Daybeds!

A daybed is both a novelty and a practical piece of furniture.

How to define a daybed is difficult because in essence it is nothing more than a bed that is placed and used in a daytime room. That however is something of an oversimplification as many companies now make day bed and some are bed manufacturers and others are manufacturers of sofas and couches.

The easiest way to describe the typical daybed is to say that it is a bed, but used as an alternative to a sofa in a living room or family room. This means that you can lay down and relax on a daybed in a way that would be difficult with a sofa.

Some daybeds look very much like a bed, and may even be dressed with pillows and a quilt! Others are more like a rectangular sofa where the depth of the seat has been lengthened quite considerably. The styles can be bedlike, sofa like and equally modern or traditional.

The size of these beds is a further variable. Some are large whilst others are no bigger than a small sofa. What all have in common is that they make something of focal point and one that cause a whole range of reactions from surprise and shock to amusement and acceptance.

Whether daybeds are just a fad or a trend remains to be seen. So far their popularity seems to be on the up, but these unusual ideas can disappear as quickly as they emerge, so only time will tell.

If you want to know more go to one of the major bed and furniture high street stores.

What type of garage door do you have?

This may not seem the silly question that at first it appears. At least not after a brief period of deliberation or a look at your own garage opening.

There are many different types of garage door motion and the manner in which these doors open, roll, lift slide and hinge may not necessarily be all that obvious.

So why would you even care?

Well the answer to that is simple. If you start to have a problem with your door and that problem needs parts, a repair, or a complete replacement, you will need to know what it is that you are repairing or maintaining.

Put simply, you cannot repair a roller garage door with components from a side hinged door or vice versa. This then begs the question, “how can I tell what kind of door type and operation I have?”

The answer is usually one that is determined by a mixture of inspection, common sense and recognition. You need to determine if you have or canrecognise a sliding, sectional, roller, up and over or hinged doors.

Eliminating some of the candidates can be quite simple, e.g. if you have a door that lifts up you can be sure that it is not a hinged or sliding door. But that still leaves the roller, “up and over” and sectional options!

Picking one of these requires a little bit more observation and the visual acuity to recognise features like arms, drums, springs and the way in which the actual door does or does not bend or flex. Doing this will necessitate taking a closer view of your garage door. This means looking at the mechanical parts that you normally ignore and that hide away to the sides and above the main garage entrance.

If you do this, recognising the type of door that you have is actually quite simple.

Science fact

I few days a go my wife bought a Netbook off Amazon for around £250.

The reason I mention this is because Gene Roddenbery, the man who conceived the TV and film series Start Trek, clearly envisioned these things three decades ago. I can say this with certainty because one of the original Star Trek films was run on TV last night and Captain Kirk was looking at one.

This really is quite incredible for a film made in the 1980’s when home PC’s were still a thing of the future and laptops, let alone Netbooks, Thinkpads and every other variation of portable computer was still a pipe dream. So incidentally were the stupid names that they all seem to be tagged with!

I makes you wonder just which examples of science fiction, presently viewed as inconceivable, are only a few years away from becoming common household appliances.

Already we have home helps like the irobot roomba and scooba for vacuuming duties. When you then take a look at the number of interactive home based computer games that are constantly invading our leisure pursuits you become aware of just how easily science fiction does become science fact.

The ease with which we accept these new technologies is, for me, the scariest part. No one questions the effects that they may have on social and communicative development, let alone intellectual development.

The other worrying thing is that as these devices become more interactive the intelligence required to make them function becomes ever closer to being a facsimile of human cognisance.

This may initially sound unrealistic, but in order to build a chip that can interact with our intelligence it needs to have a reasoning and level of perception that, in some way, mimics that of our own.

Right now this idea is light years away from what we deem to be an independent intellect. However, science fiction and science fact seem to merge at an ever increasing speed and perhaps films like Terminator and The Matrix contain ideas that we should start worrying about.