Although those were the former “official” items that you could take, in practice bags substantially larger could usually be taken and, of course, you could always add even more courtesy of the duty-free shops that you reached after check-in which naturally was never even weighed. Oh, and let’s not forget the various exceptions that were often made too.

Fly from most countries today though and you’ll find that things are considerably more strict. The bag is still the same size (after a brief shrinking to 55cm) but not all umbrellas are allowed and you’re actually going to need to use that walking stick for it to be allowed. Even medication is now often limited to a 100ml bottle size and should also fit inside your trusty resealable plastic bag too.

Yet, despite all the fuss that they tend to make over what are very small things (notably that plastic bag I find), security levels are, if anything, getting lower because the security staff are going increasingly from a checklist rather than knowing why things are being done which can’t be good.

For example, on my last trip I found that they fixated on my lack of small plastic bag to hold 2 30ml containers. That fixation meant that they ignored 1) the six inch steel pin 2) the steel spring 3) the contents of the 30ml containers and 4) the cake. The cake? Well, a cake nicely iced with the look and consistency of plastic explosive in a sealed plastic container should have meant that they insisted on the container being opened so that the cake could be checked for traces of explosive.

So what really should be allowed on? No problem with the carryon bag sitting at the long-established 110cm standard size. If it’s filled with electronics then they may well need to be checked separately but given my recent experience I don’t believe that the people looking at the screens have the knowledge or experience to detect a real item from a bomb. They should insist that the items are switched on: that’s a simpler and more reliable way of checking that they’re the real thing. After all, batteries aren’t that clear on a scanner so why should anyone assume that scanning one means anything?

Fair enough on largely banning the sharp items and on using the plastic bag as a means of checking the volume of the containers in it and letting the staff read the labels but, really, the staff should know that it’s used for those reasons and if they don’t then they need better training. They should be checking the liquids too because any people are now using resealable bottles to get down to the 100ml and therefore reading the labels doesn’t provide any reliable information about the current contents yet you often see security staff closely examining the labels to decide if the liquid is allowed onboard. The original reason for the clear plastic bag was so that they could check the contents yet that’s no longer a valid reason given the much higher usage of resealable plastic bottles these days as a consequence of the 100ml limit. In many ways, it would be much better to allow larger normal bottles.

Perhaps most importantly, they need to get away from the rigid list based approach and train the staff properly as to what they’re looking for and why they’re looking for it. My cake wasn’t on the list and yet it’s something that really should have been checked: that it wasn’t tells me that we’re just fooling ourselves that longer lists for the security people means better security.

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Sometimes it’s easy enough to choose the next one as you’ll choose the course options that originally attracted you to the study programme. For example, you’re going to need to do Spanish if your original reason for following a languages degree programme was to be able to speak Spanish.

However, eventually most people run off the end of the obvious choices for them and then find that they’re innundated with advice and “obvious” choices that they should take. For example, most language degrees will require you to also take English. When you follow a series of foreign language programmes with one in English, you’ll probably find it fairly simple and your marks will probably reflect that. When you’ve high marks in a subject, everyone will suggest that you continue with it, but that doesn’t mean that you should. If you’re only doing that subject to fulfill a course requirement then you need to consider whether or not you even like that subject irrespective of whatever marks you might be getting in it.

At degree level, you need to concentrate on subjects that you enjoy, not what other people think you should be doing. Running with subjects that you don’t enjoy is a recipe for disaster at this level. Sure, you’ll have to do some compulsory subjects that you’re not necessarily enthusiasic about but you definitely don’t want to add optional subjects that you don’t like.

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It sounds like an idyllic lifestyle, doesn’t it? You work one day a week and the rest of the week you can be sunbathing by the pool.

The snag is that you need to wash all the sheets and towels and carry out maintenance work during the week. OK, so two days work and five at the pool? In theory, you might get away with that though, of course, the guests will be using the pool too and, usually, expect you to do things for them like organise tours or the area, tell them all the best places to go and so on.

What’s frequently forgotten about in all this is the financials that go along with this lifestyle. From a typical six or seven person gite you can probably get around 700€ a week in the peak season. That size of gite equates to a small three bedroom house in size and, of course, amount of work to look after. In reality most people aim for a gite complex of around four or five gites. On the whole, you’ll eventually reach an occupancy of around ten weeks per year for the gites which translates into around 35,000€ a year of an income.

However, there’s the matter of expenses to consider. Bearing in mind that you only have four or five hours to reset the gite between guests you’ll end up hiring a cleaner to help you which eats into the income somewhat and you may need someone to look after the pool. There’s also the business of maintenance: unlike a normal house rental you’re getting a new set of tennants virtually every week and that tends to be quite hard on the furnishings so you’ll need to renew at least some items pretty much every year.

Oh, and don’t forget the taxes!

