Our Honda Foresight scooter is for sale. If you’re in London and would like a reliable, comfortable 250cc beast to zip through London traffic congestion-charge-free and get you into the country on the weekend, check out the page and give me a call. More photos on request.
It’s for sale because we’re leaving the country, but you probably knew that. Oh, it’s currently for sale at £1100 or best offer.
I’m not a financial advisor, but I’m about to offer some long, boring financial advice. Those of you who know me may think this is a dumb idea, as I’m not a big money person. You get it, you spend/save it, whatever. I don’t invest, my superannuation (Australian pension supplement) is way, way behind, and I avoid debt wherever possible. I hate what capitalism does to our environment and ourselves, yet I’m not planning a revolution because I can’t think of an alternative. (Though it might be fun to watch.)
Anyway, I’m here to offer a little advice about foreign exchange. Not for huge amounts of money; if you know someone who does, listen to them instead. This is for anyone travelling overseas and anyone working overseas and sending money home.
The basic bit of information here is that it’s always better for you to buy local currency, not foreign currency. So if you’re in the UK (pounds sterling), travelling to Western Europe (mostly Euro) then you shouldn’t buy a whole heap of Euros from the currency exchange kiosk at the UK airport. Buy enough to get you from the airport to a bank machine in Europe (automat, whatever), and maybe a buffer for the first night.
You will get a better rate buying local currency from a European hole in the wall, using your usual bank card (look for Maestro/Cirrus or Visa symbols on the back) even though they will charge you for the privilege. The exchange kiosk will charge too.
(A buffer is still a good idea, in case you can’t find a teller. Japan’s Visa machines don’t normally deal with foreign cards, and you’ll have to search one out. Ghent, in Belgium, is just short of them. And sometimes you won’t feel safe using them. A buffer is a good idea.)
This doesn’t only apply to cash, but also to large electronic transfers (TT) as performed by banks. If you’re sending money (say) from the UK to Australia, somewhere along the line there will be a currency exchange from GBP to AUD. The local bank in the UK will ask if you want to send pounds or dollars. They will then give you crappy, wishy-washy advice on which will be better.
Yes, exchange rates change, sometimes quickly. I’ve seen the pound range from 2.89 dollars to 2.30 in the last few years. But you will get a better rate if you buy the Australian dollars locally, in Australia. Yesterday, each pound sent from the UK would have bought 2.56 Australian dollars in Australia, but buying them here and sending Australian dollars directly buys only 2.51.
Sure, the exchange rate could change in the next few days, but you’re unlikely to win out buying a foreign currency. If you need to know exactly how much you’ll get at the other end, then sure, maybe that’s valuable. And of course, both of those rates are better than the rates from just two weeks ago. So it’s all a big crapshoot. Just don’t let the banks rip you off any more than they’re going to anyway, and buy your currency locally: buy Australian dollars in Australia, and pounds in the UK.
Lastly, if you’re sending a lot of money back, don’t do it all in one hit. Spread it out over time and you’ll minimise your losses, plus probably gain from spreading your income across two countries. Your mileage may vary, no responsibility taken, these statements are forward looking, Blah, Blah, Blah.
Pointless crap alert:
You know how orange juice tastes after you’ve brushed your teeth?
Well, we’ve just discovered a new one. Drink grapefruit juice, and follow it up with Peppermint tea. Or, rather, prepare it as a prank for someone who’s done you wrong.
OK. Still not Norway, but I should get out a few things while I remember them. For no better reason than I’ve been meaning to.
Sleep calls.
Hey! Boing Boing accepted my submission about Cosmic Painter. Let’s hope they appreciate some free publicity and don’t stumble under the load.
Oh, it’s a cool little program that runs under OS X, is GPL open source, and lets you “paint” on a spinning canvas. Like a spirograph, except that the canvas spins instead of the pen, and you can draw whatever you like, change the spinning speed, direction, frame rate, colour, colourspeed changing… not so much like a spirograph really. But a great idea, and hopefully when back in Australia I’ll get a chance to VJ some of this live.
Oh, and if I haven’t blogged our recent trip to Norway by this weekend, someone let me know, yeah? Email is blog [at] funwithstuff.com. Many, many photos to sift through, so I’ll post the best few.
