A Time of Magic

Clearly everyone knows that Paris is a major tourist attraction in France but why do Australians always go to Avignon?

It isn’t the obvious reason of it being the centre of a major chunk of historic monuments from the Palace des Papes to the Pont d’Avignon. It’s because a photo of the Pont d’Avignon is used in every Australian school as being representative of France.

Sometimes other countries choose artifacts that are not what those from elsewhere would consider as being truly representative of a country.

Of course for us from this side of the world it’s Ayers Rock and the Sydney Opera House that represent Australia. No, it ain’t Uluru for us and I suspect that it never will be for anyone but the aborigines.

If you wander into your local bank, they’ll tell you that it takes 3-5 days for money to be sent to an overseas bank account.

Fair enough you might think. What about when your bank owns the overseas bank? Shouldn’t it be able to do the transfer instantly? It certainly should be able to. After all, it’s not as if it needs to worry about “clearing” the money as their systems can quite clearly talk to one another. Have a Citibank account? No problem in getting statement details in any Citibank branch around the world. Likewise for HSBC. Even the more humble Halifax can manage this.

However, try to do an instant transfer from, say, Halifax UK to Halifax Spain and you can’t. It takes up to 5 days.

Interestingly though, you can do it in one day. If we need to transfer money quickly from the UK to France, all we do is swipe one of our UK bank cards in our credit card machine and it’s in our account in France the next morning. I suspect that it’s in even quicker than that but I’ve not yet bothered to race down to the bank to check the balance when we’ve tried it.

Why the banks only offer their customers the “Pony Express” speed of transfer is anyone’s guess because they already have the technology in place to do it pretty much instantly.

From the late 1800s to the 1950s, having a photograph taken was very much a grand event. It was fairly expensive and only done for special events. Therefore, most of us only have a few photographs of our great grandparents at most.

Things changed dramatically in the 1950s. Cameras became considerably cheaper and the amateur photographer appeared in large numbers for the first time. So, chances are that you’ll have lots of photographs from the 1950s and in increasing numbers through to the 1990s.

From the late 1990s people started to go digital. The first digital cameras were extremely expensive (would you believe £2000 for a 300k pixel camera?) and had poor resolution. If you were in the first wave of the digital revolution, you’ll probably have lots of really low resolution images from then.

By around 2002, the standard was 3mp on compact cameras and the number of photos taken went up dramatically. After all, you could take loads of photos but didn’t have to pay to get them printed out. Roll forward five years and the standard resolution is more like 5mp as people realised that their 3mp images weren’t really good enough to be printed out at a decent size.

But will your grandchildren be able to see those photos? I’d say that the answer for most people is “no”. Does that surprise you? Well, for your grandchildren to be able to see them you’ll need to keep the images for a start and that means that you need to maintain regular backup copies which few people do. Even with the backups, you need to have the images copied onto a backup media that can be read in the future. Nearly everyone uses USB for backup but that’s a technology that’s only been around for about 5 years and probably won’t be around 5 years from now. Copy them to DVD? How reliable is that? Not very reliable at all as a scratch or two and it’s unreadable.

Ironically, I’d say that the photos of me that my great grandchildren are most likely to be able to look at are those which I’ll have put on my websites over the years as they’re archived now and again by the likes of waybackmachine.org.