the oil price. Even if they took interest rates to 50%, inflation would still remain high.

What those high rates are doing though is killing the economy; they’re certainly not killing the inflation.

After much tinkering around with other peoples’ WordPress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one.

That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you’d think basically because a lot of the groundwork has already been done so it’s effectively tinkering around but on a slightly larger scale.

Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with that off and on for the last month or two over at SevaTeem and it looks like it’s getting close to the time when I’ll be able to release it on an unsuspecting public. As a bit of preparation for that day, I’ve started to roll it out on some of my little family of blogs with the one over at Our Inns probably being the closest representation to the final product although as it’s going to offer loads of options it could well look quite different and Personally Chosen is also using it.

What’s needed next is the addition of some options to avoid people needing to dive in and edit the code itself.