Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

It’s fully possible to recycle mobile phones. I’ve seen many offers over the years enticing me to sell my own mobile for mobile phone recycling – and it couldn’t be more easy to take these companies up on their offers.

And yet, there are a number of old mobile phones lying about the house at the moment. To see them piled up with the dirty laundry or with dusty, forgotten CD’s is a bit of a shame.

It’s quite easy to recycle them. In many cases, they send you a package, which you slip the phone into and post back to them. And then you get paid. It’s really as simple as that.

I don’t expect mine is the only house with old mobiles left lying around, so it begs the question – why? Why don’t people take more care to sell or dispose of their old or broken phones in a green and reliable manner?

We live in a society that is obsessed with recycling: there are about four different bins on my road for whatever rubbish might accumulate over the course of a week or two. Food rubbish, plastic, cardboard – the list goes on.

And people have taken to the multi-bin approach very well. People recycle their waste and their drink bottles enthusiastically.

So what is it about phones? When I bought my new phone, it even came with a recyclable plastic bag to put my old model in, so there really is no excuse.

Perhaps it’s a matter of publicity. It’s a bit of a struggle to find any stories about recycling services in the news; I suppose it’s entirely reliant on people being proactive and finding out about what’s on offer.

Pay day arrived last week, and it’s always a wonderful day.

And now, since summer is here, and my holiday is only a few weeks away, I’ve decided to do a bit of window shopping online.

Well — is it “window” shopping when there are no windows involved? Well, in any case, I have been doing some online shopping and not actually buying anything – yet.

I quite like making mental notes and lists of things that look nice, or that I’m sure I’d like, and then weighing up their pros and cons over a few days, before ultimately deciding whether or not to pull the trigger on the purchase.

Most of the time it happens with books. Books are fantastic for holidays, and I’ll certainly be needing some – but I don’t want to buy something just for the sake of it: I want to be sure I’m going to enjoy it. Or as sure as it’s possible to be, because most of the time you can’t really be sure about such things.

One book I’m almost certainly going to get is STORIES, a compilation of short stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. It has received rave reviews, and sounds brilliant. And perfect to dip in and out of, while abroad.

But there are other, less well known places to shop online, not necessarily for books, but certainly for interesting and often unusual goods. Shiny Shack is particularly interesting, especially when you don’t necessarily know what it is you’re after, or you’re looking to buy unusual gift ideas.

Or you can do the more traditional Kelkoo search: search for a product you know, and let it find the best price for you.

There is not much longer to wait before the England game. I say “the” England game, because now there is just one; just one game – win or go home. And I can feel the excitement building, feel the tension rippling in the air.

So much for the group being easy, eh? The group was supposed to be a breeze; and yet, the squad found a way to struggle, playing like strangers against Algeria, and letting in a tame goal against the USA.

The players don’t even seem to be having fun out there, and this is the World Cup – the pinnacle of their careers.

Just as there is much we can learn from Brazil and Argentina – moving forwards with the ball, not backwards; passing to ourselves, not the opponents – there is much we can learn from South Africa, enjoying themselves on the pitch. Having fun.

There has been a trend brewing in the competition recently, though, and thankfully it favours England and it favours Wayne Rooney, our talisman.

Everyone started off badly. The good teams, the good players – they all struggled, at least in their first game. But now Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, Lionel Messi – three of the “big four” – are getting involved, having fun, taking crisp, brilliant shots.

Wayne Rooney is the fourth member of that club. Surely, surely, it’s time for him to step up, too?

This is the World Cup, after all. The great players – the truly great players – rise to the big occasions, rather than wilting in the spotlight.

There are more brown bears than professional footballers in Slovenia – this is not just a game we must win; it is a game we surely should win. I can see Rooney stepping up and having a big influence on the match. And I can see England winning fairly comfortably.

And then, I suppose, all this terrible performance nonsense will be forgotten, and all will be right with the world again!

