Foreign Perspectives

Not so long ago, e-books were very much a niche market but times change.

Ebooks are a pretty major outlet these days and the range has expanded far beyond the original list of classics and self-publications to include mainstream publications. Sadly some of that has brought along almost bookstore pricing in some cases which does seem a bit much given that it clearly doesn’t cost the publishers as much to sell you an electronic version of a book as it does to sell you a paper one.

Stories abound about the lives ruined by the latest slapdown by google.

I’ve just read of two people losing their jobs because of it. The drop in pagerank is a theoretical thing for google yet now two people are on the dole because of it and they didn’t violate google’s terms of service because, contrary to google may think, google’s terms of service don’t apply to the Internet as a whole.

But why bother at all? They seem to want the market in paid links to stop essentially because it doesn’t suit their algorithm to have paid links. In their ideal world the only links provided are those that are “natural” ie when someone links to a site that they’ve come across and think is great rather than a site that they’ve been paid to link to. In their ideal world, advertising just wouldn’t exist. Well, except for adsense from google, of course.

One of the things that I thought would be hard to do with the graphics pad was the business of looking at the screen yet drawing with the pen on the pad.

In fact, it doesn’t seem to require any adjustment at all. Within a few seconds I was drawing away no problem at all.

Simple things are very simple with the pad but there’s a lot more capability that can be brought into use with the pad that I have. For one thing, the heavier you lean on the pen, the heavier the line becomes. Vista adds a whole bunch more functionality too but I’ve not even scratched the surface of that yet.

Retouching photos looks like it will be somewhat easier too though, so far, I’ve not attempted that with the pen yet.

One of the surprising things is how naff many computer shops are when you’re looking for something even marginally out of the ordinary.

We decided to upgrade the maps on the listings sites a while back and when I saw the prices being asked for what was, in almost all cases, a fairly primitive map for use online I figured that the best route would be to buy a graphics pad and run up custom maps myself. After all, they’re not particularly intricate for the most part but with custom maps it would be nice to be able to add special features to the maps – points of particular interest for example.

So off I went to untold numbers of computer shops and the best that they could come up with was a fairly naff A5 pad at best and in most cases just the A6 version which is rather small to be drawing maps on.

In reality there’s only one graphics pad to go for and that’s the Wacom Intuos range yet not one single computer shop had them so I ended up ordering from Amazon.

If you’re learning Spanish one of the worries that you’ll have is with the wide variety of accents that you’ll come across whilst you’re learning the language. Yet, native speakers can cope with them all so you should aim to do so as well.Fortunately you’ve an equally large range of Spanish schools around the world. For example, Spanish immersion Costa Rica offers a range of courses starting from one week up to six months which will naturally give you a chance to hear the Costa Rican accent.Won’t it be impossible to follow? Well, as it happens I ended up having a south American teacher for the intensive course that I did last year and settled into his accent in under a day so you don’t need to worry about it.

The other big plus point is that you get to pick up some of the local culture too. That’s an important part of learning any language and Spanish is very much an amalgam of cultures from everywhere.