I’ll look at the normal alternative to this next time ie buying a B&B.

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The problem with many of these schemes is that there are minimum payment amounts so in many ways it pays the companies running the schemes to have a thousand affiliates each bringing them one sale rather than one affiliate bringing them a thousand sales. In the first case the only cost to running the scheme is the administration as there’s often no sales commission to be paid whilst in the second case they’d end up paying out the commission at the highest band.

In general terms, that problem usually applies to companies running their own schemes therefore it’s usually better to sign up by way of one of the affiliate marketing companies such as TradeDoubler or CommissionJunction. They obviously take a slice of the commission that would otherwise go directly to you but at least you avoid the problem of having a series of small payments due yet none of them above the minimum for a payout.

Clearly there are some affiliates who go all-out in their marketing of the products and they do very well as you’d expect but it’s far from the easy job that many people seem to think. For example, even though I run a series of travel accommodation websites and religiously place affiliate links for car rental on pretty much every appropriate spot, in reality I get under $100/year from the affiliate links from those sites.

In fact, car rental doesn’t pay a massive amount (usually around $10/rental) but there are other affiliate links that pay quite substantial chunks of cash. Of those, probably among the most lucrative are house sales and online casinos.

The link on this page probably isn’t a fair test of the affiliate schemes but, on first sight, you’d think that at least some people would click on it and buy something. Frankly, I’d be very surprised if anyone did, but if they do, I’ll update this post. Go on… ruin my day and sign up for an Amex card (free to you, few dollars to me).

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Of course, it’s not just the business of reading that matters in our case, it’s the topics of the books too. In their nursery school it’s the French nursery rhymes and fables that they’re coming across so at home we make a point of working our way through the various stories that we came across in our own childhood.

Up to now, we’ve been concentrating on the Ladybird range which is for babies up to around five or thereabouts although that’ll depend on your childrens’ interests and notionally their range runs up to around seven. However, just by chance we came across the Usborne range of books which seems to pretty much take over where Ladybird finish although with quite a bit of overlap.

As with all these publishers aiming at the child market, they’ve loads of different ranges of books but the one we chanced on was their Young Readers Series 3. It’s actually aimed at older children than our nearly 4 and nearly 6 year olds but they just love the books so we’re planning on plugging away with those over the next six months or so although with the remainder of the Ladybird ones and some from the Usborne Series 2 mixed in amongst them.

Since we’re in France, we also get a library book from the school each week and read that to the boys in English which is much harder to do than you’d think. After all, if you’ve learnt French as a teenager or adult you’ll have missed out on all the words for things like witches and goblins which make up a surprising amount of the reading material that ends up getting brought home. So far though we’ve only been defeated entirely by one book.

Our next challenge will be to teach James to read and write in English.

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Whilst it’s clearly not an option for everyone, there’s getting to be quite a growth in information jobs which would let you do exactly that. Well, in principle anyway: as always, it’s rarely so simple as it might appear.

If you consider the very popular route of blogging, you’ll find that the vast majority of blogs don’t make any sizeable amount of money. Why? Well, the normal route of using adsense doesn’t work particularly well with sites with dynamic content as it usually takes adsense a couple of days to get the keyword targeting right by which time your blog will have moved on and a different set of keywords would be relevant. Secondly, you need major traffic or very well targeted traffic for affiliate schemes to work.

However, there is the option of doing sponsored posts which can be profitable even with relatively low traffic volumes. Typically you can make around $20 per day on a site with PR2 or above by writing three or four articles each day of, usually, 50 to 200 words each. If your blog gets to PR5 or over you can do really well with this option.

Other potential options are selling e-books or charging for subscriptions which are popular with some making money online blogs. There’s even SubHub which might eventually evolve into a worthwhile venture for the participants although at the moment it’s mainly an article repository for Internet business articles with a sideline in running up and hosting custom blog templates (at a rather exorbitant price).

Naturally, you don’t need to choose one single route to making money online. Personally, I do sponsored posts on blogs (not, so far, on this one) and also have a range of adsense funded sites with subscription options.

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For example, if you’ve found this post by searching with google then they’ll have recorded that search against your name if you were logged in with your google account. If you’ve found it via StumbleUpon then they’ll have recorded that too. Both are “to enhance your browsing experience” or words to that effect but they certainly remove any privacy that you thought you might have in your Internet browsing.

If you’ve you’ve been using the Internet for a while no doubt you’ve commented on some forums or blogs by now. All those comments are available to everyone. Oh, you used a false name, did you? No good because the software will have recorded the IP address from which you made the comment and that can be linked to you. Ah, but your ISP allocates random IP addresses every time you login so you’re OK. Well, no, because the ISP records who gets what IP address so, yes, that comment could be linked to you.

