My wife does the shopping for our kids’ birthdays. I am only vaguely aware of what they want, and whether they’ll be delighted or disappointed on the morning of the Big Day.

My son is approaching his 16^th birthday, and I have learnt a great deal about the way people will consume news, information and entertainment in the future from his behaviour over the past few years.

My mind has been boggled by the technology he and his friends have mastered, and which they use to communicate with each other, entertain themselves and even (occasionally) use to improve their school work.

The Xbox 360, the netbook, the on demand television, the iTouch and the mobile phone are all standard issue to my son and his friends. They no longer congregate on street corners to ‘hang out’ (is that an eighties term?), but now meet in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Halo, chat on MSN, and open windows to each other’s lives on Facebook.

I have already become the dinosaur whose poor grasp of current technology is laughed at, just as I laughed at my parents’ inability to master a video recorder.

None of this will be news to a parent of teenagers. They’re all at it.

But one thing has shocked me in the past few days. I was helping my wife wrap birthday presents and discovered we have bought him a portable hard drive, on which will store all his downloaded music, videos and games.

The drive cost $150 - quite a sum for storage in this day and age. But the capacity is a whopping, gargantuan, elephantine…

…One Terabyte!

The only time I ever wrote about Terabytes was in articles about Cray Supercomputers - the type of stuff that could work out the spread of radioactive material from a nuclear explosion, or the destructive force of a hurricane.

Now, my son is about to have that much storage in his backpack.

He will be carrying his own television station filled with all his favourite shows. He will have more music than Virgin Megastore can cram into it hugely expensive mall outlets. He will have computer games that will occupy him for 50 percent of his leisure time.

He will have more media crammed into a box the size of a hardback book than the BBC had in every film can in its archives from World War II until the advent of digital video.

The mass storage he will have at his fingertips is a massively disruptive technological leap forward. He is no longer a consumer of the information and entertainment that traditional broadcasters and publishers want him to consume. His choices are entirely his own, with every desire catered for somewhere on the Internet.

A 16^th birthday is a landmark in any young man’s life, but this particular birthday may have as profound an effect on me as it has on him.

At what point do you earn the right to link yourself with a particular profession or job title? I have been considering this quandary because, as you may have noticed, I have been doing a bit of writing of late, but not once, when someone has asked what I do, have I told them that I am a writer.

Perhaps it’s a time thing, and I just haven’t been doing it for long enough. But then I have been driving a car for 15 years and cooking for even longer than that and yet I don’t think of myself as ‘a driver’, and, as scores of people will testify, I’m certainly no chef.

Maybe you have to be seen to be good at what you do before you are honoured with a title. No, estate agents the world over disprove that theory.

Being paid for what you do is, no doubt, a key element to how people perceive themselves but that is not a hard and fast rule either. Take philosophers for example, they don’t necessarily get paid. They just sit there, thinking. But how much thinking do you have to do before you can legitimately call yourself a bona fide philosopher I wonder?

When I was a little boy I wanted to grow up to become either a tycoon or an explorer, but it seems that they are tough worlds to crack. I still don’t know what being a tycoon really entails, apart from being rich, tanned and being able to wear floppy linen shirts. ‘Explorer’ is even more vague – just go and get lost, seems to be the remit.

As with writing I figured that the best way to become an explorer was just to have a go one day. So, to test my trainee exploring skills I decided to start small and local – with a visit to the monorail on The Palm Jumeirah. What do you mean that’s not proper exploring – have you been on it? No. Exactly.

The Palm, for the uninitiated, is a man-made, palm-shaped island, the self-proclaimed eighth wonder of the world, and is both absolutely amazing and yet completely bonkers at the same time. A few weeks ago a monorail service opened up which takes paying guests the length of The Palm but which few people have yet tried out. I think I know why.

And it’s not the price. At AED 25 it is expensive but not prohibitively so, at least for a one off exploratory trip. It’s finding the damn thing that’s the problem. I knew that the main monorail station was housed inside a huge great car park. I could see it, but boy was it tricky to get to. There were no signposts. I now know how Edmund Hilary must have felt as he traipsed up that hill.

I read a report stating that 600 people a day are using the monorail. I doubt that – it’s harder to find than the Holy Grail which means that you need the tenacity of Indiana Jones to stand any chance at all.

But find it I did. And it was well worth it but not because it was an efficient mode of transport that took me from A to B. I had struggled to find A and I didn’t want to get to B. But that’s not the point. I wanted to have an opinion so that when people speak to me about the monorail I can speak from experience. And now I can, and, for what it’s worth, this is my opinion:

We can grumble – as we will – about the signage, the price, the unopened stations and the need to connect to a wider Metro network in order to become a useful daily transport link for residents. So it is not perfect, but we need to have a little faith that these issues will be addressed over time.

It’s still early days but it is clearly a modern and slick form of public transport that provides unique overhead views of The Palm Jumeirah and, best of all, it makes you feel like Neil Armstrong, stepping foot where no man has been before.

It’s new territory. Go. Explore.

GCC nationals and expatriates become acutely aware of international roaming charges at this time of year as most companies reject enormous expense claims that include holiday phone calls.

This makes it all the more important to do some research into roaming charges, and to ensure that you connect to the best priced networks in the countries you are visiting.

For example, did you know that Etisalat customers with a contract will pay roughly twice as much for making a phone call in the UK if they connect to O2, Orange or Vodafone networks rather than T-Mobile?

Etisalat’s web site lists the cost of making a call back to the UAE as:

O2: AED8.04 per minute
Orange: AED9.49 per minute
T-Mobile: AED4.43 per minute
Vodafone: AED8.08 per minute

Irritatingly, while T-Mobile is cheapest for making calls back to the UAE, Orange is far cheaper when making calls to other UK numbers.

