Foreign Perspectives

Over the last year or so the amount of junk mail I’ve been getting has completely pulled away from my ability to cope with it. Going through anything up to 1000 emails to find anything that was worth reading was just too much and that was after the junk mail filters had done their work.

So, I’ve decided to approach the problem from several different angles.

Step one was changing all the email redirects that I use to go to my bulk mail mailbox which has the strictest junk mail filtering enabled. That thinned out the junk mail considerably  but there’s still quite a lot.

Step two was setting up a brand new mailbox. I’m now in the process of changing the redirects one per day to this mailbox. So far, the mail has remained reasonable but that’s because I’m starting off with the email addresses that were largely personal; when I get to those that were advertised in some way I’ll have to work through the legit ones and change them to something else.

Step three has been in progress for a while alongside the above and consists of deleting the redirects that I don’t really use. Unfortunately, one of these has the problem that it collects a lot of valid email and it also collects an awful lot of junk mail so I’ll need to wade through it all sometime and notify the legit people.

Step four is thinning out the non-junk mail that has also grown to such an extent that it’s unmanageable. Over the course of over 10 years there’s a surprising amount of email subscriptions that build up!

Bit of a hassle but I suppose that trying to stick to the same email for over 10 years was asking a bit too much when initially email addresses were much more visible on the Internet.

One of the least well promoted things in the OU is that we’re eligible to apply for the student card issued by the NUS.

At first sight, forking out £10 or so for the card doesn’t seem like a great plan but what makes it worthwhile is that as well as being a student ID card this card also gives you lots of discounts too. So many in fact that I usually find that it’s paid for itself within the first month or two.

On the whole, the discounts are from companies who you’d expect to have a significant number of student customers which means that many of them aren’t of major interest to the mainly mature students from the OU. So, for instance, I don’t see myself ever using FlatMatch. On tbe other hand, I save about £5 a month on my Fitness First membership and Wendy regularly gets 10% or 20% discount from Peacocks and New Look plus there’s the useful 5% off Amazon and free delivery from £5 too.

If you’re not sure whether it’s worth it for you, you can have a look at the discounts on their site first.

Separate from this, but potentially even more valuable are the student discounts available for Microsoft products (up to 100%!).

Wedding dresses are a bit of a peculiar kind of purchase, aren’t they?

After all, few people would spend anything like the amount of money on any dress never mind a dress that’s intended to be worn only once, would they? Yet, of course, destination wedding dresses are very much a purchase that people aspire to, pretty much regardless of the cost involved.

They’re slightly odd also in that they generally aim to have a strong hint of tradition whilst also trying to be quite fashionable at the same time. That’s not an easy combination to manage which, of course goes some way to explain the high prices for these dresses.

Make sure you make the most of your purchase experience… chances are that it’ll be a long time before you get that much attention when buying something.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that British kids collected money over the Halloween period by wheeling around a dummy and collecting a “penny for the Guy”.

These days though, I doubt that many would even know the phrase or where it originally came from. In case you’re one of those, it’s a phrase commemorating Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up the houses of Parliament as part of the Gunpowder Plot way back in 1605.

There was a vaguely confusing few years when that went out of fashion with nothing to replace it but thanks to the Americanisation of the Halloween period we are firmly in the “trick or treat” era. Still, at least it hasn’t degenerated into the non-traditional cry of “bon bons” (sweeties) of the French who arrived at that with no previous Halloween tradition.

It’s fortunate for us this week anyway in that it’s been pouring for most of this week but was quite pleasant whilst we were walking round with the kids on Halloween night last week.

At the moment, there’s Kindle for Kindle, Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Android but sadly, so far, no Kindle for Linux. Naturally, that hasn’t stopped the Linux people running Kindle though…

Step one is installing Wine, which, for me, is via the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu 10.10. After that you need winetricks (for some fonts):

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks corefont

Then you install a not-quite up to date version of Kindle for PC:

wget http://ap.smu.ca/~taro/software/KindleForPC-installer.exe
wine KindleForPC-installer.exe

I say not-quite up to date as the latest version wouldn’t work for me; the latest version can be downloaded via Amazon.

Finally, you need to configure Wine to run the Kindle software in a Windows 98 environment. Do this by going to Wine configuration, add application, select Kindle in the Program Files/Amazon/Kindle for PC/KindleForPC.exe and choose Windows 98.

You can switch the screen to/from landscape by creating two launchers on your desktop (right-click on the desktop, select create-launcher) with:

xrandr -o right (or left if required)
xrandr -o normal

The mousepad orientation is “interesting” after doing this but quite usable; fixing that is rather more complex and the solutions I found don’t work on my system.