OK. Here’s a way for anyone interested to contact me. I don’t really need another email service, but since they offered, I’ve now signed up as a tester for Google’s Gmail. (Blogging has perks – who knew?) There are privacy concerns so I’ll watch for any news and keep you posted. In the meantime, email me at funwithstuff [squigglysymbol] gmail.com if you don’t know me yet but have something, anything to say to me. (The usual addresses stand if you know them.)
Actually, drop me a line at the Gmail address even if you do know me. It’d be nice to know I’m not just typing this for my own benefit. If you want to send lots of pictures, 1GB of email space is the ideal spot for it. And it’ll probably be good while travelling.
Google may not be perfect, but it’s a long, long way from Microsoft. Let’s hope the IPO doesn’t screw it up.
We’re leaving London soon, after three years spent here with the old buildings, the drizzle, the tube, the beer, and Londoners. Everyone’s experience of a place is different, coloured by their individual experiences. For us, though, it has been enough.
London, and other big cities, are great at delivering the exceptional time; the wonderful theatre experience (Jumpers) or the amazing restaurant (Roussillon) and the best chocolate shop in the world. (And we had a good day today looking at old buildings and gardens in Mayfair.) The metropolis is also great at connecting people in unusual ways. But big cities are lousy at the everyday.
Daily life in a city where everyone wants to be is crowded, dirty and overpriced. The tube is a living hell in rushhour, traffic a slow negotiation between crawling psychopaths. A ray of sunshine is such a rarity that everyone drops their top and takes their towel to the local park to sunbathe.
We’ll be reversing this little equation by moving to a mountain community outside Brisbane, Australia, using rain as our water supply, eating happy organic vegies and enjoying daily warmth. The exceptional experiences may be fewer, and further between. Daily life will be far more fun. (We hope.)
Five weeks left here, a few weeks around the UK, two months around the US, then back home.
Lovely weekend with the family. Sister, Father, Uncle and I went a-walking and a-drinking in Southern England, along the Test Way. Most enjoyable, though more beer than I’m used to.
(So, if I spent a long weekend rambling through the countryside, drinking plenty of real ale, wearing a beard, what does that make me? Don’t answer that.)
Anyway, one of the things we got to was Chilbolton, and its Radio Telescope. Now if you do a Google search on that, a few odd things pop up about crop circles. Some really amazing designs appear each summer in English fields, especially in Hampshire and Wiltshire, and most sensible people would agree that they are man made, mostly by the group that takes responsibility, Circlemakers.
Many, many sites persist, however, in maintaining that humans couldn’t have done it. The circles are either too complex, or there are weird effects around the area, or dowsing rods show a change… all stuff which can be easily debunked. The Circlemakers are actually pretty clever, practised, quick moving guys (here’s an answer to some criticism) who are more than ready to encourage the “researchers” by, say, adding iron filings to a circle they’ve just created. These iron filings are hailed by crop circle researchers as evidence of meteoric dust, impossible for “hoaxers” to obtain. Dowsing I’ll leave to James Randi.
There is no hoax. There really are a bunch of humans who enjoy making art with fields, and it looks great.
(Lastly, if you want a laugh, you may enjoy this analysis of the Chilbolton “Arecibo reply” formation. Wow.)
How can the USA hold people for two years without access to lawyers, loved ones or human rights, and the UK government set them all free within 48 hours? And what drives anyone to do what they did in Madrid?
I’ll be happy when we leave the UK. Flying to the USA, but not on British Airways, United or American Airlines; staying in the US, but not in the major cities; flying to Australia, but not on QANTAS; living just outside a smaller Australian city, with our own water supply and a long way from any terrorist targets.
Sure, I’m worried, somewhere underneath the day-to-day. The UK, and probably the Tube, is widely expected to be hit. All the Madrid trains went through the same outdoor station; one person could have planted all the bombs with pre-calculated timings, and the same could happen here. It’s (apparently) easy to kill, though I can’t fathom why anyone who understands the value of life would want to.
London, in a country whose government supported the last war, has so many people that an attack seems inevitable. (The IRA managed it many times.) But terrorism is unpredictable. Any small crackpot group can claim to “have links to Al-Qaida”, and all a bombing near you takes is a few determined local nutbags. As we live in a global village these days, that means that nutbags anywhere can cause trouble.
If we all live in fear of a global terrorist organisation (like KAOS from Get Smart) then “they” are winning. If “they” are a coherent force at all.
Just a quick blog to help Google find a site I’ve helped out with: ADVANCE: Advocacy and Non Violence Community Education. Good people doing good work.