This obviously applies to parents over a certain age, and if you are younger it will be your grandparents who say this kind of thing, but they are still parents so you get the drift. The daft thing is that as much as well roll our eyes and nod our heads when these things are said, we are going to do exactly the same with our kids. Now most you are now shaking your heads and muttering but it’s true, you will.

Fast forward 20, 30 or even 40 years and you will be exactly the same; “ when I was little all I got for Xmas was an iPad, a plasma TV and Xbox and a boatload of other stuff”, or “you don’t know you’re born these days,  we only had Sky plus, blue ray players and laptops to entertain us, there was no 20ft 15D light refracting super dooper screen that sung and danced and brought you a coffee in the morning when I was a kid”.

While this may all seem like science fiction to some of you what we have to remember is that technology is moving forward with every generation. Think back a decade to what there was then and what we have now. So if you put that into the context of a generation and the leap forward is huge.

It doesn’t just stop at technology either, your parents/grandparents will have at some time or another complained about the cost of living, and said how they used to get go to the dance, have fish and chips afterwards, get the bus home and still have change of a tanner/shilling/pound/fiver. We’ll be telling our kids how we went to the supermarket, got a weeks shopping, had a coffee in the cafe, got a taxi home and still had change of £200.

Realistically, nothing is exactly the same as it was when we were kids, and it will be the same for the next generation. When the compact disc first appeared it was the greatest invention ever and was the future of music. If that’s the case the future must be less  than 2 decades as these are now becoming obsolete as MP3/4 players and iPods rule ok. PC’s went to laptops, to netbooks, to tablets and soon we’ll be wearing them on our wrists.

So next time your parents/grandparents get all nostalgic, keep those rolling eyes in check and think about what you will be saying to your kids, either face to face or through the live chat that is built into the arm of the sofa.

Why oh why do we still do it? ‘Oh oh an extra hour in bed’ they cry, not quite the case for the 90% of the population who forget about it and wander round wondering why everyone else seems to be an hour ahead of them. Why should we get excited about the sun rising an hour earlier when we aren’t awake to see it, but have to put up with it getting darker an hour earlier when are all in it?

The official stance is that it marks the end of British Summer Time, absolute bilge! You don’t need to knock everyone out of sync just to let us all know that. Do they think that we are so stupid to realise that, when the feeble watery sun that we briefly enjoyed is replaced by frost and a huge drop in temperature, its time to pack away the shorts and flip flops for another year and crank the heating up.

Another name for this worldwide phenomenal farce is ‘daylight saving’, huh? Let’s get this straight, we put the clocks forward in the Spring so there is less daylight in the morning and more in the afternoon, and then do the reverse in October, erm does it not

kind of make sense to just leave them alone?

It doesn’t help either that while everyone in the world does it, they do it at different times. While the UK and the rest of Europe do it at the same time, the US and Canada do it a week later, which creates a whole bundle of laughs for those with international businesses who have to take into account for a week an even bigger time difference and adapt deadlines etc to fit in.

in a nutshell these daylight saving, start of summer/end of summer, clock shifts are an absolute waste of time and effort. Not only are sleep patterns thrown into awry, so is travel, meetings, record keeping, billing, medical devices and much much more.

Although most software is meant to adapt automatically, this all depends if it is set at UK or US protocol, so don’t rely on your laptop clock to tell you where you are, where you should be, or where you should have been an hour ago but aren’t as some dipstick over 100 years ago decided it would be fun to muck around with the worlds timing twice a year!!

Hang on, bouffant? Medallion? Budgie smugglers? Does this guy still think it’s the 1970′s or is this a really old photo? The answer would be the latter. There are literally hundreds of hotels that are years out of date, and when we arrive at the gleaming white building with secluded gardens we find a grey building splattered in bird droppings surrounded by weeds.

It is things like these that give rise to the enormous amounts of complaints that we make about our holidays. As well as the out of date photos there is also that special language known as ‘read between the lines’. Example, not suitable for those with walking difficulties effectively means at the top of the hill that only those under the age of 20 will be able to climb without help.

If you have paid extra for a sea view and the hotel isn’t actually overlooking the beach you may get a distant triangle of blue between rooftops. Beware of the distances they quote too, as holiday people seem to measure everything with an elastic tape measure. A short stroll to shops and restaurants may be just this, if you have jet engines built into your flip flops.

Close to nightlife is always a good one, as they don’t actually tell you your room is above a nightclub blasting out tunes a t 150 decibels until 5am every morning. Then you have the hotels in a quiet location, civilisation is like the aforementioned sea view, a dot in the distance down a dirt track and the only transport that could pass along this track is a donkey.

There are many websites online now where visitors get to leave their reviews and post their photos so you can see what these hotels and their location are really like, yet thousands of us still take the brochures word as law and rush to get booked up. These review sites are there for a reason, so you book your holiday at a good hotel which does what it says on the tin and saves you a whole lot of hassle.

