Steve Litchfield

Now look, when you smash your elbow with something or back your car into a wall, I can perfectly understand the temptation to exclaim something short and sharp, a choice word or two. But the youth of today seem to have taken the infamous shock F*** word of the 70s and used it instead of most of the adjectives in their limited vocabulary. Initially their intention was to shock, I guess, but it's now used five times in every sentence and it's anybody's guess what it's supposed to mean. It's just sheer laziness, with the speaker unable to express themselves properly. And movies don't really help, with 'stars' made to talk in the same way. English is a wonderfully expressive and diverse language, so come on guys, let's use it to the full....

Now, don't get me wrong. Window cleaners are often very cheerful and very friendly people - certainly our neighbourhood one is. But it's a job that simply doesn't need doing. Like most people, we had our cleaner 'do' the outside of our windows every month or so for years. Then he put his prices up and, on a hunch, we said 'no thanks' and decided to do them ourselves. In fact, we never got round to it and the outsides of our windows haven't been cleaned now for 3 years - yet, looking at our house, the windows don't seem any dirtier than the houses around us. Wind and rain seem to do the job just as well, and for free. 90% of the muck that accumulates on windows is actually on the inside (especially in the kitchen or if you're a smoker) - and that's a job that we all have to for ourselves anyway. Outside window cleaning - another job that just never needs doing?

I've probably ranted about this before, but why oh why do people forget all about time when they decide on a new job? OK, so someone's offered you a job that pays £35,000 p.a. in the big city, but if it takes an hour each way to get to and from the office, that's likely to be at least two hours of each day completely wasted (OK, you could perhaps read a book or listen to an audio device, but it's still not exactly leisure time), not to mention the stress involved with travel delays and the considerable cost in travel expenses (petrol, rail fares, etc). Factor all that in and most people would, I'll warrant, consider that a local or from-home job at £20,000 would actually be preferable. Me, it takes me 10 seconds to get to my office, 6 if I run. And I can work (or not work) according to my own iniative and inclination. And if I had to go out and get a 'proper job' again, I'd only consider something local - it's the travelling that costs and the travel...

Phew! It was with a sigh of relief that I finally bagged up our VCR and carted off all my old VHS tapes to the local charity shop. Yes, there are a few tapes that I wish I'd had time to digitise via the PC onto DVD, but the vast majority can be picked up on DVD at some point in the future, if ever. The replacement? We're now fully digital, having picked up a budget (but stylish) PVR . For the unitiated, this stands for Personal Video Recorder, although I hate the name and prefer HDR or Hard Disk Recorder . Anyway, it means that we can record directly from the built-in digital TV receiver to its hard disk, watching one channel while recording another and generally cherry picking programmes from the week ahead and letting the HDR do the rest. Really, really, cool, and no more clunky VHS tapes to take up space and let us down with poor recordings and chewable media!

I'm staggered that the humble wrist watch is still doing so well in 2006. With the time (and Calendar reminders) on every phone, I haven't worn a watch since about 1990. Clunky, restrictive things. And yet a friend of mine runs TikTox and is making a go of selling wrist watches to the millions. Clearly there are messages of style and general 'coolness' here - and I've never been considered 'cool' by anyone who's not themselves a geek!! Do you wear a watch? And if so why, if you also carry a phone? Interested in any comments!

Yes, yes, these are probably a teenager's dream - to have retail opportunities AND the ambience of loads of other excited shop-worshippers. Meanwhile, for a grumpy old man like me, there comes a point in each shop's capacity where there's so much gridlock in the aisles, so long queues at the checkouts, such a wait to get into (and out of) the car parks, that it's not worth actually being there - it's just such a colossal waste of time. My best tip is to get to the shopping mall at 9am sharp, when everything's opening. Most people are generally lazy and won't be as organised, so you'll have the place more or less to yourself and will have no traffic or parking problems. Or, even better, shop online!

I'm staggered by the realism of some of my daughter's electronic FurReal pets. The premise - she really, really, really wants a puppy. Or a kitten. etc. I really, really don't want the mess, the hassle, the smell. etc. Solution: get her a FurReal pet. She's just as happy, maybe even happier, as these pets can be cuddled all you want and never complain or scratch back. Highly recommended!

