Financial & Travel Musings

This used to be very much the preserve of public and company buildings but as prices have dropped and fashions changed it’s moving more into the mainstream of homes.

Walking down our street there are four or five homes with some kind of landscape lighting in every dozen or so. Granted these are almost all using lighting at the lower end of the price range but as time goes on some are considering more sophisticated ranges like kichler landscape lighting which move on from the basic landscape highlighting to illuminating features of gardens and homes.

Of course what this will mean over time is that people will need to construct specific features to illuminate which will, no doubt, change the appearance of gardens and homes as time goes on.

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The iPod was a nice idea when it first came out but now there are so many different models that it’s quite confusing at first glance.

The ipod reviews are really no better as they tend to go into incredible detail about minor things that nobody’s really that bothered about but at least they list the full technical specifications should you want them.

Basically there are three different iPods. The nano is the baby of the bunch and basically aimed at people who just want an MP3 player although it will also play videos. The shuffle is basically the same thing but without the screen. The original iPod is a larger version of the nano but with a whole lot more memory which means that you could load your entire CD collection; personally I don’t really see a place for this model these days. Finally there is the iPod touch which is probably the best one to go for as it has by far the best facilities available; get the the one with the largest amount of memory that you can afford as you can use this to play videos and they just eat up memory.

But why get an iPod anyway? There are much cheaper versions of the nano, original and shuttle around (think around 90% cheaper) but the iPod touch is largely unique for the moment and is worth getting.

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It’s hard to believe but we’re on the home run to Christmas which means that now is the time to start thinking about what you might want to buy everyone and where you’re going to get it.

In recent years there’s been quite a trend towards personalized gifts which need more preparation as there’s a longer lead time to have them made for you. Thus if you are considering going down this road, you need to get working on it within the next month or so to be sure that your gift will be ready in good time.

Obviously the best gifts are those that the person would want but would never have thought of buying for themselves. Thus far my all-time best ever gift has been the Sony Reader although she’s been complaining that I didn’t pay nearly so much attention to the other gifts so I guess you can’t win

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