Foreign Perspectives

One thing that I always find fascinating is the differing mix of advertisers on the different paid post websites.

You’d think that they would be broadly similar, but that isn’t the case. On some you’ll get loads of different opportunities available whilst on others there are only ever a handful. In practice, that means that I look most often on the sites with the larger numbers of opportunities as it saves me the hassle of logging in all the time to sites that rarely produce the goods.

The mix is quite different too. As you may have noticed, I take quite a range of topic areas for the paid posts, essentially for two reasons 1) they look interesting and 2) if they pay more I’m gonna consider them. Most of the time, I’m quite lucky and the available posts cover both areas.

Still, ‘yall have gotten quite a mix today with computer games, web hosting, holidays, plastic surgery and car sales! A bumper crop as we were away yesterday and didn’t get any done.

I found this little missive carved on the arena in Arles yesterday.

Whilst today, the worst of the grafitti is scraped on with a penknife, in times gone by it looks like they were at it with a hammer and chisel for quite a while. Who was D Leon that he had the time and the inclination to carve his name so deeply into the rock?

But then, it’s verging on being “historic” by now of course and in another century or two may even be deemed worthy of preservation.

School days are a bit of a nuisance for us to be honest as indeed they must be to most parents.

In our case, four days a week (he gets Wednesday off) we have to take James round to school before 9am, which gives us a few hours to get some stuff done (mostly blogging in the Winter as you may have noticed!), then off to collect him from school at 11.45am ie we’ve all of 2 1/2 hours to ourselves in the morning.

The afternoon isn’t much better, of course. To give us a little more time we usually drop him off at 2pm and head straight on for the shops or whatever though often it’s a bit of a race back to collect him at 5pm.

What we’re trying to do is to make the most of the Wednesdays by heading off somewhere when we collect him on the Tuesday evenings. Our first attempt at that was this week and we’d a very nice day in Arles.

Longer trips are more difficult though. In theory, we should set out on Saturday morning for Geneva but that would get us there in the evening and we’d have to go back on Sunday. Instead, we’re hoping to pick him up at lunchtime and head on then (he’s only at nursery school so it’s not a big deal if he misses an afternoon). That should give us all day Saturday and at least part of Sunday in Switzerland which is a nice little mini-holiday for us.

One of the things that’s been happening over the last few months is that the paid posting sites are demanding better standards of spelling and grammar from the bloggers and promising penalties if they don’t get them.

Recently, the advertisers have added some text to the effect that the blogger should check their spelling and grammar and that those with bad spelling will be rejected. Fair enough, except that almost all of those demanding better spelling have spelling mistakes in their own advert (and, in one case, in their mandatory link text!) and impose bad grammar through their poorly though out link text.

Perhaps laughably, it’s not uncommon to find that the link specified doesn’t actually work which shows how little care is put into the advertising from some places!

To be honest, with all the security things on these days, I figured that visits to CERN would have been cancelled but apparently not.

In fact, they seem pretty keen on getting people to go. Well, one aspect of that is that CERN costs a whole heap of public money and as with the likes of NASA they’re very keen to show that the money is being well spent.

That would ordinarily be particularly difficult for CERN in that the stuff that they do is very much into seriously technical high energy physics which, let’s face it, is far removed from most peoples’ lives. On the other hand, how could you put a value on the invention of the World Wide Web? The money that’s been generated by that single invention would more than likely repay all the money that’s been invested in CERN from the day it opened.

They go a little overboard on the visits in that they take a half day vs the cursory hour or so in normal places. That in turn means that they can’t have people just dropping in for a visit so if you book one, expect a wait of anything up to six months between your application and when they can show you around.

Oh, and they do show you around too. You get to see at least one of the experimental areas during your visit.