It has been three months. Three months of annoyance, three months of waiting to hear something – and inevitably hearing nothing. And now I have decided to never buy an HP laptop ever again.

I suppose I should have looked into it a little more before I bought my most recent one. There are complaints over the net that they tend to need repairing a lot.

But I was lured in by a very fancy thing with a swivelling screen that can make it form a sort of tablet computer, looked nice. It felt nice, and it even worked very well – while it was under warranty, that is.

But then, almost as soon as the warranty expired, it broke. Inevitable, I guess. The screen went black, and I couldn’t do anything. So I turned it off, and then it never properly turned back on again. It hummed a little, and the lights came on, but the screen never did.

So I got it fixed, and everything was fine again for a month or so. But then it broke again: exactly the same way as it had done before.

Now, I’ve waited three months for them to repair it. At first, they were just being slow. Then they said they needed to fly in a chip from China – and then the volcanic ash cloud stopped that from coming for a while. And when they did finally get the chip, it didn’t do anything. After three months, they have told me it will need a new motherboard, and that is rather expensive.

So I suppose I’ll just have to see if I can get the hard drive turned into an external HDD. And start looking for a new computer. I’ve been so long without it that I can’t even remember if there’s anything worth keeping on there.

But I do know this: I’m not going to be getting an HP again.

It was quite nice, this last weekend, because I met up with a lot of friends from all around the world who I rarely get to see. But occasions like this (ones that have been planned well in advance) give me a chance to catch up with them, and they are very welcome.

Really, it was at a party with old university friends, and guys from my old football team, gathering together and sharing old stories.

We had a barbecue, out there next to the lake, and even had a game of football on our old university grounds. Ducks waddled by with a trail of little ducklings, and the rain held off until we were leaving, so all in all it was very good.

But as I wandered down to the campus shop to buy a drink or two, I noticed a CCTV camera above the cash machine, and another next to the shop entrance. And there were more, dotted here and there around the place, that made me feel as though I was in Big Brother.

I don’t like feeling as though I’m in Big Brother. And I was brooding over that for the rest of the day.

But then, on the way back home, I was browsing the net on my phone, and I saw something to balance those feelings out. I missed the news of the New York bomb incident, but I did read up on it afterwards — and it sounds as though now footage has been released of a possible suspect on CCTV.

And if that can lead to his capture and questioning — especially if he’s in any way involved — then that more than makes up for being watched going in and out of a shop.

CCTV monitoring systems are all about our safety, at the end of the day.

Centenary Way in Manchester has apparently been named the UK hotspot for ‘crash for cash’ accidents. The idea is, I suppose, to go there especially with the intention to crash: these car insurance fraudsters deliberately stage accidents to claim compensation.

It sounds a strange idea to me, but there you go. It obviously works for them: Direct Line estimates that such scams total £350 million each year — which, when you think about it, is quite a shocking amount. Of course, I knew car insurance fraud was quite prevalent these days, but I didn’t know it was to the tune of so much money.

The company goes on to say that it compiled its rankings through analysis of insurance data, and with information from “coordinated nationwide investigations” by the car insurance industry.

The north of England seems to dominate the list, with junctions in Burnley and Stockport making up the top five, and another location in Lancashire at number nine.

I suppose it all adds to the difficulty of other people to make car accident claims for compensation — as well as how expensive it is for young drivers to get insured on their cars. When my younger brother was trying to insure his first car the other month, some of the sums he was being quoted were ludicrous.

But then, however unfair it seems, I suppose the amount of young drivers who crash every year force them into raising their prices.

The speed and power of Twitter has never been more evident to me than now, on the way back from work.

Who knew 140 characters could do so much? Well, I had seen the speed of it before: shocking news stories spread like wildfire on Twitter before any major news channel breaks them.

But Neil Gaiman just proved it all again. Neil — best-selling author of The Graveyard Book, Coraline, and American Gods (among numerous others) — has edited a book of short stories from all sorts of wonderful writers.

