Fivers From an ATM?

I remember about ten years ago when you could get £20, £10, and £5 notes from an ATM. All banks eventually changed to allowing only £10 & £20 notes to be withdrawn.

Today, I went into a Barclays bank and took out £10. Imagine my surprise when I was presented with two £5 notes. It confused me so much I actually stopped for a couple of seconds to work it out!

Weird.

A Possible Fix if Your Homepage Keeps Resetting

I was recently presented with a problem by my in-laws. Their browser's homepage kept on resetting to MSN every time they restarted. Although a reasonable homepage to have, they prefer to just have the google.co.uk front page.
The specific page that the browser would reset to was - http://uk.msn.com/?ocid=iehp. I thought the same as you, just go into options -> properties and reset the homepage. Nope. Every time the browser restarted, back to good 'ole MSN.
So what is the solution? Well, after much googling for various things, I found an obscure reference to my dilemma on a forum (can't remember which, sorry). It turns out that some spyware and antivirus programs (in this case Norton) have 'homepage protection'. This setting locks anything from hijacking your browser homepage for their own nefarious purposes. It also means that once a homepage is set, it will continue to default back to that upon a browser reload.
So there you have it. Turn off your homepage protection, and return it to the correct homepage. I don't know what happens if you switch the homepage protection back on and I don't intend to find out.

Twitter Twit

A couple of my friends recently did a shout out asking if anyone was on Twitter. I knew a bit about Twitter, but had never really looked into it. A couple of days ago I thought I would have a look. I’m now twittering with everyone else!

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a sort of mass text messaging social network. You ‘follow’ someone’s updates and they and/or others follow you. It’s one of these silly-but-fun web 2.0 things.

I think the most fun thing about Twitter is that some of the geekier celebrities Twitter. So you can follow them and what they are doing. As I said silly-but-fun. Amongst some of the more frequent twitter-ers is Stephen Fry (http://twitter.com/stephenfry). He twitters three or four times per day. It’s kind of fun to know what he’s up to and comment about it.

So, go on, give it a go. I won’t say who else is on there for following, you can find out easily enough, and that is part of the fun, I think.

Back Into the Saddle

Ok. Four months without any updates to any of my blogs is a bit pants. Last year I wanted to average one blog update per week…on all of my blogs. If you do a quick tour around, you will see that this didn’t happen. In fact, I barely made it past averaging one blog update per week on all my blogs put together.

So this year, I want to try for the full 52 on this blog. It’s going to be tough, especially since we’re nearly two months in already, but hopefully I will be able to do it.

You will have seen me say this before, but watch this space!