Foreign Perspectives Foreign Perspectives News and editorial on life from the south of France, a regular series on how to move here and some random musings too. As seen on TV. Articles
Car insurance: shop around!
2008-03-06 21:20:00 As you’ll gather from this photo our little car is no more and we have an insurance claim in the works. Car Insurance generally is something of a minefield in that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you try to claim on it. That being the case, you may as well go for the cheapest insurance you can get as many of us do. Or, are you better paying a little more for a “better value” contract? Well, as it happens we received the renewal for our little car after that photo was taken and interestingly it was around 30% more than the insurance for the larger car that we replaced it with (from a different company). Not only that, but had we taken the cheaper insurance in the first place we’d have received the full value of the little car rather than the 25% of its value that we actually received (and this was for a car under two years old). This is, of course, where the experience of insurance agents really pays off. They know how the various... More About: Car Insurance , Shop
Car insurance: shop around!
2008-03-06 21:20:00 As you’ll gather from this photo our little car is no more and we have an insurance claim in the works. Car Insurance generally is something of a minefield in that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you try to claim on it. That being the case, you may as well go for the ... More About: Car Insurance , Shop
Sponsored post listings sites: ten a penny?
2008-03-06 21:12:00 Although the big names are always present, there seems to be an almost constant launching of new sites offering sponsored post opportunities these days. This is brilliant in the sense that nearly all of them give you one post to do about themselves for an above average sum. Typically you’ll get $10 to write a post of a few hundred words about the sponsored listings site but I’ve had as high as $55. In several cases, that has been the only post that I’ve written for a site. That’s not because I’m totally mercenary and take only the payment to write about them and then ignore them, but because several of the sites have never had another opportunity available for me to write about. OK, eventually perhaps some of them might do, but realistically I’m not going to continue to look at a site that never has anything for me when I can spend that time looking at other sites which do provide a stream of opportunities. The e-mail sites are very hard to judge ... More About: Post , Sponsored , Listings , Sites , Penny
Sponsored post listings sites: ten a penny?
2008-03-06 21:12:00 Although the big names are always present, there seems to be an almost constant launching of new sites offering sponsored post opportunities these days. This is brilliant in the sense that nearly all of them give you one post to do about themselves for an above average sum. Typically you’ll get $10 to write a post ... More About: Post , Sponsored , Listings , Sites , Penny
It’s nearly Easter!
2008-03-06 20:42:00 Hard as it may be to believe with the weather that we’ve been having lately, but Easter is almost upon us! That means, we hope, that decent weather with be with us fairly soon and so it’s time to start thinking about gearing up for the 2008 holidays. Picnics should be featuring in those plans of course and picnic time picnic baskets are somethings that never seems to last from one year to the next. But picnics aren’t just about the baskets and there’s a whole raft of gear that you never seem to be able to keep in one place from one year to the next or which needs something of a renewal. If it’s been a good year, that picnic blanket you bought last year will be in a pretty sorry state by now and so will the beach towels. Depending on the area you live in it can be worthwhile scouting out a few picnic locations ahead of time so that you’re not stuck with going to the same old places time after time. Even if you limit your trips to a half hour drivin...
