Apparently this hypothetical question is about showing what is important to you. It was posed to me a number of years ago, but with a change of situation over the years my answer has remained constant. In fact, I don’t see my answer ever changing from what instantly popped into my mind at the time.

What would you take with you?

I’ve heard a number of answers, ranging from the obvious; “the family”, “the pet”, through the material; “passport”, “files”, “jewellery”, “phone”, to the eclectic such as “Love”. No, I don’t understand that last answer either, but the question is a personal one and as such it has no right or wrong answer.

From the answer I gave to the question I’ve discovered that what is important to me is a fresh approach to problem solving. In fact the answer partly influenced the creation of thoughtlateral.com.

What was my answer? “The fire itself”.

I hypothesize that increased pollution is either directly causing the symptoms of hayfever, or accentuating the sensitivity to pollen.

Hayfever? Pollution fever more likely!

Ultimately you decide whether it's raining debt, or raining credit.

“You don’t need a job to survive the recession?…Yeah, right!” some may serve up as a retort – along with a generous side portion of sarcasm. Others may envisage that I’m about to expunge the joys of financial prudence like a nan.

“You don’t need a job to survive the recession”. Honestly I really mean it, and truly believe it. Here’s why…

A job, unless you’re self-employed, means someone else giving you a ‘handout’ (salary) according to the value your services have to them.

Think about why you supposedly need such a job?

To make ends meet. To keep the baliffs out. To put bread on the table. To keep a roof over your head. It’s all about making money.

You don’t really need a job, what you need is to make money. A job just provides you with one way of doing that.

Freeing up your thought process to see the wider picture allows you to be more creative in the solutions to making money that you come up with.

For example,  de-clutter the house by selling unused possessions. (Many people are currently looking to buy cheap goods to ‘make do’ and help them through a financial rough spot).

Or perhaps, start a local leaflet around your neighbourhood with money saving tips. See if local businesses would be interested in offering a modest discount to customers holding your leaflet, which has an advert for their business on it.

Or even, join ailing businesses together into a ‘service chain’. Help an accessories store to cross-advertise with a hairdresser and nail bar – helping ladies to get glammed up for a night-out without breaking the bank to do so.

You don’t really need a job, what you need is to make money. So if the Recession, like Life, doesn’t give you an opportunity – then feel free to make one!

No, that’s not a euphemism for swearing. You did read it correctly.

“Swoopo” is the cross between an auction site & gambling site. An odd idea, intelligently humourous, and well executed.

The idea is that bids only increase by a nominal amount (e.g. 10pence) for each bid made. When a bid is made it increases the auction’s countdown clock by a few seconds (e.g. 20secs). If the clock reaches zero with your username on the bid you get the goods going for a song. Music to the ears of most people during a recession, no?

It offers paticipants the potential for massive savings up to 100% off, I kid you not.

Such savings can be offered as each bid made has been prior purchased, and 50p of which goes towards meeting the company’s needs. So if we do the maths… an auction item reaching £100.00 would have involved 1000 bids, each earning the company 50p. For those of you reaching for a calculator – that’s £500 for the company. (Well I did say their idea was “intelligent” didn’t I?)

Now that’s what I call e-Commerce with an Eeeeeee!

I’m sure they will be in the news in the not too distant future…

Some bagged bargains on completed auctions

A simple fiddle of the knob, and you're in the future already!

T – 5:00 and counting….

I used to have a digital watch for a Digital age, and perceived them to be superior to analogue watches. Modern digital watches are for modern times – or so the reasoning went.

…T- 4:00…

However, such a view was short sighted as analogue systems have a  benefit I much underestimated .

…T- 3:00…

You can see the scale as a continuous range. For example, on a watch you can see the future time lying ahead of the minute hand, and the past that lays behind it.

…T – 2:00…

Using this advantage, I’ve set my analogue watch five minutes ahead of the actual time.

…T – 1:00…

This continually conditions the mind to see five minutes into the future. It helps re-align my present actions so I’m in the correct place, or have done what I need to, when the time arrives.

…0:00 Time out!

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

“What does every man wish he had more of, but never knows when he has it?” says the Riddle.

“Sleep” replies the Answer.

I’ve come to think that battles of  “Morning commute rush” and “Groggy afternoon malaise” are won the night before, particularly in the time I go to sleep. The earlier the bedtime, the less likely the following morning would seem like a rat race, or the afternoon turn into a sleep-deprived stupor.

It is said the sleep hours before midnight are worth double those after, and I’ve found this has some truth to it.

However, there is a counter force that resists earlier bedtimes. Long work hours means there’s no evening to be had. So watching a late movie tempts to improve the work-life balance. Thinking laterally though, the long work hours may be shortened if adequate sleep is obtained the night before – as the better productivity results.

So the more sleep, the more likely this vicious cycle will get a puncture.

Can any road really be "safe"?

“Road safety” is a term used to represent “Road traffic safety”. However, I feel it to be a misnomer as it suggests the possibility of a ‘safe road’, which is non-existent.