I've been waiting and waiting for decent games to come along for my chosen smartphone platform (Nokia S60), but back in the real world I've discovered that convergence isn't always the best path - shock horror. To my chagrin, I've been bewitched by the quality of some of the games on my daughter's Nintendo DS Lite , specifically Touch Golf , which knocks spots off any other golf sim I've ever played, on any platform. OK, so it's another box to pack when going on holiday, but it's worth it....

Look, this is how it's worked for hundreds of years: you eat your meal, ask for the bill and then pay it, adding a little extra as a tip if you've had good service. But restaurants have obviously decided that people aren't being generous enough and have started being very sneaky. I went to Ma Potters in Reading today and, in a bit of a hurry, glanced at the bill and then paid it, adding roughly 10% in my head. The bill seemed a bit high, but I didn't want to cause a fuss because the restaurant was crowded, so I left before examining the itemised bill in more detail. They'd added on 10% automatically, INCLUDING it in the final bill total. So they'd sneakily managed to get two tips out of me. Grrrr.... The moral: examine the bill more closely before you pay. And I'm going to protest by deliberately removing the 10% from restaurrant bills that include this 'optional' extra - and not returning to any of these establishments.

So there I was in Toys'r'us. And by the checkout they had a huge pile of crisp packets, with a sign saying '5p each', with best before dates about to expire. No worries, I thought, and picked up a handful. When my turn in the (only) queue came, the checkout operator had to call the store manager over the tannoy and get him to come over and authorise the 'special' purchase with his master key. This took around five minutes, during which time customers behind me in the queue were giving up on their pile of would-be purchases and leaving the store in frustration. What an absolute farce - it would have been far cheaper for Toys'r'us to have simply binned the crisps, or (better) given them away in a big pile saying 'Please take', and generating a little goodwill. This was the second similar retail experience I've had in the last week, in each case demonstrating that there are people in business who have absolutely no idea what they're doing...

Hopefully a few people will agree with this rant at least.... I keep hearing about why our governments, companies and householders shouldn't bother with renewable energy sources (wind/sun/tidal, etc.) because they don't make financial sense. What rubbish and how short sighted! When other energy sources are failing in 30 years time and electricity and gas are 10 times the current level, there are going to be billions of people regretting not investing (yes, INVESTING) in alternative energy sources NOW. What on earth are we going to run our civilisation on when the gas and oil and coal run out? All nuclear? Hope not. Those dismissing renewable energy installations because their 'pay back' time is 20 years (at most) should realise that the 20 year figure is at current energy levels. Multiply your current fuel costs by four and then the payback time becomes an awful lot more attractive. Renewable energy is about investing in the future, not saving a few pennies or cents now...

So I'm in the middle of the UK summer and a real 35 degree heatwave. As soon as you step out of your air-conditioned car or shady house, the heat hits you like a wall. Well, this is novel for the UK, at least. It physically hurts to be out in the direct sun in the middle of the day and you can almost feel the ultra-violet rays damaging your skin and kicking off all sort of mutations... Yeah, yeah, I know, an over-active imagination, but at least people all over the world are starting to realise that prolonged exposure to the sun for people with fair skin can be very dangerous. So why oh why do a significant number of fair-skinned UK residents lie down in the full sunlight for hours at a time? If they don't use sun-cream they'll burn to a crisp. If they do, it'll take hours and hours to get any kind of a tan and the damage is still being done to their skin in any event. I was stopped by a market research lady a year or so ago and chatted to her for a few minutes. My atte...

Maybe it's a UK thing, but we have lots of TV shows where people dig up stuff from their attic and experts coo over them and then help them put them up for auction. Now, so far so good, it's marginally interesting to see what junk people have got and how much it's worth. BUT - then the auction starts and we see the highly paid presenter, arm round the shoulders of the featured contestant, going 'ooh, it's up to £15, wow, we made a £10 profit' and so on. Come on, this guy is being paid £20,000 an episode, I'm waiting for the programme where he (or she) says 'Stuff this, it's peanuts, couldn't you come up with anything more valuable in your loft?' and then walks off. Or maybe it's all just 'showbusiness'. It's certainly all rather false, anyway.

And, while this blog's getting lots of wonderful (/kind/generous) AllAboutSymbian readers, can I ask anyone who knows me and wants to help this blog along, to add http://stevesrantsnraves.blogspot.com/ to your own blog roll or links pages? Every little bit of link love helps, you know? 8-)