Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

My friend called earlier today to tell me about a car crash he had suffered earlier in the week. He wants to claim whiplash insurance compensation before the weekend. Essentially, it sounds as though someone drove into the back of his car at the traffic lights in town. He was slowing to a halt, and the car behind somehow hadn’t realised the lights had turned red, and just trundled into the back of him.

Thankfully it looks like everything is in place for the insurance stuff to be sorted out. The man who crashed into him was more than helpful, which is good to hear. But that reminds me, there is an article here that claims a significant amount of people don’t realise their options when it comes to things like this. I stumbled across it the other day, and I must remember to send it over to my friend – he would hate it if I informed him afterwards that he missed out on an accident claim or something.

I’m not entirely sure when I’ll get to see him next, though, because he was going to come to the NFL game at Wembley this week, but he has just dropped out. When people live all over the country, the problem is that you rarely get to see each other face to face. I’ll have to have a dig around to see if I can find his email address, I suppose, although I can’t remember ever getting it off him.

And now there are only a couple of days to go before the game. I’m beginning to look forward to it quite a lot. There was an article in The Times about Tom Brady, and it just reinforced that he and top target Randy Moss will be two players who it will be pretty fantastic to have seen play, after they have retired. Yes, I’m looking forward to it quite a lot!

I have not had the best of days today, and it was made worse by a phone call I’ve just had from BT. Let me just say that it really annoys me when you get called by your service provider about deals and offers. When I was at uni, it was Virgin – they called me on a number of occasions about some sort of package where I could get television and phone included, whereas I only had the broadband. The thing is, it is rather easy to cancel broadband when you finish the year and move out – but the phone, and the TV is another matter. And then you have to consider the fact that there is always a minimum contract agreement, which would go on far longer than my tenancy.

It might sound pathetic, but it just annoys me. Being called by BT, with them offering me some supposedly fantastic deals on their new BT home phones, it annoys me. I have been using BT here for a while now, and they have been okay. The internet is sometimes quite slow, we sometimes get stung on the occasional phone bill, but for the most part they have been okay. But that doesn’t mean I want to get called about new phones. If I want new phones, I can shop around for them myself.

There are so many specialists and websites, and shops out there – places like this telephone system website – that make it so easy to get that sort of thing anyway, that now more than ever you don’t need people selling you things down the phone. It’s the same with internet. You have telecoms and the like, but more than that, you have television adverts, you have the internet in general: you can use the internet to research the internet, and find the deals you want. If you want sdsl internet, you can research and get sdsl internet.

So rather than go through the process of turning them down, I simply hung up. And after the day I’ve had today, it felt quite good, too!

At work today, our office was abuzz. For weeks now, we knew that today would be the main sprucing up day, the day of replacing, of cleaning, of freshening. But I don’t think anyone expected it to be as hectic as it was. Not only have we been changing things around, moving things, selling things, updating things. Needless to say it has been a hectic day. People have been running in and out, speeding around sorting things out and taking things from one place to another, and it has been difficult to find time to breathe, really. Some of the people I don’t think even work with us … they were brought in, I suppose, to help out, because someone cleverly anticipated the madness.

I think I can live with the madness, though. It was much needed. The fax machines have gone, and new models will be brought in to replace them.

The computers have gone, too, and they, will be replaced. Indeed, the computers were most in need of replacing. They were not only big and bulky, but incredibly slow; sometimes so slow that you couldn’t very easily run Word, or other such programs, without a tremendous amount of waiting around.

Our very dated phones have already been replaced by cordless phones that, in my opinion, are pretty swish.

Yes, everything has been updated, or changed, or replaced. The only thing that hasn’t are the desks and the shelves … even the folders, I think, are new. Most of the office equipment is new. And already, even though the revamping project isn’t complete just yet, it’s making a difference. It’s certainly a lot nicer working in an environment that isn’t painstakingly slow, or loud, or untidy.

I forget, now, how it happened, but earlier today I was eating lunch in our local pub – they do an excellent Sunday lunch, and thankfully it’s very reasonable too – but the topic turned from watching ospreys fishing, to teleportation. And it was quite an interesting discussion.

Someone thought that they thought that the very idea of teleportation was first seen in Star Trek, which, at its beginning was a very low budget science fiction show. In order to cut costs, they apparently just thought that it would be incredibly convenient to have some form of travel where you could move from one place to the next without having to do anything. It was simple, quite brilliant, and you didn’t have to spend money on anything more than a little device and a fancy sound effect.

And now, because of this, we have scientists dedicated to researching teleportation; scientists investigating it and partaking in tests to try and move molecules a certain distance across a river, and all sorts. Whether it’s true or not, it’s quite interesting to think about: it’s the notion that it’s not really science fiction, but science fact. Science fiction has created something that could potentially be very real, and might not have been were it not for its sci fi origins.

But, as I understand it (or perhaps I’m mistaking it for some form of hyper-jump space travel) isn’t teleportation merely deconstructing your body into its constituent, base parts – transferring them, and then reassembling them like lego? It rings bells. And that’s true, then even if teleportation was possible in today’s world, I’m not sure I would want to even try it. I don’t think I could trust a machine to construct me back to a fully functioning, fully working person.

Susan Boyle, who wasn’t even the winner of Britain’s Got Talent, seems to be enjoying more success than the group that did win it. She sang for the first time on American television the other day, performing on the final of the American version of the show.

It’s interesting … the winners of such shows have long since disappeared – or, at least, the majority of them have. Even when you count things like X-Factor, which is even bigger here than the talent show. On top of the performance, apparently she has an album coming out soon, so she has certainly done a lot better than some of her peers.

