Decided to change the design of BradMcAllister.com what do you think?

Changed the sponsor banners to a nicer set of Brands, if you find this blog brightens your day why not check out my sponsors.

Now I just need to think up a better set of category names, current ones need revising, I have some spare time coming up so that might just get done!

Quite a busy day today, our 5th wedding anniversary so we went to Harrods for a nice luxury buffet lunch with a bit of wine. Like lots of Londoners if we go to central London it has to be on a Sunday so we can park there, but today is a special day.

We drove to Knightsbridge and looked for a car park near the store, after following one sign to a car park that ended up nowhere we found another and up one little side street found ourselves at Harrods own customer car park. One nod from the bloke as I was driving in and I carried on down the ramp until he told me to stop – confused I asked why and he told me they only do valet parking, so we spent 6 mins getting Theo and the pushchair out of the car in the middle of the entrance and handed over our wheels.

Off we walked to the Georgian restaurant at the top of Harrods where we have been before and know is a pleasant place to spend an afternoon. Two hours hearty eating later we were utterly stuffed with top quality roast beef, prawns & crayfish and more fancy deserts than I care to remember, and went to pay the bill – after 15 mins the waiter told me he was on the phone with the bank over some complication, I was getting very annoyed with how long this was taking and told him to cancel that one and I use another card.

Eventually I found myself talking to the Barclay’s on the phone at the till, my quality afternoon taking a turn for the annoying. They told me that I had spoken to them recently and they asked me to go to a branch with some ID to re-activate the account – I told them I knew nothing about this…

Last month I got two letters from Orange (the mobile phone company) congratulating me on signing up to a new expensive phone contract I knew nothing about which caused me to close an account I had opened for 25 years but decided not to use for the past couple as Natwest customer services are so shite.

It turns out already again I am the victim of the fraudsters, and someone  at 8 in the morning two days ago tried to change the address on one of my credit card accounts, again on an account I hardly ever use since my beautiful Morgan Stanley Platinum card turned into a Barclaycard when they bought them out… I just don’t like Barclays for some reason.

After 3 phone calls getting more and more angry trying to find out what the fuck was going on I got the someone trying to change the address story and a new card was on it’s way, so that’s sorted. Really amazed how much fraud is going around though, for this one it must have been some small ecommerce website being hacked or something – bit off-putting really.. I buy stuff online alot!.

I got the Harrods restaurant to call the carpark to make sure we were not charged for the extra time taken to sort this all out which they did with bullet like accuracy, the professionalism of Harrods employees is really impressive. It’s good policy in computing to require people to change their passwords frequently, it looks like the same may be the case for your bank cards – cancel them and get new ones every few months as fraud is getting out of hand.

Me and Natasa have been married for 5 happy years, accomplished so much and this year with the arrival of Theo we have an exciting future turning him from a bouncing happy baby into an awesome man.

Today Theo got a new toy, and he just can’t get enough of it!.

Or things like this happen to them :)

I got my first computer when I was around 10, or earlier… can’t remember exactly – I had two Commodore VIC 20 computers, and two Commodore C64′s, around that time in the mid-80s there was a weekly magazine that came out and had 5 bigass binders that held all 52 editions together. I couldn’t remember the name of it and it’s so obvious… just found it now on wikipedia here. You got little computer programs that took ages to put in to those first generation home PCs and inevitably you would make loads of typos that would take so long to debug you would just give up.

But sometimes they worked, and I guess that has a lot to do with why computers have been such a massive part of my life.

I had a massive purge of facebook friends to strictly people I know, and changed the RSS feeds import to just posts from this blog rather than my network of sites, I’ll keep stuff like Bingo for by bingo facebook alter-ego marketing login etc which makes far more sense all round.

Only a couple of days left until we are all off to Turkey – and me and Natasa got the sneezes… had the doctor check us out this morning and we are not growing pig snouts… just a bit of a cold which will hopefully disappear before we fly out.