The price of receiving a call (AED3.09 per minute) is exactly the same across all UK networks.

Count yourself lucky if you are not a Batelco customer. Batelco has entirely different roaming charges, and the cheapest options are different for peak-time and off-peak calls. Looking again at roaming in the UK, Vodafone offers the cheapest off-peak price for calls to UK numbers of BD0.082 per minute, compared to BD0.284 per minute on Orange for peak and off-peak calls - more than treble the price!

Peak price tariffs are different. Connect to the O2 network and you will pay BD0.355 per minute, 40 percent more than the tariff of BD0.204 with Vodafone.

And if you are calling Bahrain, it is different again. This time T-Mobile is comfortably cheapest with an all-day rate of BD0.39 per minute, compared to Orange’s eye-watering peak time rate of BD1.17 per minute.

UK coverage for all major mobile networks is in the high 90 percent range, so in most parts of the country you are well advised to manually select a network rather than allow your phone to automatically find one.

The examples here give only a narrow window into the complexities of international roaming, but I urge you to do your own research before travelling this summer. Five minutes of web research could save you colossal sums on your phone bills come September.

Let me know if you have any other tips for saving money on mobile roaming.

Transparency looks set to be the only winner in the fallout from the Algosaibi and Saad groups.

Exactly what has happened at the Saudi firms at the centre of a corporate scandal rocking Saudi Arabia is still not clear.

What is clear, however, is that it has changed how family owned companies in the region will be able to do business.

The practice of “name lending” has been widespread in the Gulf, where companies have been able to borrow money based solely on their name recognition and reputation.

But as the dispute between Algosaibi and billionaire Maan Al-Sanea moves into a New York court room and banks brace themselves for losses amid debt restructuring at the two companies, privately held firms are going to have to become more open or face having their financing cut off.

Friday’s move by Algosaibi to pursue its claims against Al-Sanea through the courts marks a departure from the private culture of the region’s family owned companies.

So private are they that many Gulf firms do not even have a public relations department for media professionals or other people seeking information about them. (A well known retailer recently fired its entire media relations team – tellingly, without informing the media about it.)

That privacy has extended to the debt markets, where the same companies have been unwilling to communicate key financial information to banks, credit rating agencies and other financial institutions.

Banks across the region are now feeling the effects of that secrecy, as names that were previously thought unsinkable default on bank loans and bonds.

The UAE central bank has said the country’s lenders have “significant” exposure to the Saudi companies, and has asked all banks operating in the country to inform it of the size of any loans extended to them.

Omani banks are the only ones in the GCC to have publicly announced their exposure to the beleaguered conglomerates.

Other banks would do well to follow their example and provide the market with some of that transparency their borrowers seem to lack.

Like many others I have been a keen amateur sportsman down the years. I have shed blood, sweat and tears on the football field, suffered sunburn playing cricket, broken bones on the rugby pitch, thrashed around on tennis courts the world over, and been brutally demoralised on virtually every golf course on which I have ever stepped foot.

What I attempt to do and what the professionals do, whatever the sport, are poles apart.

Professional golfers, for example, fully expect to complete a round of golf in fewer than 70 shots – that is to say that they expect to ‘break 70’; I masqueraded as a golfer last weekend but the only thing that I broke was my putter. On purpose. In fact if anyone was watching me play – which I sincerely doubt – they would be forgiven for thinking that I was actually a fisherman rather than a golfer, such was the regularity with which I had to scoop stray balls out of lakes.

Professional snooker players regularly accumulate breaks of over 100; the top players occasionally record maximum 147’s. I first picked up a cue in 1983 and my highest break to date is 22.

The difference between the keen amateur and the professional is vast. But equally cavernous is the gap between the average pro and the elite.

Roger Federer is a prime example, and he has just provided us with a timely reminder at this year’s Wimbledon. Sunday’s final was close but in the end it seemed as though he was brandishing a birch twig rather than a racket, as he administered death by a thousand lashes to the husband of the swimwear model, in the match that never ended.

Federer often wears a sweatband around his head when he is playing – I get the distinct feeling that if I were to step on to a court and play against him that he could wear it as a blindfold and he would still win.

He is not just a champion; he is part of sport’s elite; he is a Grand Master not simply competing with the opponents of today, but with the history books; battling against the achievements of all who have gone before. The other most notable Grand Master currently active today is Tiger Woods, who is another on his way to becoming the most decorated player of all time in his chosen sport.

Tiger would almost certainly not recognize what I do as being the same game that he has come as close as anyone to perfecting; instead thinking that I am some sort of nutter that enjoys hacking his way through shrubbery and gorse bushes of a weekend. “That’s not golf,” Tiger would think to himself. “That doesn’t look fun.” And he’d be right.

There are others too. Schumacher in Formula 1; Hendry following in Davies’ considerable footsteps in snooker; Phelps made waves in the pool; even team sports have the ability to throw up the occasional star that shines brighter than all others such as Maradona in football; Jordan in basketball and Lara and Warne in cricket.

The thing is, even the most recreational of amateurs can play a brilliant shot now and again. A crushing forehand. A crisp cover drive. A sweet five iron. You play that one shot that befits the professional arena; you hang on to it’s memory and think, ‘I’ve done it once, I can do it again, all I need to work on now is my consistency’.

But then you see one of the Grand Masters at work and you realize that they do not use a racket, a bat, a cue, or a club as we mere mortals use. The sporting Gods have issued them with a magic wand, and all that we have in common is the name of the game that we are playing.

Most of us play sport because we enjoy it. Some of us play to win. But there are others – the chosen few – to which, as Federer’s post-match press conference T-shirt declared, ‘There is no finish line’. Indeed. There is no easy path to the summit. For those seeking a new summit there is no path at all.