Where lovers’ tiffs are concerned, this was a pretty big one.

Anyone who subscribes to Virgin (formerly NTL) will know that that since early last year, they have had no access to several of Sky’s core channels, including Sky One and Sky News.

The pair locked horns on the matter when they failed to reach an agreement over some of Sky’s most popular channels. Toys were thrown out of respective prams, with both refusing to budge, leaving avid fans of hit shows such as Lost – well, literally lost mid-series.

But yesterday the rivals buried the hatchet and agreed fixed fees to carry each other’s channels.

From next Thursday, full service will resume in both camps. Virgin customers will have access to all of Sky’s basic channels, while Sky customers can rest assured that Virgin’s basic channels, including Living and Bravo, are theirs to tune into until 2011...I’m sure everyone is breathing a sigh of relief that those repeats of Jerry Springer aren’t going anywhere...

Personally, this can only be a good thing for Joe consumer.

I liked the thought of getting a bundled package with Virgin, but was put-off by the fact that several of its vital channels wouldn’t be part of my viewing package. This will make me think again.

May Sky and Virgin live happily ever after eh?

There’s a war going on in our office.

As the financial meltdown continues around us, we at The Fool have been getting our priorities straight.

So, this morning as I sat down at my desk, I opened an email sent to the whole office.

The subject?

The state of our kitchen.

You see, our resident kitchen goddess has gone on holiday for a couple of weeks, leaving the rest of us to fill her shoes while she's away. Now, you’d have thought it would be a relatively simple task. But there's a bit of history to this debate.

Over the past year that I’ve worked here, I’ve seen emails cursing the person who left their unfinished meal in the sink, damning those who left their mugs laden around the dishwasher and condemning those who dare to leave wet rings on the table where their mugs have sat.

There’s also one particular crockery vigilante that sits in our office. I’m not going to name any names, but this morning he threatened to, and I quote, ‘curse you [sic] PC’ if you didn’t leave the kitchen spick and span on his 'day' of kitchen duties.

To be fair, he has a point. There are some serial offenders here. Take, for example the person who leaves a spoon on the water dispenser every, single, morning.

Or the person who continually throws their spoon into the sink. I’ve been reliably been informed who you are. Then again, it must be due to the early onset of arthritis preventing them from bending down to the dishwasher.

Vigilante, have a heart.

Kinda reminds me of when I was at uni and the word ‘hygiene’ didn’t exist. I didn’t dare use anything in my kitchen halls. The kettle alone had things growing inside it that scientists would only find on Mars.

At least here it's clean. And as much as I may jest about the email, the injection of fear has meant I could almost see my refection in the tabletop today.

Who says threats don’t work eh?

Have you ever Googled yourself?

I must confess, I have. A few times actually. I’m not sure why, but every now and then I type my name into the engine to see what comes up.

In my case, The Fool appears, along with some articles I wrote while on work experience. And, if you scroll down a bit you’ll see ‘my’ Facebook entry, where I reveal my true identity as a balding Chinese man.

If you don’t believe me, look for yourself.

That is what I look like in the morning.

However, it’s one thing to fall into the trap of narcissism as I clearly have, but quite another to have it done for you.

Let me recount a tale my friend told me that had me in tears of laughter, and one I feel we should all take note of.

So my mate was on a date with a guy she’d met on a night out. Was she keen? Of course. Was he? Well, I’d better tell the story.

So there they were tucking into their l’escargot, or in their case, a Nando’s half chicken. The conversation was polite, as it often is on first dates. Light, and not too probing.

Then, half way through the date, he says:

‘Soooooo, what’s it like working at XX? Must be much better than when you were at XX…’

What?

‘Er, yeah. I saw on your Facebook profile that you worked at XX’

‘But I haven’t even added you yet’

‘Yeah but I found you’

‘So you found me, didn’t add me, and have been reading up about me???’

CUE IMAGES OF PSYCHO SHOWER SCENE

Needless to say, they didn’t kiss that night.