When he announced on Twitter that he would give away a number of copies to the first 50 to re-post his message, naturally, I re-posted it. Or re-tweeted it, as it’s known.

Unfortunately, so did hundreds of thousands of other people. I was not in the top 50: I could tell by how long it took to try and count my way to #1 (I gave up after a few seconds). But the line stretched on long after me, as well.

All this was in a matter of minutes. He posted it, I saw it a few minutes later, and within a few more minutes, the poor people in charge of sorting out who won what, and who to give what to, were bombarded by a storm of messages.

There is a definite power to Twitter. When you’re famous, anyway, and have over a million followers. It is seen when Mr Gaiman posts a link, and those waves of people click on it, and crash the website. But it is also seen in the way they help charities, or foundations, or people in need, if they are that way notified.

It’s like having your own army, in a way. On your phone. In your pocket.

The second episode in the new series of Britain’s Got Talent is on today, and I must admit, I’m quite looking forward to it.

Every week, there’s something about it. I don’t know what it is — I’m not normally into these singing shows, and I’m not sold on X Factor — but there is a charm, and something slightly funnier about BGT than the others.

Perhaps it’s acts like this amazing dog, which was on last week. When it first came on, I was worried that the act would be ludicrous, but it was hilarous, and actually very well done.

And equally, acts like this one are wonderful and truly remarkable.

Sometimes people just come along and blow you away, and you had no idea that something could blow you away. Last year, there was a fantastic saxophone player who moved one of the judges to tears with his music — and that dancer last week made the hairs on my neck stand up.

There’s certainly something about it. I have no idea who or what will be performing this week, but it is almsot guaranteed to be entertaining.

Perhaps that’s what’s so good about it: it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Yes, ultimately, the winner must perform in front of the Queen, so of course there can’t be anyone too whacky going through. But it is fun, and it is entertaining, and some TV shows lose sight of that these days, I think.

I got a scare earlier today. It came in the form of a call from the college where I’m doing my post-graduate course. After a minute or so of security questions and hoo-hah, they said that there had been a problem with my payment.

Of course, it follows that I was a little worried. Here I was, in the middle of my course, and something was wrong with payment..

I decided to look up information on loans online, because I have a habit of Googling things when I need quick answers to problems, and more often than not there are other people who have gone through, or are going through, the same sort of situation.

There are a number of IFA’s — or independent financial advisors — on the internet, where you can search and ger reviews on all sorts of sites and solutions. And it’s things like that that can come in handy in a hurry.

Sometimes these can be better than the actual search engines. On Google, results can often be riddled with things you might not want to find. For example, house insurance quotes came in abundance when I searched on there, even when I didn’t specify anything like that as keywords. And private medical insurance, too.

But before I panic too much, I think I should perhaps get in touch with the bank and see exactly what the problem is. It migt just be that they are staggering the course payments, and I didn’t know about it.

In what is quite an interesting move, when you think about it, the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) recently signed two video game designers from US games developer Infinity Ward.

It’s interesting because while the CAA has a history of excellence, but its clients are people like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, and Will Smith. Footballers like David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo are also enrolled, alongside American sporting superstars like LeBron James and Peyton Manning.

But video games? The move puts them right up there, with all these famous faces. I doubt something like this has ever been done before. Certainly, if it has, I haven’t heard about it.

But then, it’s easy to see the duo’s appeal.

Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.7 million units within the first 24 hours of release, generating over $400 million in worldwide sales. But the snowball did not stop there: by January 2010, it had taken over $1 billion. On April 21 this year, the Guinness Book of World Records officially recognised Modern Warfare 2 as the biggest, highest-grossing media release of all time.

There is no more anonymity about them. Their talent – and probably the fact that they made $1 billion in two months – has been recognised in an almost mythical way. And their work has been recognised as art, and as brilliance. Whether the series will ever be the same again without its two top talents is another question altogether.