Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

I thought I would do one more blog before bed (and boy, am I looking forward to bed after last night). Because I had a few friends round for drinks this evening, and, strangely, they were very complimentary about my phones. Which is an odd thing to be complimentary about, I think, but there you go.

At least they were complimentary about something. But it’s one of those things that just sort of caught me; made me smile. And so here I am, rambling about it.

I told them I was with BT. And that BT are pretty rubbish. But then I suppose when you live out in the middle of nowhere, most phone and broadband services will be pretty bad. Still, it was more the handsets that they liked; what, with their fancy (though unused) buttons, and a look about them that says: I do more than ring people. They are those fancy dect cordless phones.

They had never considered buying telephones online before, which is where I got my ones from. There is a phone shop in our local town, and it’s usually well-stocked, and pretty good for whatever you need. But the possibilities with online are limitless. You can browse tonnes of phones, and eventually find that extra special hub or handset.

Sometimes, they even throw in deals. Discounts on business and ADSL lease lines, and that sort of thing. And, of course, the big ones to look out for are internet deals, because there are so many bargains to be had that save you money. Certain UK ISP’s, like Zen, are often good for that.
But when I go into a shop… I don’t know. If there are no deals advertised, I don’t feel confident enough to ask for a discount or to haggle or barter. Which is why, often, online is the way forward – for me, at least.

I felt so tired this morning that I was groggy.

Running on probably four hours sleep – and maybe less – I wanted nothing more than to go back to bed. Such is the price of watching American football in the UK: it is on late at night, and if you watch it, you feel it on Monday morning.

But this was the NFC championship. This was the spectacular, the peculiar battle between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints. Last night, enthralled, I knew I could deal with the tiredness to watch this.

I picked up a paper, before I got on the train. The Times. Mostly to try and wake myself up, I think, but it’s nice to have something to do for twenty minutes or so. I leafed through it. And I was struck by one of the stories inside it. Apparently, our schools are planning to spend thousands of pounds a year to unfilter and re-filter You Tube.

Currently, it’s blocked at schools. You can’t go on it – there could be something offensive on there. But teachers want to use it as a tool to help children learn, because it’s wealth of videos can be helpful for that sort of thing. So they plan to unblock it, and spend all this money on ensuring there are no comments visible.

What?

Have they forgotten what it’s like to be a kid? You don’t care if you read something profane in a comment. In fact, if you do, you probably think it’s cool.

And if it’s blocked, you can just watch it or read it when you get home.

It just seems like an absurd waste of time and money. It seems so pointless. Haven’t we got better things to spend our money on than this? Give £10,000 to help Haiti … this You Tube censoring is just pathetic.

When Championship Sunday rolls around, there is always the same feeling: there is a sort of brooding presence about the day. It’s big, and you can feel it. Today is the day that the AFC and NFC champions are crowned, the day that we discover who will be making the trip to the Super Bowl in Miami.

Every year this day rolls around, it has the same feeling. But this week, perhaps more so than any other championship year in the past, things could be bigger and better than ever.

The first match it the Indianapolis Colts against the New York Jets, in a clash of opposing play styles and philosophies. It will be wonderful to see the chess game being played by Peyton Manning and Rex Ryan, the Jets defensive guru. But, secondly, we have the Saints at home against the Vikings.

And that’s where the real magic should be. It is the two best offenses in the league, two of the best quarterbacks in the league, and some phenomenal playmakers like Reggie Bush, who played sensationally last week. If you haven’t seen his run from that game, make sure you check it out here. I know I can’t stop watching it.

To kill the time before the action begins, you might also like to check out the short videos on NFL UK, with commentary and insight into the big games.

I have one of these smart phone gadgets, with all the fancy-but-generally-pointless applications on them, and earlier on today I was fiddling around with a new app; a metal detecting app. I was curious, was wondering whether it works or not.

Because whilst you can waft it around keys or scissors or some other metal object and it seems to do something, it is just as likely to do nothing at all. It is mostly a green bar that fills up when there is something it recognises as metal, or doesn’t fill up otherwise.

And it got me thinking – with the app store for iPhones and Android devices so thriving, is there anything that there’s not an app for?

Apparently the answer is no. There is even an app for translating your baby’s crying and screaming. Allegedly, this app, if you hold it up to your distressed baby, will tell you if it’s hungry, or just plain pissed off.

