Nowadays it’s all changed of course. Not only is the largest bookshop in the world available to all of us but we can choose gift baskets which would put to shame any that were available even just ten years ago and would have truly amazed our grandparents both in terms of the range that you can choose from and the price which, despite years of inflation, has barely shifted the price of a wide range of products available online.

Of course, it’s that much greater market that is both increasing our choice and driving down the prices. Who’d have thought 20 years back that to buy a CD you’d use a shop that was based over 1000 miles away from you?

At just everywhere else in the world you can expect theme parks to add another attraction or two each year, in Florida they seem to add another theme park. Paradoxically, that makes Orlando vacations more difficult to plan in that there’s just too much to interest everyone. It’s somewhere that you need to cut down the number of places you intend going to rather than scabbling around to find somewhere of interest that can happen in many other vacation destinations.

Still, ’tis nice to have way too much to see than not enough, isn’t it?

I don’t mean the time travel aspect of it: that’ll happen one day. No, it’s the business of getting to see the President right away that’s not going to happen. Unless it’s planned for in advance.

I think the only time travel series I’ve seen which even thinks about this is Seven Days that where they arrange the codeword in advance and, of course, that’s the only way that it’s going to work. In the early days of time travel it’s likely to be similar to the early days of air travel ie there will be limitations on the distance that you can go back.

Limit that distance and it doesn’t leave you a lot of time to get in touch with the authorities, convince them that you really are from the future and for them to do whatever is necessary to prevent the disaster. Without a codeword or similar quick way of proving that you are who you say you are then it’s going to severely limit the possibilities, at least in the early days of the technology.

One final thing is worth noting and that’s if there’s some really, really major disaster that spurs on the development of time travel in order to prevent it then it would actually be necessary to put the contact mechanism in place for time travellers well in advance of time travel being possible. Ridiculous as it may seem now when time travel is considered, at best, science fiction and indeed thought of as impossible by a large number of people, it seems only sensible to put in place those contact and proof mechanisms in place just in case that major disaster is going to happen soon and time travellers do turn up in time to prevent it.

Most people stop at the estate agent and then sit back waiting for something to happen but these days you have a number of effective options open to you. Those who are already using adwords for other things often start to use it to place adverts for their property. Expensive for sure but quite effective too.

Another option is to list your place on one of the new free listings sites. For example Great Property Direct is an offshoot of one of the top listed holiday rental listings companies thus already has good visibility on the search engines.

That’s led to a massive industry that covers everything from fitness clubs to reduce those sagging bit to lotions & potions to do something about the sagging bits on our faces. Whilst many of us are either too busy or, frankly, too lazy to do much on the exercise front at least we can do something easily enough on the wrinkle from with top wrinkle creams that’ll cover up all those cracks and even some that have been shown to do something or other somewhat deeper to actually slow down the arrival of the wrinkles in the first place.

Now, “all” you need to do is get that credit card out…

For instance, normally the tactic to get inflation down is to increase interest rates which in turn will keep the exchange rate quite high in respect of other currencies. That works well for a while except that with a high exchange rate you can find yourself sucking in a lot of cheap imports after a while which, of course, isn’t really that good for the economy. In times past, that would have signaled the onset of import controls to correct the problem but that’s rarely a runner these days.

The other problem is that this time around, it’s not runaway lending by the banks that’s getting inflation up, it’s the oil price. Therefore, no matter what the interest rate is, it’ll not make a whole lot of difference in inflation, so why do they bother? Basically because that’s how they’ve always done it. Yes, they know that it’s largely the oil price that’s driving inflation upwards but the only weapon that central banks have left to them is the interest rate so they keep that up knowing that all it’s doing is hurting the economy.

Having said all that, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of the mess this time.

Just popping out to the local card shop doesn’t really cut it if you’d like to make a good first impression as everyone will have already seen the cards that you’d get from there. Much better to get them online where the selection, as always, is much greater and they’re generally cheaper too of course.

Of course the very first invitation that anyone sends out is their baby shower invitations so you should really make those ones as special as you can as they’re amongst the very first momentos you’ll have.

One of the milestones along that route is Pentermine which works as a hunger suppressant. Now, many pills have gone down that route before but the problem with previous versions is that the effect wears off after a while and then you need to look for something else to produce the same effect. This one operates directly on the chemicals that cause the hunger sensation and should keep that feeling off for quite a while.

Now the only problem is finding some cheap Phentermine.

It’s not that the router isn’t working well but we could do with a wireless router with a bandwidth limiting function on it as we’re finding the sometimes the videos and/or games that one person is using the connection for mean that the rest of us can’t use it at all or that it’s unrealistically slow. Net effect of that at the moment is that we end up blocking both videos and games for most of the day when we’re using the connection for work. That’s an effective but unpopular solution to the problem of course.

The other issue is that our router uses the slower wifi protocol and as all of our network cards have been upgraded over the last five years we could all get a lot more performance through the connection if we upgraded the router. Now “all” we need to do is to find the right model for us!

In a lot of cases these are completely irrelevent to that business. I well remember one particular stand that I went to at a trade show that had a really neat line in marketing pens which went like hot-cakes because they were so cute.

Now, pens are a good thing to hand out as people tend to keep them for a while but the problem in this case was that they’d put on just their company name. No phone number, no e-mail, no website. And, that company name wasn’t overlly relevant to their line of business.

Net effect? They handed out a LOT of pens. I still have mine. I’ve no idea what the company does though!