The world’s language
2008-03-06 20:16:00 Sometimes I wonder whether or not it’s worthwhile even attempting to learn another language if you’re a native English speaker. After all, around Europe it’s commonplace to find that companies choose their working language as English. That doesn’t mean that they suddenly revert to some other language when chatting over lunch: it’s English all of the time in many of these companies. In the European administration there is little option but to choose English as it’s the one language that can be counted on to be known by everyone as, outside the UK and Ireland, it’s almost always the first second language that people learn. So in many cases you can get away with only English. The other problem though is that as a native speaker of English it’s often difficult to get the chance to try out any other languages that you speak as throughout the world people tend to go to English straight away unless you speak their language at a very proficien... More About: World , Language , The World
Online UK garden centre
2008-02-28 21:01:00 It’s nearing the end of the winter so it’s a good time to start thinking about how you’d like your garden to look this spring. Garden Furniture will no doubt feature highly in your thoughts and it’s good to see that it’s available online these days as often the selection in local garden centres seems to be ... More About: Online , Centre , Home Improvements
Wordpress annoyances
2008-02-28 20:49:00 Whilst it’s great to have Wordpress available free, what’s not so hot is that now and again you hit little bugs in the software that you can’t do a whole lot about. For example, at the moment, I’m continually getting “MySQL server has gone away” which is a time-out thing. There is a fix for it ... More About: Commentary
Thinking of learning German, or perhaps just refreshing your existing Germa
2008-02-28 20:44:00 If it’s been a while since you learnt to speak German , chances are that you’re a little rusty and in need of a refresher on the vocabulary and grammar. If that sounds like you then the information on the German language at elanguageschool might be ideal. I’m not sure that you could learn the language from scratch using the ... More About: Learning , Thinking
New template, new readership
2008-02-28 20:35:00 One of the oddities of blogging is that it’s very easy to change the overall look of a blog without affecting the content at all. Now, on the whole outside the regular readership most people arrive on a blog by way of a search engine of some sort. Some are blog specific, some are generic like ... More About: Web Development , Template
Looking for a car but ain?t got the money for one?
2008-02-28 16:56:00 I’m sure that situation describes many people these days but even a bad credit record isn’t a show stopper as there are many excellent sites around that offer pretty much guaranteed car finance no matter what your situation. Generally speaking car credit is very much a specialised area as there are a massive number of options available ... More About: Shopping , Finance , Money
The popular posts: all financial
2008-02-28 16:24:00 Whilst this isn’t really an out and out financial blog as such I write about various financial topics from time to time as you’ve probably noticed. What’s odd about them is that any time I write about something financial, I always get a little flurry of incoming links from an assorted collection of blog aggregation services. ... More About: Financial , Popular , Posts
Parents are still giving their ?kids? money
2008-02-27 20:38:00 With the credit squeeze still upon us, it shouldn’t be a great surprise to learn that many parents are still tapping the Bank of Mum & Dad even as adults. The research commissioned by Scottish Widows indicates that over a third of parents have had to tap into their retirement savings to fund these requests from ... More About: Kids , Finance , Money , Parents , Giving
Looking critically at your own language
2008-02-27 20:26:00 Doing the English component of my modern languages degree as the very last course after years of learning both French and Spanish gives a slightly peculiar perspective. For one thing, I know a lot of the linguistics words that they’re using but I only know the French and Spanish words for the relevant terms. It’s a ... More About: Commentary , Language
The detox trend
2008-02-27 12:37:00 One of the catchwords of modern times is ‘detox’ and no doubt everyone knows someone who has gone on a detox at some stage. It’s the new way of treating the body and health from the inside out and of course in many ways it makes perfect sense to do this. I guess it is ... More About: Detox , Trend
Writing style for sponsored posts
2008-02-27 12:18:00 If you’re ever leafing through blogs that do sponsored posts there seem to be two basic styles that people use when writing them. First, there are those which are pure advertising. They have written exactly what the advertiser has asked for and nothing else. Commonly in these you’ll get extensive repetition of phrases along the lines ... More About: Marketing , Writing , Sponsored , Style , Posts
Looking for a property on the Mediterranean?
2008-02-27 11:58:00 If you’re looking for a property along the Mediterranean most of the time you’ll not be too bothered about which particular country that property is in. The snag is that the majority of property listings sites operate on a country by country basis so you’ve to hunt round a whole lot of them if you’re ... More About: Property
Back into the t-shirt
2008-02-27 11:46:00 It looks like that for a second year running winter has pretty much passed us by. The trees are already showing signs of greenery and many of the fruit trees are already flowering. Good for us, of course, but it looks like the local ski resorts have had another pretty poor year as there wasn’t a ... More About: Commentary , France , Back , Shirt , T-Shirt
Looking for a UK payday loan?