It sounds an awful lot like my metal detector. And as such, probably doesn’t work. At least very well. But, for all my criticism, there does appear to be a certain amount of research to back up the apps claims. Research suggests, for example, that the pitch and frequency of a baby’s cries can indicate as much as health problems.

Whether it works or not, we’ve certainly come a long way in a short amount of time – it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was fiddling around on a phone that was just a … well, phone.

I didn’t realise that, on average, our young, new drivers had so little experience, so few lessons. When I came across this piece, I read with some interest. Apparently there has been a study undertaken to show that quite a few young drivers feel unprepared for being unleashed on the road. Many of them have only had up to 30 hours of practice, whilst it is recommended you should have 45 hours of training – in addition to 22 hours of private training.

Suddenly it’s not so surprising that car insurance companies provide such steep quotes for fresh-faced, recently passed drivers.

And yet, many people find it outrageous that companies can charge so much for insurance. It can, in a lot of cases, be huge amounts of money. Rarely, though, do we see it from their perspective. Car insurance companies are increasingly losing money on injury claims, with “bloodthirsty lawyers” always looking to squeeze out extra revenue. Not to mention the amount of claims which will be unjust, falsified, or completely fictitious.

We live in an age of cheap deals, where there are a number of websites that specialise in beating your last quote, and digging up the very best offer. People want their car insurance quotes to be delivered quickly, cheaply – and again the insurance companies will be under pressure to compete, to lower their prices. Again, the car insurance companies will be losing money.

There are plenty of websites that aim to give you plenty of compensation for accidents and injuries, too. Personal injury claims lawyers who offer no win no fee deals, but strive to win something, anything – even if you haven’t been hurt in the first place. You have your own personal injury calculators, too. It really is a different world these days, developed over the last twenty years or so.

A world where the legal profession is blended with our lives and our cars more than ever. But is it really for the best?

Manchester United are in serious debt. Liverpool are, too.

The economic downturn has a far reaching shadow that extends well beyond us to every aspect of society.

We hear about it through the television, through the newspapers, through every aspect of the media. People are struggling in every aspect of society – even football teams are struggling. Struggling to balance their titanic wage books, struggling to keep afloat when, for so long, they have had to pay millions and millions of pounds to player after player.

What can we do? The average Joe, the everyman, working and working for just a scratching of the money that these sports players and celebrities make? What can we do? How do we manage money when even people whose job it is to manage money are struggling to do so?

Financial protection and, with it, now more so than ever, financial planning becomes key, becomes incredibly important. We need to be careful in everything we do, everything we spend money on, because it is so easy to misstep. And in times like these, financial missteps can be tremendously costly.

Today is the day of good deals – looking for them, finding them, and taking them, where you can. There are places that can help out with this, Money Supermarket, and other websites designed with you in mind, to help you out with your finance and your spending. And they can be tremendously beneficial.

And, it goes without saying, that insurance of every kind is as important as ever. From the small things, whether it’s your mp3 player, or if you’re just looking for home insurance reviews – or the bigger, more important things.

You can get life insurance that covers health problems, critical illness, and other things.

And, based on the premise that your home is the biggest investment you’ll ever make, there are some impressive (and not so impressive) mortgage life insurance cover schemes out there, as well.

The problem is that there are so many of these kinds of deals, you need to do your research and make sure that you find the right one for you.

New Years Eve and Day have vanished in a blur, and now here we are in a properly new year, staring 2010 in the face. Everyone is making their new year’s resolutions. Traditionally, of course, this is a time for change, a time for a fresh start, a time for renewal. This is a time to be the person you want to be. But some things, it seems, don’t change. I was browsing a list of property prices in 2010, and couldn’t help but notice that here, in the property market, things seem as horrible as ever.

I’m almost certain that I read something about house prices going up, and might have even blogged about it a while ago, sometime towards the end of last year. Some news story or hint or glimmer of hope that suggested change – of a good variety – was on the horizon. But evidently I remember wrong.

No matter how you look at it, things for our economy are still not looking good, and as a recent graduate, that’s quite a scary thought. I still know people who are looking for a job over a year out of university. There was a time when having a degree alone was enough, but not anymore.

All the word at the pub tonight was about mortgages, too – even mortgage rates are under the shadow of this repression, which, like the enemy in a horror movie seems to never go away.