So if you don’t want a room in a hotel on a hill 7 miles from the sea, a swimming pool that 2 people could fill and a balcony permanently in the shade, check out these sites before you book, it’s too late after.

Technology has made changes to all our lives, whether these changes are good or bad is very much down to personal opinion, and age! The majority of us though are embracing this technological world and it seems that every industry has in some way been improved by the technological revolution, it’s hard to think of an area that is still lagging behind but consider this for a moment; how long does it take for a flipping cheque to clear?

Exactly, one of the most important industries in the world, finance and banking, are light years behind mobile phones and games consoles, and this is an absolute travesty. What is even worse than the innate inability to turn a bit of paper into actual cash in less than 6 weeks (it seems this long at times) is the excuses they have. The plain fact is that cheque clearance is still in the dark ages, and is no quicker now that it was a decade ago.

There are some cynics out there who will consider this as a way that the bank makes interest on our money by hanging onto it for longer than necessary, so as if to prove us wrong they have that brilliant concept known as express clearance. You pay a hefty chunk of your cheque to have the privilege of getting YOUR money into YOUR account is a slightly more reasonable amount of time.

How this works isn’t clear, but presumably that payment you make goes into the electric meter which in turn makes the computer go faster thus clearing your cheque quicker, simple! Another bugbear is the ‘working day’ malarkey, a working day in the banking industry is still Monday-Friday, whilst the rest of the world works 7 days a week.

To add insult to injury, that working day also ends at 3pm, and any transaction after that time is processed the next day. You can picture all the computers sitting watching the clock, it hits 3pm and the boss, Mac we’ll call him, tells all his minions that that’s it for the day lads,  and they all hibernate until the next day. So theoretically, Monday should be the most productive day for them as they have slept all weekend while we have toiled.

The firearm in question had, of course, no moving parts, no bullets, no place to put bullets, and no trigger.  It’s solid plastic, for goodness sakes.  That’s what the owner, 60-year-old Julie Lloyd, told the highly dedicated guardians of the peace at Gatwick.  Mrs. Lloyd bought the little figure from the Royal Signals Museum at Blandford Camp in Bedford as a gift for her husband, who is a retired signaller with the Canadian Army.

It was the metal antenna attached to the soldier’s backpack that sent a danger signal to the airport scanner, but when the little fellow was removed from Julie’s luggage, officials saw the gun held in his hands, and that did it.  No firearms on that plane, no sir.  To give them credit, the guards did let her keep the gun and mail it to herself from the airport. Soldier and gun were eventually reunited and the gift was a big hit with her husband and his mates back at home in Toronto.

The purchase and the attempted flight with the gift in her hand luggage took place in 2009, and may never have caused any embarrassment amongst the guards if Mrs. Lloyd hadn’t told the Blandford Museum people about it.  They apparently found it so ridiculous that they went public with the story, and now there are undoubtedly some red faces in the ranks of security inspectors, not to mention the supervisor who ruled that rules are rules, and let’s not take any chances.

The real issue here probably comes down to the question of whether an intelligent person should exercise a bit of personal judgment when it comes to ‘rules’, but another aspect is the tendency of just about everyone these days to cover their hind parts at all costs.  Carried to extremes, this can be a very dangerous philosophy.  Those in positions of responsibility for the safety of the generally innocent public should be thinking clearly and rationally, not just checking off boxes on a list.  It seems that too often when a programmed computer alarm goes off, rational thinking comes to a screeching halt.

An ambitious research project now underway has already yielded some interesting results.  Matthew Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard University and his supervisor, Daniel Gilbert, have published some preliminary findings from a survey conducted among 2,250 volunteers.  In this case the participants were all iPhone users, since that’s how the researchers collected their data.

The results, published in the journal Science, were based on the input of adults, average age of 34.  The iPhone app allowed researchers to contact the individual participants at random times during the day and get their answers to questions about what they were doing, what they were thinking about while doing it, and their emotional mood at the moment.

It was determined that about 50% of those taking part in the survey were daydreaming when contacted.  Whether the daydream was a ‘good’ one, like a coming vacation or a ‘bad’ one like a coming trip to the dentist, the predominant emotion amongst the daydreamers was unhappiness.  The conclusion at this point is that daydreaming is more likely to depress you than improve your state of mind.

Killingsworth and his colleagues are willing to grant that imagination and creativity are almost synonymous with daydreaming.  Humans have a unique ability to think about the past and the future, to learn from the former and plan for the latter, and of course to imagine things that are not ‘real’ or may never happen.  This ability is what put us on the moon, but Killingsworth says that too often it’s used in a way that makes us unhappy.

The preliminary conclusion seems to be that being distracted makes us unhappy, but no one addressed the question of whether all that iPhone messaging was a factor in the distraction, therefore the unhappiness.  A lot more research is needed, and you can still sign up for the survey.