Future Homes.

When I can't sleep at night I normally just lie there and end up thinking about odd things. Last night I couldn't sleep and ended up thinking about all the voice-controlled objects that Marty McFly had in his 2015 house in Back To The Future Part Two. See, I told you I think about odd things.

I was mainly thinking about how annoying most of them would be. I have a function on my phone which allows me to give my mobile a verbal instruction and it will then carry that instruction out. Great in theory but in practice it doesn't work; if I tell my phone to 'call Kieron' it calls someone else. And I have to press a button to activate the voice control, so what's the point? I may as well just press a few more buttons and make sure I'm going to speak to the person that I want to speak to.

Admittedly Back To The Future Part Two is set six years from now and is - more importantly - fictional. But the technology in the house is not technology I would want. Who would want to watch eight TV channels at one time? I can't even listen to Radio 4 and read at the same time as the radio puts me off, so attempting to watch more than one TV program would be rubbish. And I don't want an insanely huge fruit bowl to come out of my kitchen ceiling when I say the word 'fruit'. Would it still make an appearance if you said fruit casually in conversation? There are some cool functions in that house though. 'Lights On' for when you want the lights to come on, for example. I was trying to think of something as cool as this one. All I could come up with was 'Flush'.

I have heard about people (and I'm talking about real, present-day people now) that can control their homes from a phone. One of my old managers could dial a number, press a few keys on his phone and his house would automatically close the curtains or put the oven on. Which is pretty slick but there's a lot that could go wrong. Get your codes mixed up and you could come home to find that you've turned the central heating up to full and the vacuum cleaner's going nuts or something. That makes me sound like a technophobe and I'm really not! But I like nice, simple technology. Something that does the job it's meant to do and does it well. That's why I'm a big fan of the iPod Classic. Simple, elegant and does exactly what you want it to with no fuss. That's my idea of progress.

There are three things in Back To The Future Part Two that I want. The first being the Hoverboard. Obviously. I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned this before but it hasn't stop being true. Second, the machine that makes the little pizza into a big pizza. You know what I mean, the pink Black & Decker thing. And the third is that dog collar that walks the dog without anyone having to be there. But, to be honest, I'd be happy with a voice activated toilet.