Here’s hoping things pick up soon. Otherwise, it’s not much of a happy new year so far. It’s not just affecting property buyers and home buyers, it’s affecting everyone countries’ property investors if things continue this way. Or any countries’, for that matter. But I suppose you can say that about a lot of jobs, in these times.

There is a general impression, when it comes to illegally downloaded music, that it hurts the music industry. But according to the Independent, there has been a study undertaken that shows that the people who download music illegally, and admit to doing so, are also the ones who spend the most on music.

Why? Perhaps the music that is downloaded convinces them buy the album… perhaps the internet allows them to hear and download music that they wouldn’t have otherwise listened to, that they can they go out and buy. Perhaps it’s just the fact that the people who download music illegally are also the biggest music fans. But regardless, it follows that banning them from the internet, and cracking down on them, and doing everything it’s possible to do in order to stop them downloading music will actually have a negative effect on the music business – quite the opposite to what these people would like to achieve.

I must admit, although it’s not something I would just think about out of the blue, I’m not overly surprised that this is the case. But I also don’t think it will change their approach: their hammer blow will reign down on illegal downloaders, whatever the consequences.

I just thought it was an interesting story to start the weekend with. And hopefully it should be a pretty fantastic one – it’s certainly set up to be. Why? One reason: NFL playoffs. Even though the games get shown pretty late over here, they’re no less of an event: we’ve got in the beer, and the crisps, and all manner of junk food to sit down and just enjoy the occasion.

Both games tonight should be interesting ones… and both are rematches of games from last week: the Bengals against the Jets, and the Cowboys against the Eagles. Somehow, I don’t think the result for either game will be like what we saw last time the sides met, either.

Basking sharks are now breeding in the waters in Scotland, according to this piece. It describes, quite nicely, how the sharks swim nose-to-tail during courting, and makes it all sound very pleasant and wonderful – but the fact is these are sharks in our waters, and that’s an idea I’m not hugely fond of. In fact, as much as I’m intrigued and interested by the piece, for in a way it is quite nice – in another, it is quite scary.

I watched Jaws when I was younger, as I’m sure lots of people did, but ever since, I’ve had a thing about going out into the sea. The sort of thing where I just don’t really do it. Even though I know it’s very, very unlikely that there will be a shark in the sea, right there where I am, right when I am swimming, it’s the thought that it could happen that puts me off.

And until now, I have always had the slight consolation that there probably aren’t sharks in our waters. But now it’s more probable that there are absolutely tonnes of them!

If it’s true that fish have table manners (which, in itself, is a bit more of an appealing idea than sharks swimming around in the sea near me), then maybe that trend extends all the way to their flesh eating, gigantic brothers of the ocean.

Then again maybe not. Call me a wuss, but I’ll just have to avoid swimming in the sea for a while, I think.

Have you heard of the naked scanner?

Neither had I, until today. But I was browsing the news earlier, and came across this article on the BBC’s website – the scanner is being tested in Manchester airport to speed up airport security checks, and reduce the hassle and time-consuming nature of being individually checked by guards, and having to take off your belt, your shoes, and your jacket, etc. Which all sounds rather wonderful.

The problem, of course, is that it produces a naked image of yourself, and transmits it so someone in a remote location somewhere nearby.

I suppose people are complaining because of the notion of a big brother society, where we can be watched and seen and tracked in all manner of places, all over the country. This is a step too far. It’s like something out of James Bond, like those glasses he had in a recent movie that allowed him to see through women’s clothes.

But is it, really? Sure, you can argue we live in a big brother society. These days, CCTV cameras are pretty much everywhere – I even saw one in the cinema the other day, not outside, but inside, by the escalators – is that not more worrying than being seen in black and white, for the briefest of moments, at an airport?

And then there’s GPS vehicle tracking – another invention that means you can pretty much be followed everywhere. Someone can find your vehicle, and follow it in real time on a computer screen, and track you down.

I think I would be more worried about the radiation from the scanning device in Manchester than being seen sort of naked. They say it’s only a minute amount, that you’re safe for thousands of trips through the scanner, but that’s not the point: I still don’t want to subject myself to that. And let’s not forget this is airport security we’re talking about. I would rather fly safe in the knowledge that I’m not about to be blown up, than worry about being seen naked.

When it comes to the big brother stuff, there are far worse things than being seen in a black and white image somewhere. Something like RFID tracking (imagine buying a product and having a chip in it so people can track where it goes!) is probing more worryingly into my privacy, I think, than the naked scanner.

But maybe that’s just me.