Foreign Perspectives

Several hours on and we’re still waiting for the replies from the villas in Majorca that we’re hoping to stay in over Christmas.

That’s the one thing that I really hate about booking self-catering places. At least with a hotel you can just click on their site and it’s booked. With self-catering there always seems so much more administration to go through and, for the most part, for no good reason.

Still, at least we have sort-of settled on a place to go (assuming that the flight prices don’t go against us whilst we’re twiddling our thumbs, of course).

Testing websites can be quite difficult once you go beyond the simple online brochure type of website.

For one thing, unlike most “normal” computer applications, you have untold millions of untrained people who can access your site and therefore you need to make sure that you try equally stupid things along the way of your testing as they are sure to do in “real life”. Clearly internet connections go down for instance and you need to allow for that, but what about the speed of their connections? One or two sites that I’ve tried out lately have consistently timed out on me no matter what I’ve done because my connection just isn’t anything like the speed that the writers of the site assumed that it would be.

Once you get into databases it’s a whole different ballgame too. For one thing, you always need to be able to let a number of people update your database simultaneously which in itself requires a different style of programming than that which is sometimes taught in the schools. What’ll work on a closed corporate network isn’t necessarily acceptable on an open Internet one.

Even after your site is up for a while, you should make a point of trying it out now and again. Actually looking it as your customers will see it. Remember they don’t necessarily have the 25″ widescreen monitor that you have and, even today, are more than likely using resolutions of 1000×800 or less. Watch the fonts you use too as many that you get with your computer aren’t available via the Internet; newer computers don’t always support the fonts on the older ones either.

There’s something of a growth market in mortgage and loan quotation services at the moment both in America and here in the UK.

That’s indicative of quite a lot of shifting around in the interest rates and deals available so even if you’re not actively considering home loans, it’s a good time to have a quick look. Mortgages are usually by far the largest single expense and therefore even quite a small percentage reduction in the payments can have quite a large effect on your lifestyle. Something as small as 1% of a difference soon adds up: much better to have that money in your pocket than the banks for sure!

Loans are another flavour of the month thing too with Christmas being so close (one month and 10 days to go!). Rather than dump the whole lot on the credit cards, it’s probably better to put some thought into it as it’s easy to save quite a bit with some of the current deals (from 4.9%!).

We should be sitting in the sun today but instead we’re freezing with a biting wind blowing quite a gale as I look outside from our conservatory towards the hillside.

Aren’t conservatories wonderful things? This isn’t even a sponsored post and I’m praising them anyway!

Seriously though, it really shouldn’t be as cold today as it actually is. We should still be able to use solar power to heat the water but it’s simply not a runner at the moment.

Although people can often assume that global warming would mean exactly that, in fact it wouldn’t as global warming would change the climate in ways that aren’t necessarily fully understood. Yes, some parts would be warmer and perhaps the earth as a whole would be, but in that transition to a warmer earth some areas would have severe changes to their weather patterns.

Despite spending almost two days solid looking for a place for us to go for Christmas, we’re still looking.

Having said that, we’ve narrowed the search down considerably. For one thing, thanks to a spate of rather chilly weather here, we’re thinking that perhaps trawling round the German Christmas markets in the biting cold wasn’t such a good idea after all and perhaps somewhere rather warmer would be the way to go.

So, where? In principle, the Canary islands are the place to go for certain warm weather but they’re way too expensive at this time of year so we’re looking at Ibiza and Majorca at the moment with a side-bet on Alicante and Valencia.

At the moment, the problem is that it’s not nearly so easy to find apartments as it is to find hotels online. One major pain is that most apartment/villa bookings are “on request” which means that we’re sitting waiting for replies re availability and prices from several places.