2008-02-26 20:06:00 If you’re finding that there’s more month left than you have money to pay for it then a payday loan is one possible solution. These are very popular in America but have only recently reached our shores so you may not have heard of them before. Basically, a payday loans are short term loans that are intended to be repaid ... More About: Finance , Loan , Payday
What?s the best way to learn a language?
2008-02-26 19:39:00 After well over 10 years attempting to learn French, Spanish and even a little Greek I can confidently tell you that the answer is: “it depends”. Consider Greek for instance. I did a six week class on that about 15 or so years ago and that was enough to be able to understand a good deal ... More About: Commentary , Language , Learn
Learning French for free
2008-02-26 19:01:00 If you’re thinking of travelling to a French speaking country this summer, now is a good time to make a start on getting your French up to speed as, for the most part, French speakers are very, very reluctant to switch to English for you. There are loads of places online to learn a bit of French and ... More About: France , Free , Learning
Eating up the day in looking at new themes for the blogs?
2008-02-26 18:52:00 One very easy way to eat up a whole day (or sometimes days) is to start thinking that you’d like a new theme for your blog and then get going on looking through what’s around. There seem to be thousands of themes knocking around these days and nearly all of them free which makes for something ... More About: Blogs , Themes , Eating
Considering a nursery for your little ones?
2008-02-26 18:34:00 With all the scare stories around these days everyone tries to take that little bit more care in selecting a day nursery for their children. There are loads of them around these days but one name that I’d not associated with them is BUPA who are, of course, very well known in the healthcare market throughout ... More About: Nursery
Dreadful ?English? in sponsored posts
2008-02-26 17:50:00 Whilst almost all places listing opportunities for sponsored reviews say something to the effect that they’re expecting good quality English spelling and grammar, it’s becoming increasingly common to see absolutely dreadful grammar being produced by the advertisers themselves. Consider just a few examples from one recent opportunity which I rejected simply because the English was so ... More About: Sponsored , Posts
Looking for a sign?
2008-02-25 21:54:00 If you’re looking to buy a new sign then Build A Sign has a whole host to choose from. Unlike those that you’ll find in the shops, their signs are fully customisable so the large list that they have on the site is really a good deal larger when you consider that you can change the wording ... More About: America
Depressing weather
2008-02-25 21:50:00 We’ve been having really great weather over the last week or more so it’s all the more depressing that we’re back to what we’d expect to be normal February weather here ie dull and wet. Funnily enough we’re almost at the end of February and it’s only now that we’re getting the kind of weather that ... More About: Commentary , Weather , France , Depressing
South Africa - an up and coming destination
2008-02-25 21:31:00 South Africa is a destination that just dropped off the tourist radar for a number of years but it’s one that’s coming back into fashion in a very big way. Not only is the climate much more appealing to the tourist market but the tourism infrastructure has seen major development in recent years and the tourist ... More About: Holidays , South Africa , South , Destination
Looking for Wordpress themes? an easy way to waste a whole day!
2008-02-25 20:21:00 I thought that it was time I spruced up the look of the blogs that I run so I’ve been looking for a new theme off and on over the last few weeks. Today though was a bit of a marathon session when I picked up over 20 potential themes and am in the process ... More About: Wordpress , Wordpress Themes , Themes , Easy , Waste
Electronic signatures
2008-02-25 12:20:00 With more and more businesses operating over wide geographic areas it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get people together to sign off on things. However, the ESIGN Act of 2000 opens up the opportunity of using an electronic signature to approve the documents that you’re working with. The act declares that these electronic signatures are just as ... More About: America , Business , Electronic
Another new paid posting site
More articles from this author:2008-02-24 21:13:00 One of the problems with paid posting sites is that the majority of them expect you to know how much your blog is worth which, for most bloggers, is the one thing that they know next to nothing about. That being the case, you often find “high value” bloggers writing substantial posts for $5 when they ... More About: Site , Paid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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