h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

True, TC, but some of the things that aren't dishwasher-safe aren't delicate. We have some mugs that we won't use regularly because they can't be put in the dishwasher with all the other mugs. I don't see the point of putting the dishwasher on and using a special cycle just for a few mugs. It's cheaper to wash them by hand.

Having said all that, we have a couple of mugs that aren't dishwasher-safe, but we didn't find out till the design on them started to fade. One of them is about 25 years old, so it doesn't really matter if the design goes.

...all part of the 'great leap backward'.

The versatility of 20th century designers is apparently not to be expected of 21st century designers...

Apparently they're not concerned about exceeding or even equalling the performance of their predecessors or competitors, only about producing trendy junk.

There's very few and far between specialist shops any more.

There's the odd chocolate shop, but that's about it I think. The other one I was thinking of was computer game shops, but even they don't just sell games any more, you can get hardware and accessories from them.
The global rise of supermarkets and the homogenisation of the high street has led to a social change where every shop has been told that it has to diversify to survive.
Newsagents sell books and toys. Clothes shops sell shoes, sunglasses and hats. Banks sell insurance and mortgages (once the preserve of the building society) and even the Post Office does credit cards.

Perhaps what we are seeing from this children's book is not a lazy writer sending a child to an egg shop, but a social commentary on the fragility of the economic consumerism that we have built around ourselves, powered by the mass corporations and marketing agencies. The "egg" itself may be the subtle symbolism for the individual specialist shops of our youth that held so much potential.


Or I may just be talking a load of dingoes kidneys as I've not had enough tea yet this morning.

Jumping back a post or two (I can't think of a comment on specialist shops for the minute) - it is ever a cause of annoyance to me that the wonderful progress of the 20th century seems to have taken a step back these days.

I've mentioned before the photocopier where you don't just put in a piece of paper and a copy comes out, but you have to press a number of buttons before it does it, and the telephone system which is now no longer capable of showing you the name of the caller. Doing mail merge in Windows is another example of how a good idea got over-complicated after improvement.

The words of a programmer still ring in my ears: "What do you want to do that for?" They (present company excepted, I hope) just don't live in the real world.

in Aachen there is the most fantastic, tatty looking, over full (seriously teetering piles of stuff) kitchen utensils shop. From Kitchen aid mixers to little plastic bags of rubber washers for taps via all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, the like of which I haven't seen in many a year (those rubber nozzle things that we used to have on kitchen taps for example)

I go there about 4 or 5 times a year, and always end up buying something that my granny used to use and I never thought I'd need

And of course, there are those dozens of different caramel shops...

I agree with you about overcomplicating things TC, usually though it's not the programmer's fault, but the client's.

And usually the extra "features" come into the job late on, almost always too late to be designed in properly, so are just bolted on. Which is what often leads to crap products.

>>The global rise of supermarkets and the homogenisation of the high street has led to a social change where every shop has been told that it has to diversify to survive.

The tide might be turning, to some extent, since most of these bloated supermarkets in the UK are now under-performing; apart from ALDI, which has been having spectacular success with a rather limited range of foods. Morrisons have said they're going to follow the ALDI business model*.

* You'll find their business models in big wire cages down the middle of the store...

Aldi's business model is the "own brands" model, buy it cheap and sell it cheap.

Aldi also diversify a *lot*, just look at the specials they advertise all the time.

So I don't think that's a great example, because they're doing the same thing, just cheaper.

I agree about the absence of 'speciality' shops, but how long do they last when they do start up. In Redditch (our closest town of any size) there are no single-product shops. Card shops sell toys and knick-knacks, shoe shops sell handbags, jewellery shops sell ornaments and gift items.

There are some towns where speciality shops do survive, but even these don't sell a single product. They are 'speciality' because the items they sell aren't available in chain-stores, be they supermarkets, department stores, whatever.

Oh, I very much doubt many speciality shops would survive now, they just don't have the purchasing power to compete with the prices that the supermarkets can do.

plus people don't have the time to use them. If you have to do all your weekly shop on a Saturday and go to the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer (you don't need candlesticks every week, surely) it takes too long.

Aldi. Their specials are carefully selected products. If you save their flyers for a couple of years you know what's coming and when. I find it useful, for example, to know when they will stock the lawnmowers so that I can plan to cut the grass that weekend

Thinking about it, Sho, we have a butcher in Redditch and AFAIK all they sell is meat. We also have a butcher/game merchant in my village that only sells meat. All other shops sell a variety of produce. Even the florist sells greetings cards and gift items. The baker sells sandwiches and beverages. We don't have a greengrocer. Candles (scented and unscented) and candle-holders can be bought at local garden centres.

in my town we have a proper fishmonger, a bookshop, shoe shops, a butcher but not much else apart from hairdressers, a couple of clothes shops and mobile phone shops. Oh there is a craft shop.

But not one greengrocer. There is a market, fruit, veg and flowers but it's on a friday morning when most people at work and therefore useless. That is my PH of the day.

Sounds like Amboise - fruit and veg market (among other things) on Wednesday, frequented by local housewives, but not much else in the way of greengrocers. The produce at the market was better than anything I've seen in the UK recently, and I don't think much of it was imported.

The Loire valley region gets a bit too warm for me in the summer, otherwise I'd like to emigrate there.

Roosters. And their incessant crowing.

Roosters, and their barnyard manners.

Companies that use 'scare' tactics to try to get you to buy their products/services. I recently paid for web hosting. As a result I was 'given' 1GB of space with a company that provides cloud storage for backups. I backed-up my netbook yesterday, which used about 100MB. Today I got an email telling me my backup hadn't been completed because I'd exceeded my 1GB allowance.

As far as I'm concerned, I didn't ask for or want the services of this company. If this is the way they try to get money out of their customers, I'm going to uninstall their app. I have free accounts with other cloud storage companies that don't behave that way. They're good enough for me.

Ditto.

I personally keep the recycle bin positioned directly under the spot in the upper left hand corner of the screen where the shortcut for a new program appears when installation is complete and don't hesitate to resort to radical search and destroy uninstall tactics when I'm in any way dissatisfied with either performance or marketplace manners on a drop everything and do it right now basis.

Reminds me of one of my all time personal petty hates, software that installs a shortcut on your desktop each time it does an update, even if there was no shortcut there before, because you keep deleting it. Yes iTunes, I'm looking at you!

Can anyone tell me why iTunes and Quicktime need to update so often?