She first shot to fame last year, and it was a sort of hyper-fame, not just a shooting star sort of fame that dies a week or so afterwards. It sounds rude, but a lot of the other contestants were forgettable – she, on the other hand, will probably still be hailed in the street. Indeed, it appears as though there were over a thousand people waiting for her when her plane landed in the USA.

It certainly seems to be the case that she’s more famous across the pond than she is here in the UK. I’m not sure quite why … although I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was something to do with the power of Twitter. Ashton Kutcher was quick to get join her bandwagon, and he has about five galfrillion followers on there who would have been wowed by her initial performance.

And let’s be honest, it was pretty special.

Over the last few days, investment and savings, and that sort of thing, have been the topic of choice. But now, after reading a few morbid articles in the news, it occurs to me that life insurance is the best kind of investment … I’ve just never really thought about it before, I suppose.

The other day I linked to a news story about a man who was killed by an altar falling on him at church, which proved that you can never be prepared for what can happen to you. And here is another story that could have ended tragically as well: a girl had to take the wheel of the car after her mother, on drugs, lost control. This case could have ended in something a lot worse than whiplash.

Thankfully it was all okay, but it could have been fatal – more than a niggling injury, more by far. And that’s the worrying thing.

When these things happen – and they happen a lot, really – and increasingly more often, it seems, it’s more than enough to get you thinking about term assurance and life cover. As if you needed a reason to do so.

Sometimes being an English NFL fan means late nights. In fact, it pretty much guarantees late nights. Last night, for example, it was about 4.50 am my time when the game finished. It went to overtime, which is exciting, but also makes it even later. But it was a brilliant opener to the season, with some fantastic moments, and on top of that it was fun just staying up with my brother and shooting the breeze whilst watching the game. He’s a Steelers fan, and as such it is my duty to dislike them – it made for an even more entertaining game than normal.

I’m also doing a fantasy football thing this season, with some of my old university friends. Something about that that makes what is already an exciting sport even more enjoyable. I suppose it’s the fact that, even when you’re not supporting a team, you are still supporting your players. You cheer on teams you wouldn’t otherwise have done … you look into matchups and situations that you wouldn’t otherwise have done. And, of course, there is all the friendly banter and trash talking that comes with it, which has already begun in earnest.

I slept in till midday, and my dog was very pleased to see me when I finally did emerge. And I think I will spend today recovering. Now I’m just lounging in front of the television, watching a bit of Neighbours at lunch time. It’s amazing that, no matter how bad things get in that show – and things get very bad indeed, sometimes – there is always this wonderful, upbeat, happy jingle at the end that more often than not serves as a huge contrast to what has just happened in the show.

And now for some lunch…

Every week, when I turn on the television, there are all sorts of shows that are essentially the same thing. Either someone gets paid to travel around the world, seeing the sights, or someone gets paid to go off and discover new species of animal; sometimes it’s someone getting paid to go away and have a taste of a different culture for a while. One such show was on just now.

Great British Journeys, it was called, and it was all about a man who gets paid to recreate these fantastic trips that have been taken through history, and recorded in aged, peeling books. He walks where these people have walked, long ago, and extracts are read from their books in the background, and at times it was just wonderful.

For example, today, he was rowing down a river so vast and beautiful that it’s a wonder that it’s even somewhere in our grey country. Mist hung in the air, only barely revealing the trees that surrounded both sides of the river, and as the camera panned back I was reminded of the Lord of the Rings. The book that he was recreating was all about finding picturesque places – the author, whose name, rather rubbishly, I can’t remember – had his own definitions of what made buildings beautiful, and we were treated to a number of his original drawings, and how similar they are to the real buildings, lost in the wilderness and touched only by father time.

The show finished, and the voice-over-man said that the next episode would be on later, I thought: thank you. I might just watch it.

I had a brief stint on the Xbox 360 just now, and before I logged off, I was browsing through the marketplace, where I eventually ended up looking at a section I had not checked out before: the indie video marketplace. There’s not much there, but what is is something that has made the last half an hour quite a wonderful half an hour indeed.

It’s a show about a group of people who are addicted to a massively multiplayer online game, and it’s called The Guild. The game itself is unnamed, but is almost certainly World of Warcraft, or something similar. And the show follows them, their real-world lives, and their online lives. The characters are wonderful, the comedy is spot-on, and I can’t recommend it highly enough – especially since it’s free.

You can watch it on their website, or on You Tube, or on your Xbox, and if you’re in any way into computer games – and even if you’re not – you will probably enjoy watching it.

I think I’ll watch an episode or two more before calling it a night.

We have SDSL at work, which, in short, means things are more peachy there than it is at home, when it comes to the internet. Unfortunately, we have exceeded our bandwidth limit, and are now limited to what is quite a sedate pace. For browsing websites and things, it’s okay, but it takes forever to load up a video on You Tube, and watching anything on iPlayer is currently impossible.

And it’s not just iPlayer – it’s TV Catchup, too, so in our present state we can wave goodbye to television over the internet.

When you consider that you don’t need excessive speeds for IPTV to work in the first place, it’s a bit of a shame. You just need some speed, and I suppose at the moment, our punishment is that we do not have any.

Things like BBC’s iPlayer are very handy when you’ve missed something on television, and you want to catch up. You could watch the whole of the world athletics championships again, for instance – which I have been doing, from time to time, at work, when I want to break up a particularly boring task. It helps to keep me sane. It helps the days go by that little bit quicker.

But it would certainly help to be able to watch it at home if I wanted to, too.