Things that you notice in a major city centre

On Saturday afternoon, I had the misfortune to venture into Leeds city centre, not realising that said day also happened to be the major shopping day before Christmas.



But still, major shopping days happen to provide a source of mild amusement when you actually take a minute to look around. Here are a few that I spotted.

• People naturally join a queue, despite not knowing what the queue is for.
  
  
• Police truancy patrols are a very good idea, but I would question their effectiveness on a Saturday afternoon.
  
  
• Every single motorist wants to park in 'The Light' car park.
  
  
• In the German Christmas market, most shoppers will adopt one of two strategies.
  1. Talking to the stall owner in your best GCSE German.
  2. Talking in the "S-L-O-W-E-R AND L-O-U-D-E-R" method that Brits do so well when abroad.
  They do this despite the fact that the stall keeper is a Chinese boy with a distinctly unnerving Yorkshire accent.
  
  
• People don't seem to understand that shops at Christmas are often busy places and continue to proclaim that "this is stupid this is" at single one of the 32 Christmas temps drafted in just for that particular weekend.

I'm sure I'll think of more later

Don't Have Fun This Christmas or You'll Make us Mad

As millions of Britons hit the high street this December in the run-up to Christmas, Her Majesty's Customs Officers can't help but step in and spoil the party.



Whilst most of us will head to the local City Centre or clog up the Ring Roads queuing for the car park to gargantuan out-of-town shopping centres, thousands of others will leave Blightly alltogether and head to the States.

Not only will they take advantage to the favourable tax rates (as low as 5% in New York against 17.5% in the UK), but they are now encouraged by the fact that a £1 coin will get you almost $2 ($1.98 to be precise). That gives us Brits massive spending power on the other side of the Atlantic.

But the Customs officers aren't happy. Not content impounding cars from cross-channel ferry "booze-cruises" and in some cases, selling the vehicle without the owners knowledge to pay for an alcohol and tobacco duty bill that has already been legally paid within the European Union, they now take great enjoyment in pointing out that we aren't allowed to stock our suitcases with cut-price iPods, laptops and designer jeans from across the pond.

The legalities of it are that any item with a value in excess of £145 (although there is no definition whether that 'value' is retail or trade value) is subject to tax when you land at the UK airport.
There are obviously ways around this. For instance, a laptop computer, camcorder or iPod can easily be disguised as something you took with you in the first place, provided that the customs officer doesn't stumble across the packaging in another suitcase but it's hardly practical to go opening Christmas presents you bought for your granddaughter or teenage son.

Most of us would hope that common sense would prevail and that customs officers at Heathrow will realise that a 58-year old woman with an iPod and pair of Levi's for her grandson isn't a major threat to the economic stability of the nation but then again, perhaps we have too much faith in them.

Rubbish Inventions of the Modern World: Gillette Fusion

Allegedly, the "best a man can get" has just been made better.









The new "Gillette Fusion" offers "the best shave yet" because of it's "five-blade Shaving Surface technology" and, if you believe the marketing slogans, will completely revolutionise the way we shave.

Rubbish.

Why the hell does a razor need five blades, as well as a sixth on the top for those "hard to reach" areas? Further still, why does a razor need five blades, a sixth on the top for those "hard to reach" areas and a battery to make the thing shake like a shitting dog?

Like most blokes, I fail to see what six blades do that three blades can't, except making you twice as likely to cut yourself.

I'd love to see the Gillette MD when that idea was pitched to him. Perhaps he thought he'd be better off slitting his wrists with the extra three blades?

Rubbish Inventions of the Modern World: Deal or No Deal

Not so much an invention, more of a creation but rubbish none-the-less.







The current "daytime TV show of the year" in Britain happens to be the above titled programme, the very same game show that has relaunched the career of Noel Edmonds.

After Noel's House Party was axed by the BBC in 1999, Edmonds had found himself attending the local job club until last year.

After applying for the presenting role on Countdown, he was then snapped up by Channel Four to present a new game show called "Deal or No Deal."

The show involves 22 contestants, one of which is picked to play the game. Each contestant has a box with a cash value inside ranging from 1p to £250,000. The player then selects boxes at random to reveal a cash amount. That amount is then taken away. At various intervals, a "banker" makes an offer based on what cash values are left. The player then decides if they want to accept this offer or play on to earn a greater offer.

The problem is, it is perhaps the only TV gameshow I can remember where contestants have the opportunity of winning a live-changing sum on money through no skill whatsoever.

It's like Russian roulette except instead of a gun, you've got piles of cash. Any idiot can reel off random numbers and win big. This is made better by the fact that the contestants are usually whacko's and nut-jobs who believe that they have psychic abilities or that the £250,000 "has to be" in the box which happens to be their guinea pig's birthday or something equally stupid.

Why then, is the programme so successful? Well, it makes good TV. It creates suspense and is a typical example of 'car crash TV,' where a member of the public has their weaknesses exposed live on National television and if you want to look at it from a psychological perspective, it is a perfect demonstration of human greed.

Oh, and it's a daytime TV programme and so more than likely, the lack of any form of skill or intelligence involved in the game is perhaps an indication that Channel Four know their audience well.

Why am I saying this in my Christmas advice section? Well, C4 are cashing in big-time. It's that time of year when you get the various board game, DVD game, PC game, Playstation / Xbox game, handheld game, pen and paper game and so on.