OK, everybody stalks people on Facebook. But it’s one thing to do it, and quite another to tell people like Mr. Airhead did.

I was reading a press release the other day saying just how much information people can get about you on social networking sites…and it's not just fraudsters.

In fact, as the press release said, even prospective employers play the Googling game.

It gave me great comfort to be told by Ed that I was Googled before being offered the job here.

Thankfully, my slate was clean. But if you leave your Facebook profile open for others to see, the question you need to ask yourself is would you mind your future boss seeing that photo of you in halls dressed as a drag queen? Or would you want a potential partner to know that you have an extreme passion for stamp collectiing?

If you prefer to get to know them before revealing details such as this, perhaps you may want to consider keeping your Facebook profile private.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Google there's not much you can do about the things that come up. Apart from behave, of course.

But keep it private! That way you can avoid any more of those Norman Bates moments...

I am a cheat.

It’s been three weeks since the start of my experiment, and I was planning to write a blog last week to let you know how I was getting on.

But as we all know, time and tide waits for no man, and it certainly wasn’t gonna wait for lil old me to complete a blog. So apologies to the one person who actually reads this, I will give you an update now...

I don’t know about you, but I am no TMFMotorRacer, and from his comments on my last blog, there’s no way I could live on £10 a week. (unless I ate grass perhaps, but even then it would still cost me a bus ride to get to the park and get munching).

In truth, MotorRacer, I salute you. If there's one thing I've learnt it's that I am simply too darn lazy to prepare my lunch the night before. Yes, I realise I have nobody to blame except myself. If nothing else, this experiment has made me realise just how much I spend on that staple of life…food, and also how reliant I am on that plastic fantastic.

So, this brings me to my opening declarative, and how I cheated.

Well, I was standing in line (late) (as usual) to meet my friend in town and needed to top up my Oyster. The queue for the main machine had ten people standing in it and the queue for the main service desk was even longer. So, there I was thinking I'd never move, when one of the 'card only' machines on the side became free.

Do I stand here until thy kingdom come, or do I reach for that plastic. Just. This. Once???

In the end, I succumbed to the latter, and topped up £5 using my debit card. The thing is, shops and businesses make it so easy for you to hand your card over these days. Some even let you 'tap and go', so you can take away your goods without even batting an eyelid. No wonder it's so easy to lose track of how much you spend.

However, since then, I have managed to stick to my £75 budget, even though by Friday I'm looking in the bargain bins for any scrap or morsel they'll flog me at a knock-down price. I think the main point is you can't spend money you don't have, and you do learn to survive on the budget you have.

Finally, I’m actually surprised that not one of you eagle eyed punters have highlighted that I can’t actually add up.

In my first blog I set myself a budget of £75 a week...or £350 a month. With approximately four weeks in a month (4 x 75 = 300, not 350). Duh.

Well, I have decided that this £50 miscellaneous fund is going to be renamed my 'contingency fund', to be dipped into for emergencies only. Life or death situations. Do or die scenarios....

Like, for example a couple of weeks ago when I absolutely needed to fork out £15 for my

I AM THE STIG

T-shirt at the British Motorshow.

Priceless.

Enjoy the weekend!

Before these Fool blogs were launched, us writers were told that our blogs should contain ‘around 30% of financial stuff’.

To be honest, I’ve found it hard to think of something financial to write without sending people (yes, you) to sleep. So in an effort to introduce you into my weird and wonderful world, I thought I’d repay my blogging debts to society by setting myself a challenge:

As I said in my maiden blog, I love cashback credit cards. I pay for almost everything using mine. And though I get funny looks when I try to pay for a pint of milk at Tesco with it – the way I see it, it makes all sense.

However, the bad thing about these cards is that you can quickly run up hundreds of pounds without even realising.

Last month I spent nearly £500 on ‘stuff’.

When I say ‘stuff’ I’m not talking about 'woah these are timeless classics and essential purchases' stuff, I’m talking, 'look back in my wardrobe in a couple of years and say what the hell were you thinking dude?’ stuff.

