Foreign Perspectives

In the middle of a programme on the 31st our satellite system packed in and we’re still trying to get it going again!

We’ve changed the LNB, changed the cables leading to the dish, changed the digital tuner and even changed the dish from an 80cm one to a 95cm one and still no telly! It’s not even that we’re not getting a signal as we’re picking up “something” which gives us a 75 to 85% signal strength with around 45% quality yet no channels at all which is confusing.

Originally we were thinking that Sky had issued a new card and we’d not gotten it yet but that wouldn’t matter as the free channels (ie BBC & ITV) don’t need a Sky card and the second tuner that we’re trying now doesn’t even have a slot for one (and, yes, it did work fine before without a card).

It only took us about half an hour to get the thing tuned in when we did it first time around yet we’ve spent loads more time than that now and still not one single channel is coming through, even in great weather.

So, if anyone has any ideas, they’d be welcome because we’re stumped!

Whilst it’s easy enough to come up with a price for a house in a town where there are a lot of similar houses around and a regular turnover, it’s an entirely different matter in rural France.

For a start, once you get into the countryside, houses aren’t all the same. Even two similar looking cottages won’t come with the same price attached because they’ll be in different locations with different views and so on. And, of course, they’ll not be the same inside either nor will they have been equally well maintained. Finally, there just isn’t the regularity of turnover of housing in the French countryside as you get in a typical town in the UK.

So how do the French price their houses? Well, first off they look around at the various estate agent brochures that seem to be in every place you could possibily find them. The French don’t have a single estate agent selling a property usually so there are even more brochures than you might expect.

They look for vaguely similar houses to what they have to sell and take a view on whether their’s is worth more or less than the price being asked. What they don’t do usually is to ask the estate agent what the price should be and therefore the prices listed aren’t necessarily realistic. In fact, most are actually conversions from some relatively arbitrary figure in French francs with the estate agent commission being added on (hence the slightly peculiar sums that you sometimes see being asked).

So, don’t take the price in the estate agents brochure as gospel. It’s usually not based on any firm idea of what the house should be worth so you may well be able to negotiate either the price or what’s included in the price.

We’ve been looking around the prices of places locally and there’s quite a divergence between what some places are actually worth and what they might sell for at the moment.

For example, there’s a major hotel/restaurant complex near us that’s listed for almost EUR 2.5 million. It’s easily worth that as it’s a recently modernised building with over 30 rooms, large swimming pool, gardens, sports facilities, has a second building under construction to add another 30 rooms and planning permission for a third building for the complex plus extensive grounds.

Unfortunately, that complex is totally out of character with the region. There’s nothing comparable to it locally and for good reason: there just isn’t the market for it here.

So, whilst it might well be worth 2.5 million (and probably more), chances are that it’ll sell for around 1.5 million or so. That’s if it sells at all, of course, as it’s nothing like what people would expect in this area which means that nobody is looking to buy such a facility here.

One of the ongoing discussions since November in our little household is: “how come YOUR blog is OK and MINE isn’t?”.

Well, thankfully after over a month of hassling google, Cultured Views is once more back at PR2.

How did we get it back? Well, you’ve to register for google’s webmaster tools section, then claim the site and finally send a grovelling message to them saying that you’ve added “nofollow” tags to your sponsored posts and please can you have your pagerank back.

The snag is that adding “nofollow” just to sponsored posts doesn’t seem to be easily doable at the moment (ie there’s no plugin to do it) and therefore we’ve got nofollow on all outgoing links which seems somewhat counter-productive to google’s stated aim of identifying sponsored posts vs those that aren’t sponsored.

I’m just about to start the final course of my modern languages degree and although it’s actually the English course whereas all the others were in foreign languages, I’m finding that I’m dreading that first tutorial just the same!

Still, at least I shouldn’t find myself wanting to ask a question yet not knowing what the words are which can happen sometimes in the foreign language tutorials. It’ll be the very first tutorial that I’ve done in english for over 15 years so I’m sure it’ll feel a little bit peculiar.

In fact the first tutorial is a couple of days before the official starting date for the course so I’m not sure what we’ll be getting up to in it. Also it’s supposed to be an e-learning course so I’m not sure why there are any in-person tutorials at all although to be fair there are only four of them listed whereas normally there’d be something like twice that number for a course at this level.