Still, at least your e-mails are private. Not really. The Internet is structured as a network of linked computers so every e-mail you send will have gone through a series of computers to reach its destination and every one of those computers could easily record the contents and who sent it.

It seems like we’ve finally got the surveillance of 1984 and all we’re missing (in most of the world) is the totalitarian regime. Still, perhaps if we wait a few years we’ll have the complete set.

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Oh, they don’t break down, but the quality of the workmanship that you see in some of the posts is really deplorable. What’s perhaps worse is that a lot of those low quality blogs are taking sponsored posts and if anything the quality of the posts that they get paid for is even worse than the norm for them.

Why do the advertisers put up with it? OK, they might just want the link from the blog but do they really want their product to be associated with shoddy workmanship? After all, the authors of these posts are numbered amongst their suppliers ultimately. Surely they can’t be so uncritical to accept what are often very shoddy posts indeed?

How bad are they? How about “you must visit this site. i think there products are really great. visit this site they have great products.”? I’ve paraphrased the real example so you can’t search for the actual blog entry that was based on (which was worse than that).

Good quality writing doesn’t mean that it can’t be about trashy subjects. Whilst many would call The Sun a trashy paper, every one of their articles is well written. Sure the writing style is laid back but it suits the content just as the relatively dense writing style of The Times suits it’s content and readership.

Just as there’s a range of writing styles in newspapers, so too one would expect there to be a range of writing styles in blogs. That doesn’t mean that the spelling, grammar and repetitiveness of my example is acceptable though because it isn’t and especially so since the advertiser paid $50 for it (quite why they approved payment is beyond me).

I’m not saying that you need perfection from day one but you should at least aim for that.

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Now, in the early days it was quite clearly a straight listing service. I typed up the entries as they came in and they were displayed on the site as a great big list. Nice and simple if somewhat time-consuming.

As it grew, I figured that a database was the way to go and in the second year that went live. By then the original 20 properties had grown to over 100. Mark 1 of that simply replicated the original hand-produced site and a version of that is still around to this day because the hand-produced format is much more effective in SEO terms than a written for database site is for various reasons.

With the dramatic reduction in the work required from me to actually add the information, I broadened the amount and variety of information that the property owners could add. That increased so much that I figured after a while that I should write a new-generation version of the original site to run alongside the original version but targeted at a different market. The increase in information meant that properties now had a little website each with several pages on it.

Interestingly though, I’ve recently come across a free accommodation property site that has come at the problem from the opposite direction. What they do is get the property owners to add a whole lot of information and they produce a little website for them which gets listed by them.

What’s clear is that we’ll both likely meet in the middle several years down the line as I’m in the process of souping up the mini website that my listing service generates and already some people are quoting that address as “their” website address which presumably will become more common as time goes on. In fact, it’ll become more and more of a website generation facility over the months to come as that’s my main area for development this year.

The question next year though will be: how do I promote it to the owners? The listing service aspect will clearly remain but there’ll also be the aspect of building almost custom websites for the owners (surprisingly easy to do). In fact, thanks to the recent change of hosting service I’ll even be able to let each owner use their own domain to point to their “mini” website (which will potentially be larger than many “proper” websites).

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It would be impossible to find a time traveller though, wouldn’t it?

It certainly would if they were really careful or even if they were careless but took the trouble to remove traces of their visits after the event. Would either situation apply though? Somehow I just can’t see it applying on all of their trips nor for that matter on any of them so long as their target time period was well before the invention of the time machine itself. After all, why bother trying to cover your tracks when anyone who knew about you would be classed as a nutcase?

If we take it as read that they wouldn’t bother to cover their tracks to any great extent then how about trying to find them? Where, or rather when, would you look?

I suspect that we can also take it for granted that they’d be visiting ever famous event over the range of their time machine but realistically we’d never know for sure that they’d been to any time much before the 1900s because the documentary evidence that we would need to detect them simply isn’t around. They might well need to be more careful any time from about 10 years ago when CCTV became commonplace too and, of course, the requirements for providing ID might make extended stays in the past more difficult too.

However, there is one event that would fit our requirements ideally and probably fit theirs too.

That’s the Titanic disaster.

Why? Well, it’s very well documented so that we have the potential of discovering them and they would like well documented events too so that they’d know where they could go and, in this case, who they needed to be. The plus point for us is that if we assume that their time machine goes back with them and they need it to return home, then they have to be one of the survivors.

So, in principle, all we need to do is to check through the records of those survivors to find someone who a) doesn’t have a past more than a few days prior to them getting on the ship and b) disappeared after they returned to England (or Ireland). That task is easier than you might think as the Encyclopedia Titanicia has biographies of all of the survivors and, of course, you can ignore the first class passengers (too famous) and those who were part of families which narrows down the field somewhat.

So what’s stopping you?

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