A road of itself is neither safe nor unsafe. It is the manner in which the road is used that creates danger, or lack of safety.

For example, a road with a particularly sharp bend is neither safe nor unsafe. If however a driver decides to navigate such a road at high velocity, they are likely to come a cropper, almost certainly in fact. This is not due to any fault with the road, but the driver choosing the incorrect velocity to get around the bend.

A road is neither good or bad. It just is. It is up to the driver to accept it, and drive accordingly to the road conditions.

Surely an icy road is unsafe?

No. An icy road is simply less tolerant of driver error. A vehicle with the correct tyres driven with good skill would have no difficulty, but an uprepared driver with unprepared vehicle would be a different matter.

At what size does stuff become litter?

Litter, junk, waste, refuse, trash, you know, the stuff that is a waste of your cash? That’s right, I’m talking about litter.

What is the size of the litter problem?

I don’t ask that in a “Save the Earth and free the whales”-kind-of-way (though that can be good too) or in way that means lots of furry Christmas presents because someone forgot to get Tabby neutered.

What I mean is, just what size exactly does a refuse item need to be in order to be classified as litter?

Think about it, if the soggy cardboard that was holding the last leg of greasy chicken is tossed to ground in a carefree manner, few* would argue against the item being classified as litter. (*-Well, few people I’ve met anyhow. Obviously you’re mileage may vary)

After all, it is an unwanted item that has been improperly discarded, i.e. not in a bin – so is called litter.

Hang on though! What if we were to shrink the problem? Let’s shrink that cardboard down…

Now if our post-pub-2:00am-haute-cuisine container shrinks to become a cigarette butt is it still litter?

Yes. Wherever you dump that fag stub, if it’s not in a bin it is litter.

Hmm. Maybe we didn’t shrink it enough. OK, let’s shrink it some more…

Now it becomes a spot of dust on your glad-rags as you are on your way out for the evening. Without hesitation you flick the offending dust off your garment and continue on your way. You litterbug! No? You mean it wasn’t litter? Why? It was “too small” you say? Now you see my point.

Smaller than what? What is the comparative size that says “This is litter”, or “This is not litter”?

All I can say is it’s larger than an eyelash, but smaller than a chewing gum. As far as I can tell, that’s about the size of the litter problem.

Lateral thinking can prevent slow speeds online

Bandwidth. How big is yours? Do you care? Well apparently, we are all demanding more of the stuff with streaming video from the BBC iPlayer and other video casting sites. The pessimists write about how it could break the Internet, how it could change the price of a loaf of bread, and even cause your mother to say “I told you so.” (OK, well maybe not as bad as that, but I’m sure it sold a few more papers anyhow).

This causes me to have that 1000pixel stare and get flashbacks when I sleep at night. You see, as a Web veteran from the last century, remembering the day Yahoo (all one page of it) appeared on the Web, and the onset of Flash I get a deja vu feeling about it all.

Back in those Halcyon days, when “surfing the net” meant annoying a fisherman while catching waves, bandwidth was a most precious commodity. Not precious in the way of kilobits, but bits. Yes, every bit counted.. and there wasn’t that many of them to count either!

Having a 56kbps line was a veritable storm drain in the plumbing of data transfer, and web designers pushed out the boat, or graphic content to be exact. In addition to this, more people were getting ensnared in the web daily. How could this fledgling Web grow when so many ‘flies’ were trying to ensnare themselves therein?

Well the answer, other than “very quickly, actually”, is smartly. Smart how? You see, the problem was tackled from two directions, above and below. Capacity was increased by modernising infrastructure and laying new ‘spider threads’ as you’d expect – the tackling from above bit, and this is the main* thrust of the current debate being discussed in the media. (* ‘main’ as in ‘only’)

Now here’s the ‘but’; the problem was also tackled from below by web designers. They created pages more appropriate to the available bandwidth – bandwidth optimisation. To see just how effective this is, compare and contrast the effect of a bumblebee at full kilter hitting a web to that of a midge fly reversing round a bend and nudging a web.

The savings when optimising, compressing, trimming off the fat, paring down to the essentials can be substantial. It’s worthwile. Consider shaving 1% of data off downloading a web page ( this seems a modest task as a quick check of my current 22Kb web page shows I could save about 2kb just by removing extraneous spaces in the code – which is nearer 10% of shaving-savings than 1%!). Multiply this up by the amount of people sucking content out of your server users and your savings just keep stacking up. The more users the more savings.

Every designer and his pet goldfish is using javascript frameworks, CSS, and all other manner of unclean meat in websites these days. Isn’t it time to bring on the code obfuscators that reduce variable name lengths down to a character, and all other manner of compression enabling technologies we can throw into the mix? I think so, in fact, I know so. Optimisation worked very well before and helped the Web become what it is today.

Gone on, impress your wallet, compress your code. You know it makes sense when breaking the bandwidth barrier.