What to do when you have accidentally dyed your ten pound note blue? (still in jeans pocket when the jeans got dyed)

You can try to take it to your own bank and see if they'll swap it. They don't HAVE to. If that fails..

You can take it to this place, The Bank of England, yes, the place that issued the note in the first place. Threadneedle Street, London.

This place is not a retail bank. It doesn't have a sign on the door saying it's a bank at all, just a small sign on the steps saying that the Bank of England museum is around the corner, and a tube station that is called Bank nearby. Very few people have bank accounts here. It's only real account holders are other banks and financial institutions, and the UK Government. Like traditional banks, they like to keep odd hours, with the close of business being 3pm Monday to Friday on their banking services counter.

Approach the friendly security staff, explain what you need, get directed to a rather posh banking services room, with sofas, go to a counter. They have just two counters, and ask the staff nicely to handle it. They will give you a form, and will send the note off to their mutilated bank note division, which is actually in Leeds, and if all goes well, and they accept that it was a geniune note that wasn't recorded as stolen, they will eventually transfer £10 into your UK bank account.

Voila! I have exchanged an IOU from the Bank of England for another IOU from the Bank of England. You haven't been able to exchange bank notes for Sterling Silver or Gold Sovreigns for over a century.

Co-incidentally, there are two ATMs in the banking hall there. I thought I could do with a nice crisp tenner, and a commemorative receipt, so went to use it. It turns out that the machines are only available to Bank of England customers, with Bank of England cards. They must be the least used cash dispensers in the world. Fine if you happen to be Bob Diamond and want some cash for the weekend for a quick spontaneous yacht purchase. I wonder if it's stocked only with high value notes.  Not sure that Her Majesty the Queen would be able to use it, since she apparently does her banking at Coutts & Co, so her card wouldn't work there.

So, I found myself with some time to kill on Saturday at HMV in Oxford. I'm the kind of guy who likes to still buy music and have something to touch, and get greasy fingerprints on the media, I ended up buying the re-release of Big Country's "The Crossing". It came on a CD, in a jewel case, with a "Security protected" sticker covering the opening; presumably the discs are in the cases on the shelves, and this is to trigger the shoplifter alarm if someone tries to walk out without paying.

Now, when I had purchased the disc, and bought it home, I set about opening it. There's a silly sticker blocking my access to my disc.
That doesn't matter, you see, because your typical jewel case for a CD can easily be opened the other way.

and now I can take the disc, and listen to the music, and knowing full well that my packaging is still secure. Oh yes. I'm glad that HMV are concerned about the security of my disc in my packaging.

The unusual noise that Swarfega makes when the full plastic tub is hit

Spent a good half hour yesterday getting rid of a wasps nest that they had decided to build in my 'porch', half a can of insect repellent and a quarter of a tube of silicone-based frame sealant to plug the hole they'd made, and they've pretty much given up by the morning. There's still a few lone wasps that seem to remember that there was something interesting there.

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The EPG on my crusty Philips hard-disk video recorder lives on.

A few days before Christmas, it started flashing up a message about the
fact that the method of receiving the EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) that
it was using was being decommissioned. It used to pick up it's proprietary
EPG from ITV1 analog signal, where it was broadcast alongside teletext.

Clearly, ITV had been charging the owners of the Guideplus system for
carriage, and with the UK rapidly changing to digital telly, there was
a limited lifespan for this method of broadcast. On the 1st of January 2011,
the analog version of GuidePlus+ died in the UK for most users.

Philips designed the PVR 7260H with DVB-T as an afterthought, and despite their
claims before I bought it, they aren't going to be updating the firmware
to pull EPG over the DVB-T streams used by Digital Guide Plus+.

Guideplus always did simulcast on British Eurosport on satellite. I have
a Freesat Panasonic telly. British Eurosport is a subscription channel
that is normally only available with a sky subscription. Their teletext
stream, however is unencrypted. This means I could use it.

My solution involved a bit of recabling, and working out how to get
my telly to output a non-freeview channel overnight to a SCART connector
while it's on standy, and telling the PVR to look at it's SCART output for the
guideplus updates.

Still a bit bodgy, but it does work, and it does mean I don't have the
wasted expense of buying a new PVR, or landfilling an otherwise working
device.

I find myself trying to make sense of address data for the emergency services,
and thinking of the late, great Professor Stanley Unwin.

It's a matter of life and death.

So the homecare I have for my boiler that I pay good money to get at
least one annual service should have caused an engineer to turn up
today. Waited in all morning. Nothing. Called them up. Turns out that
someone at British Gas had just pencilled in the appointment, not
confirmed it.

Miles per imperial gallon. That is 3.82 litres per 100km. Not bad as a trip average in a family car. (yes. I was driving carefully)

Well, not quite as the Amish have barn-raising parties, but I'm at my parents putting some finishing touches to my parents new shed, the construction was all done earlier in the week. Gable end bargeboards have now been fitted on their Finnish timber cabin at the bottom of the garden. Maybe it's time for a topping out party, or help them mend the fence.

It is rather posh for a shed, with double glazing and all, so you could call it a summer house, a project room, a writer's recluse (George Bernard Shaw did his best writing in a shed at the bottom of the garden.