Foreign Perspectives

Although I am that little bit happier to be able to hold a photo in my hand rather than have it only as a digital file on disc, obviously it’s a whole lot handier for me to have that image on disc too.

In fact, although I’ve thousands of photographs from my holidays all over the world, you’ll only have seen those that I’ve taken in the digital age which, for me, effectively started just under four years ago properly but there are the camcorder images from back as much as 16 years.

What to do about all those non-digital images though? Well, in the plans is the purchase of a slide scanner which’ll radically increase the number of photos available to me online and make a major difference in the geographic coverage too with photos from Australia, the far east, India and several Pacific islands not forgetting about photos from just about all corners of America and Canada.

Now all I need is for the price of the things to drop down to something sensible.

Since we’ve gotten over the peak of the Summer season and, more importantly, I now have the Spanish exam behind me, our thoughts are turning to holidays for ourselves.

London is an easy choice for us as we’re just 20 mins from the airport and the flight times are pretty convenient too. Not only that but there’s loads of things to see and do in London year-round so we don’t need to aim for any particular date.

One interesting option that we think of now and again are London apartments. You might think that these would be very expensive and, of course, some of them are. Not all though and particularly not if you choose your dates wisely as many serviced apartments are aimed at business people and therefore have lower rates at the weekends.

Failing that, London is naturally full of cheap hotels although you should be careful with these as some are cheap because they’re not that convenient to public transport. If they’re reasonably close to a tube line even hotels that are relatively far out can be extremely practical as you can get a surprising distance on the tube in 20 minutes.

ReviewMe is one of those paid post sites that gets heavily promoted by the make money online blogs.

Now, the make money online blogs appear to do incredibly well from the posts that ReviewMe offer them with the likes of John Chow quoting figures into the thousands of dollars per month from them. Now, to be fair, you’d expect his blog to do quite well from any payment scheme in that it gets very substantial traffic each month and therefore is a valuable property to advertisers.

For me though, all I could see were a few posts at $5 back in May and nothing more until last week.

Ordinarily, I don’t do $5 posts and definitely not when they’re looking for 200 words but I figured that perhaps it was a matter of starting from the bottom and working up with them so I wrote a couple in May and then four last week.

Result? They paid out for one of the four, the advertiser pulled out of another one and they rejected the other two.

Why the rejections? Well, they sent me an e-mail saying that I’d “flagrantly broken the rules” and quoted the three rules:

1. The post must say it’s sponsored;
2. The link as specified by the advertiser must be included; and
3. There must be at least 200 words

I tag all my paid posts as sponsored unless the advertiser specifically requests that I don’t. The post that was accepted was identical in this regard to the other three.

I copy and paste the link specified so it was what the advertiser asked for in all four cases. 

I run a wordcount on my posts so all four cleared 200 words.

Actually, the second point was the problem. Three of the four advertisers had specified a link that simply wouldn’t work. The ReviewMe software obviously checks that the link in your post is the one asked for and therefore it’s not possible to correct this yet they rejected me because the link wasn’t “correct”.

I pointed this out to them but have yet to receive a reply.

Some jobs sound really fantastic.

You know the ones: you hear about a friend who lands this great job which has them jetting about all over Europe and it sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?

Except, of course, that it’s incredibly tiring. At one point I had one of these “fantastic jobs” which at one point involved flying to London three times a month. Now, at the beginning, that was brilliant as I could pick up all kinds of things in London that I couldn’t get in the local shops and I could do a bit of sight-seeing as well.

After a month or two of that though you’ve seen all the sights and been to all the shops and then it’s just tiring which is, of course, the problem with jobs that involve a lot of travelling.

Well, that’s an easy question: it’s the English course that I need to complete my modern languages degree.

The snag is that you need to tell them a) before you know the results of the course before it and b) in the midst of the hardest part of your current course. Therefore, it’s best to have decided upon the course for 2009 before you have even started the course for 2008.

Now, up to now, this hasn’t been a problem for me. I started the French way back in 2002 and for the next three years obviously I was going to be doing successive French courses. Likewise for the Spanish from 2005. Getting towards the end of the degree threw me a little but made the next logical course the English one which completes the BA (Honours) Modern Languages degree.

Now, you’re probably thinking that I’ve reached the end of the degree therefore there aren’t any more courses to consider.

In a sense that’s right but once you’ve stopped studying for a while it’s really, really hard to get going again as I found out when I left an 8 year gap between the BSc (Hons) Computer Science and the MBA. Therefore, I have kept going with small courses ever since. Nothing major for sure between 1993 and 2002 but enough to keep the brain ticking over and that made it a whole lot easier to get going on the current degree.

Anyway, I’m sort of toying with the idea of starting off on a science degree for a change They work in a similar way to the languages in that I’d pick up two diplomas along the way. One major difference is that most of the courses are 30 points rather than 60 which makes them considerably more doable.

So, ’tis probably going to be S104 next year. Or it might be The Art of English which would complete a Diploma in English.

Must get a coin out when the signing up time arrives 🙂