Dear Retailers / Giftmakers,

I am a man. This means that I lack the necessary genes for success in the field of 'present wrapping'. In the future, please can you design your gifts and presents to fit into neat rectangular boxes, as I find these somewhat easier to wrap (though they're still sufficiently challenging!) rather than the ornate moulded plastic designs in shapes which wrapping paper just wasn't designed to cover!

Many thanks,

James.

I love my car. Really, I do. It's great, economical, fairly sporty, and has a load of space in the back for Aimee and her copious paraphenalia. It has lots of toys - like parking sensors, dual climate control and loads of three-letter-acronymns that I don't fully understand (like ABS, EBD, ESP, TCS and so on), it also has a bluetooth mobile phone system, built in. The phone system is one of the reasons I bought the car - what with doing quite a bit of travelling, and the ban on using mobiles in cars. Everything is great in the car, absolutely wonderful German quality - except this phone system.

Firstly, the number of phones it supports is meagre at best - most of which are old and retired now. None of the Nokia E or N-series phones (or indeed, any Series 60 Symbian phones) are supported - though that's a Nokia issue, rather than an Audi one, which they've only just fixed with the E71 and N96.

Secondly, when you have a compatible phone, and you wish to utilize the Audi's wonderful voice-activated controls, it all turns to goopy shit. To illustrate this, I recorded my attempt this morning at trying to dial my voicemail box using the voice controls. All the car needs to do, is dial '901'.

Apologies for the quality of the recording, it was done by using another phone's Voice Recorder and then exporting the audio off.

Didn't really stay out late last night - got back to the hotel around 11pm, tired and with my feet aching.

Woke around 9am to another sunny morning and, my last day. I really, really need to get some presents sorted for folks at home, so I decide to make that the aim of the game for today, and, I think I've done ok. The weak dollar at the moment makes New York an attractive proposal - and its clear that I'm not the only nutter that'll be going home with a shiny new suitcase, full of booty.

All the 'discount' electronics and giftware stores have hastily arranged 'Luggage' sections, with all manner of cases, from $400 Samsonites to cheap Asian knock-offs. I, obviously, plump for the cheapest bag I can find that'll hold my stuff - $45 for a mid-sized expandable suitcase with a trolley handle. If it only lasts this one journey, I'll be happy!

Wandered around the Flatiron district this morning - disappointing (though probably unsurprising, really) that most shops seem to close on Sundays (or not opening til mid-day, at the earliest). The Flatiron building is architecturally beautiful - if the people who owned the building across the intersection from it let people take photos of it from their rooftops, they'd make a killing.

PS. I just looked in the mirror and realised that I am very, very sunburnt. WTF? Sunburn in New York? In October?!

Ok, so, the updates stopped. Even my mum thought I was dead, murdered by a crazy New York gangster, but, I wasn't. I was just bloody busy. Busy, and tired, in cycles.

I went out for a quick look around when I arrived - even though I had been awake for 20+ hours by that point, to fool my mental chemistry into accepting the time-delay. This proved to be a great idea, for two reasons - 1) I have no jetlag at all, now, and 2) I found Smiths Bar, a couple of blocks from Times Square.

I like to think that I'm not the 'regular' tourist - sure, Times Square is pretty neat, but it's a tourist trap ready to suck the dollar bills out of your pocket as just as soon as it can. I don't really understand the notion of going all the way to New York to go to franchised eateries like Planet Hollywood, or movie-spinoff-moneyspinners like Bubba Gump Shrimp where you'll eat some godawful microwaved shit served to you by a waitress that's getting minimum wage and providing minimum effort. So, I went out on Thursday night and had a bit of a 'recce, just to help me get my bearings.

I'm finally here, typing this up in my hotel room on the 22nd floor. What a pickle! Everything was going swimmingly perfectly well until I reached the check-in desk at the hotel.

Me: "Hello, I have a reservation for Mr Sheridan, for four days"

Snooty hotel man: "Ok", tap-tap-tap-tap, raised eyebrow, "ah, yes, I see. Sir, your card was declined (equate my emphasis to his volume), so that booking is now gone."

I'm sure I don't need to give examples of some of the choice words I used here - I'm sure you can get the picture, and the long and short of it is, well, I'm on the 22nd floor looking out over Broadway :) , but I do need to ring my bank tomorrow - it looks like the card I 'paid' with is barred from international transactions, presumably as an anti-fraud measure.

The rest of the flight was fine, felt a bit tired by the end, but once we got into the last hour, it flew by (pun intended). JFK Terminal 4 deserted, and Homeland Security let me in with no qualms. Which was nice.

The flight to Amsterdam was very, very quick - about 40 minutes, and, also refreshingly deserted. I had an entire row to myself, Not that I needed it for such a short hop.

Schiphol is massive, just massive. It took me a good 20 minutes walk to get from the arrival gate, in terminal C, to the departing gate in terminal F. Thing is, there isn't actually any seperate terminal buildings, it's just one long, long, long concourse of departure gates and 'retail opportunities'. It's certainly a different approach - there's no 'airside' and 'landside' as in most airports, security and baggage scan is all done at each individual gate. Seems a bit daft to me - especially as there's no prior warning of this for a transiting passenger - and juding by the number of 'Vee are in zee process of unloading jour baggage' announcements over the tannoy, I'm not the only one with that opinion.

Comedy moment of the day - and the one I wish I'd caught on camera - the campest Dutch policeman in the entire world, zipping around Schiphol on a Segway, patrolling the endless corridors of the concourse.

Hello there from Terminal 4 Airside Wetherspoons! I'd been told a number of horror stories regarding Heathrow in general, and particularly T4 (and not T5, even though its opening was a failure on a purely biblical scale). Thus-far, I believe them all to be completely unfounded.

I stepped off the tube at the T4 station (though in my eagerness at Kings Cross/St Pancras, I have to confess that I may have accidentally boarded a Piccadilly train bound for Uxbridge, and it wasn't until Holborn until I realised my faux-pas) and no more than 3 minutes later, I was airside, thru security and in a largely deserted departure lounge.

I realise I must be epically late to the game on this whole 'online check-in' malarky, but, jesus h christ, it doesn't half save some fucking around. Print off your boarding pass. Walk to security. Hand over pass and passport, nice man scans boarding pass, says "Thankyou very much Mr Sheridan, have a good flight" and you walk through to the X-ray scanners. No queueing, no fannying, no fuss.

Thankfully, my taxi did arrive on time and I had a good half an hour or so to kill at the station before my train. Ordered a giant tea from one of the cafes at Sheffield station and imbued as much caffeine as I could muster.

The 6600mAh extended battery for the Aspire One arrived yesterday, and I gave it a little dry-run at work to see how the battery life held up. The battery reached 100% charged at around 11am, so I disconnected it and gave it some light use throughout the day - with the wifi on, and a number of sizable data transfers, and a USB flash card attached - by the time it got to 5pm, it still claimed to have over 2 hours life left and about 25% capacity. Very promising.

Presently, as I write this, I'm hurtling through the countryside on a knackered old East Midlands Trains Intercity125, playing FreeCiv on the One. I had planned on loading up the machine with as many films and stuff as I could muster, but not one of my torrents finished on time. Which was disappointing. I did have 'Be Kind Rewind' and the first two episodes of 'Fringe' from a previous haul, and I guess they'll have to do me.