Foreign Perspectives

The best place to do this is in a technology shop because the majority of people aren’t on solid ground in respect of knowledge of the product.

This lack of knowledge makes it difficult for them to place a value on the products being sold. Added to this is the fast changing nature of the products which often leads to illogical pricing whereby better products can cost less than inferior ones.

I saw a great example of this in PC World (always an excellent hunting ground for this type of thing) at the weekend. A couple were in to buy a netbook for their daughter. The netbook cost £239 but they were talked into paying over £600 for it and that wasn’t even counting the software that they were subsequently talked into as well. All of this stemmed from the “small” payments of £25 a month and the potential to get another “free” laptop at the end of two years. Of course, by that time, they could have bought at least three laptops with the money.

The other problem that’s particularly noticeable in the netbook market niche is that a large PC shop can have anything up to around 20 different netbooks ranging from £170 through to around £370 with seemingly little to distinguish them. I question whether a normal customer would be able to tell whether having an N270 was any different than having an N455 or N550 and in reality few people would notice the difference in processing power. Even the battery life is a very iffy means of distinguishing between models as one shop can have a netbook with a 4 hour battery life at the same price as another shop with the same model but an 8 hour battery life.

The fast moving prices also creates anomalies with newer and better models quite often costing less than the older model even when discounted. Thus the “massive discounts” that were previously available on the Sony 300 and 600 readers barely brought them down to the price of the much improved 350 and 650 models.

So, lots and lots of ways that you can be ripped off!

If you think that you’re just joining the gym to get fit, think again.

For a start there’s a clear pecking order dividing those who run on the running machines from those who walk on them, those who stick to those from those who use the cross-training machines, the divide from those who stick to that group from those that use the strength machines and then there’s the gulf between those who use machines and those who use the free weights. And that’s before you even consider those who only go to the exercise classes.

Then there’s the fashion parade that you get in some gyms. Thankfully there’s not much competition with the men’s fashion but the women certainly make up for any lack of fashion sense in the men with some clearly joining because it’s the fashionable thing to do rather than with any sense of getting fit.

But don’t let all this put you off… it’ll not be long before you find your own niche in the gym whether that be amongst those there to get fit or with the fashionistas.

When the school that our little guys go to was built it had a street running alongside the school wall so when the number of cars bringing kids increased, it was easy for the kids to get dropped off at the school gate and then go down that street.

Times have moved on somewhat since then though. That street and the one parallel to it where my granny lived have been demolished and replaced with a new housing development. Unfortunately, one of the aspects of the new development is that it’s built more in a courtyard style so neither of those two streets exist and instead there remains only the original street leading down to the school entrance which now is effectively a cul-de-sac.

Net effect? You’d have thought that it would have been obvious to the designers of the new development that creating a cul-de-sac where there previously was a way out was going to create problems and so it has. Every morning and afternoon that street is jammed with traffic going down to the end and attempting to turn.

What’s now happened is that the police have been called in to ensure that the school entrance isn’t blocked with cars and that nobody is parking over the new driveways. What should have happened is that the original exit street should have been preserved.

It’s about to get worse though as there are a couple of new housing developments just adjacent to that cul-de-sac and they’re all coming with little lay-bys for the residents. Naturally, they consider the lay-bys as theirs and don’t want the parents parking in them. The snag is that by the time those developments are complete that will leave nowhere to park at all for anyone but the residents. Somehow I suspect that’s going to cause major friction in the years to come.

Running the latest version of software is generally a good idea and if there’s no cost involved then there’s nothing really stopping you.

Unfortunately, running the latest software isn’t necessarily such a good plan if you’re not running it on the latest hardware. As we all know, new software almost always takes up more in resources than the older stuff does but, on the whole, the free software movement produces software that’s a bit lighter on the computer than the bloated stuff that we’ve become used to from Microsoft over the years.

Sadly, Ubuntu 10.10 seems to have broken that mold.

It runs just fine on my notionally main computer which has 3MB memory and a sensible processor behind it too. However, it was slow to the point of being almost unusable on my Aspire One which, whilst sporting only 512MB and an N270, is the computer that I use most of the time.

To be fair, a lot of that was down to Ubuntu One and removing that did speed things up somewhat. However, it still left the periodic freezes.

So today, I finally decided that enough was enough and after backing everything up reinstalled Ubuntu 10.04 which handily enough is a long term support version. As it ended up being a clean install I’m also finding some things that are now working after having been broken in the upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04.

I’m still wondering about the main computer. It runs OK but those freezes are becoming a pain.

Aside from technology men are pretty much useless in the shopping stakes but they’re at their lowest point when buying stuff for their significant other to wear.

To begin with it’s lingerie purchases that are almost always an unmitigated disaster. There’s just no way that they are going to get the sizing right as it’s far more complex than anything that they’d buy for themselves. Not only that, but, of course, they’re generally choosing something that is thoroughly impractical, aren’t they?

Even in other clothing though they’re none too good at selecting something that their wife or girlfriend would like to wear or would find all that practical. Even here the basic style choice that they’re generally aiming for is “sexy” whilst the wife/girlfriend is looking for things like “warm”, “comfortable” and “practical”.

To be fair the wife/girlfriend is just as bad at choosing a techy product for their man too 🙂