Financial & Travel Musings

Updating the lighting fixtures around the house is something that many of us put off ’til we’re getting going on a major refurbishment and sometimes not even then.

However, that needn’t be the case. After all, lighting fixtures are technology and technology has a tendency to continue to produce new and better products for lower and lower prices as time goes on. Not only that but discount lighting is very much a fixture (if you’ll forgive the pun) of interior design shops everywhere.

The style and functionality of the pieces changes quite substantially over time too so if you’ve had your fixtures in place for more than a few years it’s usually worthwhile to have a look around and see what is available. Many of the new items are specifically designed for low energy bulbs too so you may be able to take the opportunity to substantially reduce your power consumption whilst getting a nice update to the look of your home.

Popularity: 15% [?]

It hardly seems like a week since we were getting seriously annoyed with the UK court system but it is.

This is quite a busy time for us in a lot of different areas and for a variety of reasons.

Since we weren’t too pleased about the approach taken by our UK hosting service re the above, we took the opportunity to move the key blogs over to America where the First Amendment gives writers and free speech generally a whole lot more protection than the UK does in some areas. That was a surprisingly seamless transition but has had the effect of seeming to change the composition of our readers for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the moment (it’s not the geotargeting of searches as that usually doesn’t affect blogs that much).

That move has had the side-effect of creating another blog for us back in the UK should we want to use that though we’ve not thought a whole lot about that as yet.

Separately from that we’re starting to gear up for John starting school here in September. It seems like a long way ahead at the moment but already we’ve a couple of appointments at the school in May relating to that.

I’m still plugging away with the Child Development course (ED209) which seems to have ramped up the quantity of work required of us over the last few weeks. At the moment it’s almost as though it were a 90 point course rather than a 60 point one. I’m still currently sticking (just!) to my schedule which is running 4 weeks ahead of the official calendar but I can’t see me keeping up that lead much longer if the quantity of work doesn’t go down a little. On that front, the next book is on children’s learning of language which I did a lot of during the English course last year so, in theory, that should be easier to get through. What it has taught me is to investigate further when comments on a course say that it’s “hard going” as this one did. Fortunately, next years course doesn’t have comments like that!

Tomorrow’s a public holiday here so we’re heading off somewhere or at least hope to if the weather is reasonable which, at the moment, doesn’t seem too likely (after all, it is a public holiday so what do you expect?).

Popularity: 42% [?]

Isn’t it odd how we can sometimes get particularly attached to a piece of technology?

I’m sure there are still a few people around who still fondly remember the Model T Ford which was the car that really started the motoring habit around the world. Just think that without that we’d not have McDonalds!

Even now I’d still quite fancy having my own PDP-8 since it was the first computer that I really got to know. Sure, it’s seriously outdated but even so. Would you believe a maximum memory of the equivalent of 48k bytes and 2MB of disc space was enough to support 11 users simultaneously?

However, even the humble compact flash card has a place in my heart if only because it’s so similar to the little memory cards that Mr Spock was forever shuffling in and out of the computer in Star Trek.

My current favourite item of technology is the Acer Aspire One that I’m typing this on now. It’s so cute that I’m expecting to keep it around for long after I would ordinarily have replaced it. This is the computer that really gives the phrase “portable computer” a proper meaning. Sure, it’s not so fast as its bigger siblings but it only adds a second to load times for the wordprocessor or whatever and, let’s face it, all computers have long since become far faster than we really need them to be. It wasn’t that many years ago that you’d never have thought that a computer would ever be fast enough to place full screen video but this little baby hasn’t a problem with it.

Isn’t it peculiar the technological items that we get attached to?

Popularity: 25% [?]