On Monday the local branch of my bank called regarding my account. They queried a direct debit due to go out of my account on Tuesday, my first thought was that there’s something wrong with the direct debit. They asked if the payment was for a credit card, which it was. Pretty obvious really as the name on the direct debit is of a very well known credit card company. I was then told that due to the bank account I have I’m guaranteed a credit card and at the moment they are offering a 12 months interest free period on balance transfers. I then asked a few questions about the card such as what the fee was on a balance transfer etc. The woman on the phone was unable to answer any of my questions. She only knew that a. I was entitled to a credit card and b. it has a 12 months interest free period on balance transfers! After being put on hold for a while I finally got some answers. I quickly ended the call at this point as I didn’t see much point in it.

A while after the call it occurred to me they must have looked through my account to see what direct debits I have so they knew what services to cross-sell, in this instance it was a credit card. To be honest I’m bit annoyed about this, I feel like my privacy has been invaded. I’m aware that the staff in my local branch have full access to my bank account, they need to, to be able to provide me with customer service. However I don’t expect this access to be used to find out what services they may have a better chance in cross-selling to me! Are they allowed to do this? As it seems to me to be an unfair advantage?

Having said that I doubt the bank is going to get very far if their staff don’t know anything about the services they are trying to cross-sell!

All of this is on top of the constant badgering I get whenever I go into my local branch about home insurance, financial reviews etc. It’s got so far that I actually dislike going into my branch now! I think it’s time to start looking for an Internet only bank!

There are rumours that Wigan & Sunderland are interested in buying Andy Johnson from Everton for about £10 million. If we could get around £12 million for him then I’d be very tempted to sell him. He had a great first year with us but last year was interrupted by injuries however we didn’t really miss him with the Yak, Jimmy & Vic all playing well. I also like Timmy playing up front so I don’t think we’d miss him and £12 million seems like a good deal for a player we paid for £8.6 million for 2 years ago.

While Moyes has said he’s not interested in selling I have a feeling he won’t be with Everton by the time the season starts.

I’ve finally uploaded the photos from my trip to New York City back in 2005 after being reminded by Rhys‘ recent trip to New York. In summary I had a fantastic time and can’t believe nearly 3 years have passed already. I can’t wait to go back! If you get the chance, go, you won’t regret it!

A few of my favourite photos are included below…

A couple of weeks ago we had some friends come and stay and after going out for a meal and having a few drinks we ended up at home with a desire to play Trivial Pursuit. Unfortunately we don’t have the original board game version, however, I remembered that I have the Star Wars Saga DVD Edition that was given to me as a Xmas present a while ago. We played it until the early hours and consumed even more alcohol, although by the end only the men had any real interest in playing the women were more interested in talking!

Playing the game and seeing various clips of the fims reminded me that, as a big fan of the films, I don’t own them on DVD yet. So last week I put this right and ordered Star Wars: Episode IV, Episode V & Episode VI on DVD. I was quite surprised there was so many versions available of the first trilogy (in terms of release) of films yet only one version of the second trilogy of films. I went for the so called “Limited Edition” which includes the original theatrical version as well as the updated version. Hopefully I’ll receive Episode I, Episode II & Episode III for my birthday next month, I think I’ve dropped enough hints!

I would have thought by now there would a box set of all 6 films as that’s what I would have preferred to buy rather than the indiviual films. Come on Lucasfilm your missing a trick here!

Dear Vodafone, unless you can offer me the iPhone 3G in the next 3 months I shall be leaving you after 6 years and joining O2.

The 3G version of the iPhone has been announced by Apple and should be available sometime in July here in the UK. I’m assuming it’ll only be available via O2 again. It’s been released quicker than I thought, while the rumour sites had been predicting it would be I wasn’t so sure.

I upgraded to the Nokia N95 last September in the hope the 3G version of the iPhone would appear sometime this year. I managed to get a 12 month contract out of Vodafone (along with the free upgrade) just in case it was released. I was very tempted to get one last year but couldn’t justify the handset cost along with the 18 month contract required, I was also a little disappointed that it wasn’t 3G.

I’ve got to decide whether I go for the 8GB or 16GB version now. Decisions, decisions!

I’ll be retiring my trusty PowerBook G4 very soon and until I decide on what my next laptop will be I’ll be moving all my data onto my Windows XP desktop PC for the time being. I’ve been using iPhoto to manage all my photos so I’m now looking for a Windows based alternative. The first one I thought of was Google Picasa so I’ll try that out. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

I’ve been tweaking my theme recently to make it more search engine friendly and it seems to have worked as I’m getting a few hits direct to posts from Google searches. In case anyone is wondering I’ve just made sure the HTML meta tags always have values (using the post excerpt & tags) and that the post title comes first in the page title if applicable. I know there are some plugins I could have used to do the same job however I learnt quite a bit about Wordpress themes in achieving my goal. I’m more familiar with Wordpress and themes now than I was before anyway.

Does anyone have any other SEO tips they can suggest?

I’ve just seen this article about Vodafone’s ad over at The Register. I remember seeing the ad in question a while ago while the limit was still 120MB. I couldn’t believe it myself, they were trying to sell a data allowance of 120MB as allowing you to browse any website, any time!

Talk about hyping a service up!