Dyson DC33 - First Impressions

I've just become the owner of the DC33 - Stubborn.

My old vacuum cleaner was a compact bagless machine (Electrolux Cyclonic Lite 1800W), that I was forever having to empty and then clean out the filter with a dustpan and brush, creating a horrible dusty mess and usually resulting in a sneezing fit (and one reason the wife refuses to empty it, because she suffers far worse than I do).

It also lost its sucking power at an early stage, and required frequent filter cleaning to get back to optimum sucking power.  Despite this, our carpets have had this dirty look about them for a while, and I decided it was time to change to a decent vacuum cleaner.

The minute I put the DC33 onto our carpets, they became a shade lighter, and I could see all sorts of dust and dirt being sucked up into the canister (it's quite fascinating really - a bit like inspecting your hankie after blowing your nose, but not quite so repulsive).  Its rotating brush also helped to loosen the dirt from the carpets (something the compacts tend to lack).

To empty the canister, you just press a button, lift it out, and press the same button again to open the door on the bottom and have the dirt fall out, fantastic.  There is only one bit of maintenance they recommend and that's rinsing out the HEPA filters under the tap once every 3 months.  I think I can cope with that.

So, my first impressions are, a great product, and at £179 from Currys, not a bad price (if a tad more than I'm used to paying for vacuum cleaners), and it comes with a 5 year guarantee, so hopefully it'll last a while.  It also only uses 1300W of power, so that's 500W less than my old cleaner, and yet it has more sucking power.  The greener choice as well then.

I have to say I was a little confused when I was looking at the different models of DC33's, but as far as I can make out, they're all the same except the colour of the top of the canister is different (mine is white) and you get different accessories.

If I was going to suggest an improvement, I've love to see more uprights have the retractable cord thingy that most compacts do, because it means less faffing about and more fun pressing the pedal and seeing the cord get sucked up (simple pleasures).

Now... if I can only persuade the Wife to use the thing I'll be sorted.  She claims she gets all sneezy when she vacuums, so she tends not to do it, a valid excuse for the old vacuum cleaner, but hopefully not this one.  Unlike my my younger brother's lame excuse for not peeling potatoes, because he claims he gets itchy legs.   My parents were gullible enough to believe him at the time.

Tablets, smartphones... whatever next?

What with all the the hype about tablets and the latest smartphones, sometimes I like to take a good hard look at where all this came from, and where we are going with it.


In the 1980's, one look at Lethal Weapon and you see a carphone the size of a brief case. 

In the early to mid nineties, my Dad got a GSM mobile phone, the thing was a brick by today's standards, but good grief we all thought it was small.  Not that he ever used it, given the fact that tariffs were very expensive back then, it became an expensive mantlepiece ornament that beeped occasionally.

For the first 2 years at University in '97 and '98, nobody had a mobile phone; then suddenly a few first years would have them, then a few of my friends, and then finally, I got a hand me down from my younger brother. It was like a disease spreading throughout the populace.

We didn't use them a great deal, costs were high, and texting was a bit of an ordeal on the early phones, and I'd say it wasn't until the Nokia 3210 came about that things got decidely easier (and we all played snake).

But we still met in the flesh, and arrange to go places when we were all togther, the phones were for finding out why you were late.

I guess it was from about 2001 that people started to use their phones more and more, and face to face contact with people seemed to me to get less and less.  By the middle of the noughties, the text message was a ubiquitous form of communication that started its own language (some of which still baffles me), and now people have web phones with integrated widgets to organise their life on Facebook.

The pace of change has been huge, can you imagine putting a teenager of today back in the 80's and seeing how they would cope?  One of my relations is a teenager and she spends most of her time focusing her eyes six inches from her face, this can't be good, unless you work for Specsavers.  What really scares me is she thinks she "knows" people from her conversations with them on Facebook, without having actually met them.


To me, this is bonkers.  I mean, if you share your profile with everyone, you might as well stick it on a sandwich board and parade the streets with it and start chatting with strangers.  Call me traditional, but when I grew up, we didn't talk talk to strangers, and yet the youth of today do so on a daily basis, often without their parents knowing about it.

Are we going to end up with a generation of people who can only communicate via Facebook?  Will they even know how to host a dinner party?  Will they just sit in stunned silence when they don't have their phone on them, and they actually have to talk with people? It's a poser for sure.

As for having 300 "friends", well, it's been proven that you can't really "know" more than about 150 people in your social circle, and you'll only really spend time talking to about 8 of them on a day to day basis.  But it's almost a competition to some people.  What happens when you just don't talk to people any more?  In the old days, you'd just stop writing and calling, but now they're stuck there in Facebook limbo, mere noise on your news feed until you de-friend them (shock horror)!

So what do these tablets bring to the discussion.  Personally, I don't see it for consumers, a laptop will do the job just as well, and maybe better for half the price, maybe it's useful for TV presenters or doctors in a hospital to cut down on the paperwork, but for you and I, I have yet to see the benefit.  That's not to say I don't like them, I've seen the iPad and it's a truly impressive piece of kit, but I don't particularly see a need for it, unless you like playing Angry Birds on a 9 inch screen.

When you stop to think about how often you change your phone, or upgrade your computer, it does boggle the mind the amount of money and resources we expend just to get the latest thing, this just adds one more gadget to be upgraded (who wants an iPad 1 when the iPad 2 comes out in a month or so?).

So what comes next?  Wearable phones?  Computerised jumpers that have your Facebook feed on the front of them, with snazzy solar powered trousers to charge it up?  Personally, I hope it's a bubble that'll burst, and that today's teenagers will realise that actually going and seeing your friends and enjoying yourself down the pub or going out for dinner with them is more enjoyable and more social than any social network.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls....Roll Up! Roll Up!

Welcome to "The Banana Turtle"!

Firstly, the name, as my profile says is just a nice piece of chocolate I was given, and it seemed like a good idea at the time to use it.

And what's the point of the blog, well, I figured it was time to join the bandwagon and just see where this goes, who knows?   I'll try to keep it about interesting things I see or do, which may just force me to actually do interesting things, and maybe I'll just rant about stuff I don't approve of, or like, and generalise about stuff I have no right to meddle with.

I should imagine that given the fact I have an interest in technology, there may be a bit about that here.

I hope I find good things to write about, and in turn, I hope you find them interesting.