Please, stop fuelling this endless production line of lazy TV.

Rubbish Inventions of the Modern World: Playstation Portable

The chances are, if you are buying Christmas presents for a 10 year old boy, a Sony PSP will be high on the list.




But before you head into Currys and give the 17-year-old counter assistant £150+ of your hard-earned, read on.

As a portable games console, the PSP does a job and certainly rivals the competition but it's not just a games console, meaning that the PSP files perfecty well under 'P' for 'Pointless'. Don't believe me? Here's a run-down of the so-called 'features' that the PSP has to offer:
MP3 Player:
OK, but why carry around a big clunky games console when you have a mobile phone, iPod or other mp3 player that will do exactly the same?
WiFi:
Why? How many 10-year olds know how to set up a wireless network? More to the point, why would a 10-year old want to download mp3's through a wireless network onto a MS Pro Duo card? Your average 10-year old just wants to play Grand Theft Auto, regardless of the fact he's not 18 yet.
Movie Player:
Why again? Firstly, UMD discs are like hen's teeth to find and they are a darn'd sight more expensive than your standard DVD's.
Even why you can find one you can afford, the chances are that the battery will cut out half-way through the film.
A wrist strap:
The day you start listing a 'wrist strap' as a feature is the day you know you've made a product that can't live up to the hype.

There you have it, yet more consumer advice for the unaware Christmas shopper.

Rubbish Inventions of the Modern World: Sat Nav

In the second part of this series designed to make sure you don't buy the wrong thing this Christmas, we take a look at a device that has seen a huge boom in the past two years: Satellite Navigation.



Sat Nav systems have really taken off, fuelled entirely by huge price reductions. Three years ago, I was happily selling GPS systems at upwards of £800 and more often than not, topping a grand. Today, you could get a better spec system from Aldi for about £90.

Anyone who works on the road will have one of these things stuck to their windscreens, haulers, couriers, mini-cab drivers, reps, the emergency services, even ice-cream men have been seen tapping away at the touch screen menus. Heck, even I've got one.

But why?

We believe that they get us from A-B with minimal fuss, but do they? Well no, no and no it would appear. All they seem to do is attract the local underclass to your vehicle.

The pro argument is that they guide you around unfamiliar areas and in fairness, when they arEn't taking you up some back-alley in Wales, they can do that. However, try using them in a City Centre and they aren't much cop at all. Half the problem of city driving is negotiating the multitude of one-way systems and performing countless lane changes. Not once will a Sat Nav even give you an incling of which lane to take, that's if you've still got a reception in the first place.
There's also those people who use them purely in their home town, not realising that it's more than likely costing them money in fuel as it finds yet another cack-handed way to get you to the local supermarket. They are certainly no substitute for local knowledge.

So for those of you browsing Currys this December for that perfect gift, turn away from Satellite Navigation.

Rubbish Inventions of the Modern World: Digital Picture Frames

Believe it or not, Christmas is not a million miles away. Now is the time that retailers and manufacturers everywhere start to churn out the inevitable stream of crap to get you to part with your hard earned.



Over the next few weeks, a View from the Bar guides you through the pitfalls of Christmas shopping. Today: Digital Picture Frames.

Photographers and photo-developers are constantly bemoaning the death of the photograph. In the past, you'd take your holiday snaps, sent them off the be developed and then a week later, you'd all gather around like a family going "awwwwww" and "oooooh" as your mum flicked through the photos. (As a kid, you were never allowed to touch them). Then they'd be filed away in a photo album for another day - even the rubbish ones where your finger strayed across the lens or where you took photos of the TV just to use the film up.

Today, we don't bother with that. These days it's all instantaneous. We take the photos, immediately delete the ones we don't want and then download them onto our hard-drive the minute we land. And we just leave them there. Half the time we don't even look at the, they just sit on the hard-drive never to be seen again. We ignore the fact that we spend £200-£300 on a digital camera that gives us worse picture quality that our old 35mm camera, we just like the sound of the word "megapixels".

So along came a series of ideas designed to kick-start the home photography scene. First you had photo printers, but people still couldn't be bothered printing photos after they bought a new printer and so the next big idea was digital photo development booths. Think of it like a cash machine except instead of putting in your debit card, (then you put in your debit card to pay) you put in a memory card and instead of cash, you get photographs instead. They are still knocking about here and there.

But then some boffin decided that instead of merely printing our photos, we needed somewhere to display them and so the 'digital photo frame' was born - and it was rubbish.

The idea is to display your digital photos in the same way you'd display your old-style photos. The problem is though, it's entirely dependent on screen quality, which isn't very good.
Manufacturers of these things, like any modern consumer electronics, look to keep the costs of the product as low as possible, ignoring any detrimental effects in quality. That means when some no-mark distributor of poor quality LCD screens comes up with a good offer, it's just too tempting.
Not just that though, the big £2000 three screen jobbie you see on the above link? One of the screens didn't work and the remote was comical. You physically had to go up to the device and form a tunnel with your hand between the remote and the screen you wanted to change so that the remote didn't affect the wrong screen!

In the end, the reviewer for Channel 5's "The Gadget Show" ended up making his own picture frame - with a 15in TFT monitor and some MDF from Homebase.

So in short, avoid digital photo frames. The first of a series of 'What not to buy this Christmas' advice.