The truth is, it’s so easy to spend money online and in the shops these days. For example, with one click of a button I can buy things on both Amazon and iTunes without giving it a second thought. Storing credit card details on websites is evil, and I have become a perpetual victim of buying things…well, just because it's easy to really.

So, in an exclusive event, for one month only, I will be ditching my plastic in favour of that good old staple…cash.

I've spent a long time thinking about the sort of budget I would need to get me through the month. Perhaps I should try to be as stingy as possible? £20 a week? £30?

Then I thought...hold on a minute, I am trying to save money, not join a Franciscan brotherhood.

So, I have set myself a sensible (and perhaps generous to some of you) budget of £75 a week, which hopefully should allow me some decent food, maybe a couple of luxuries and the chance to enjoy myself too (but not travel expenses -- with London’s Travelcard prices, I may as well reinvent myself as Jesus and live on bread and water for a month).

At a total of £350 a month, it should help me cut down on spending and start a trend which I can hopefully stick to in the future.

I shall try to save money by bringing meals to work (which I never seem to find the time to do), going out less (which I’m even worse at) and drinking less (one word – ha!).

But all in all I’m pretty optimistic.

So here I sit, with £75 in my wallet. I'll let you know how I get on.

Wish me luck!

I feel like flushing my iPod down the toilet.

Almost everyone I know with an iTouch has been raving about the 2.0 software update. So, eager to jump on the bandwagon, last night I decided to download it too.

I’ve heard from several sources that you can, ahem, download it, for, er, free, but as a law abiding citizen I decided to do it the legal way. After all, admitting my misdemeanors on a blog would be like shooting myself in the foot, and if I did that and you saw no more articles bylined by me, you’d know why…

So there I was sitting on my bed downloading the update. All was going well. Then, as I approached the final hurdle I got this message:

ERROR. YOUR IPOD CANNOT BE UPDATED. ERROR 885490683684-58568968-8906 (well, the number wasn’t that long, but it may as well have been)

At 9.05pm it wasn’t working.

At 11.23pm it still wasn’t working.

After attempt fifty-nine I was ready to throw it against the wall.

I then spent the next hour trawling several forums to try and fix it. I disabled my firewall, reset the iTouch, reset my computer, brought my cauldron out, chucked my iPod in it and did a dance -- basically anything and everything that could possibly help.

It still wasn’t working.

Now I might have to toddle down to the ‘genius bar’ to try to get it fixed. I'm tellin ya, Einstein better be waiting for me behind the counter at the Apple store or I think I'm going to cry. As you can probably tell, my iPod is like a member of my extended family.

Yes. I am that sad.

So now, I have no music, no photos and a very empty iPod in my hands.

Apple is the brand I hate to love. Maybe I should just walk around with the word ‘sucker’ branded on my forehead.

HELP!!

I don’t know what I’m doing here.

No really, I don’t.

Yes the hype has been around for years, but if I’m being honest blogs are a new concept to me. During yesterday’s ‘blogging meeting’, while everyone else seemed to know what they were talking about, I spent most of it trying to feign that I understood what was going on.

That ‘A’ in drama sure came in handy.

So, as a blog virgin, I will try to take you through some of the weird and wonderful things I come across in daily life. I’m not promising you the stuff of J.K.Rowling, nor of Katie Price for that matter. But as this is my maiden blog voyage, I thought I’d tell you a bit about me…

I love gadgets, and spend blindly on them. I was the only person in university halls with a 21 inch television and PS2 in my room. Try carrying that up four flights of stairs.

I also like watching tennis and football.

I used to support Newcastle back in the days when Kevin Keegan was manager (first time round) and before David Ginola defected to L’Oreal. These days, even though Keegan is back, I prefer to stay neutral.

When it comes to financial products, I am a big fan of cashback credit cards. I am also a big fan of spending. The two don’t normally go well together, but I make sure I pay my balances off every month. Honest!

So, enjoy! This blog is a learning process for all of us…

TMFSuzy