I keep seeing adverts on TV for Wink Bingo, and in particular for their latest promotion of £15 free without needing to deposit.

As I love a gamble and anything that's free I had to give it a try. It was easy to sign up and the free £15 was in my account straight away and available to play.

So I played. I was only in the 5p room so it cost me 60p each time for 12 cards. Everything is automated and the numbers are marked for you. It all moves along smoothly and quickly and, if your numbers are coming up, enjoyably.

So far I've played 5 times (total of £3) and I came really close to the full house jackpot on my second go, having only one number needed (87 - my new bogey number!) for what seemed like an age.

After your initial free play amount is spent they offer to add 200% to your first deposit so you can play really cheaply initially, by which time hopefully you will have won a prize.

It is pretty addictive though, I feel like going back and trying again as I write this, so always remember the golden rule of gambling - never bet with money you cannot afford to lose.

My remaining £12 is calling me so I'm back off to Wink Bingo now. See you later.

PS. I remember now this is not my first brush with bingo. My sister arranged a bingo night for my 31st birthday at the local bingo club. The whole family went.

Being newbies we weren't quite sure of the etiquette (or even that there was etiquette in bingo!) and as the night wore on we made a couple of faux pas.

I started to use a fruit machine in the middle of a game, the sound of which caused all of the regulars to stare at and sshhhhh me. And my sister got very, very drunk and very, very loud too. We were near enough thrown out.

Only silver lining was that my Dad won a full house (not sure the regulars liked that either!) which covered the cost of the night so we all went home pretty happy.

I've not been back to bingo since so perhaps playing bingo online is a safer option.

Received an email yesterday evening from Visit Liverpool advising me of another prize win. Tickets to Underwater Street and a 1 night stay at the Holiday Inn. I've added this to my list of 2009 competition wins.

This comes almost exactly two years after my last win with Visit Liverpool in September 2007 (see competition wins 2007). That time we had a 2 night stay in a boutique hotel.

We really enjoyed our last trip to Liverpool and it will be nice to get back there and see if anything has changed. We have baby with us this time so it will be his first trip there.

Can't decide whether this should be on my 40th birthday or it could be for our wedding anniversary. Either way it is likely to be in December so hope weather is not too cold as we really enjoy walking around the city.

2009 has picked up just as I expected. As I've been able to enter more competitions more wins have started to flow. And with every win comes an extra spur to enter some more.

Good luck with your comping but don't win any prizes I want!

We have launched our first competition on Improve Your Future. You can find it by visiting our competitions page.

The prizes are three sets of DVDs. You can choose which one you want or try to win all three.

• Vacancy and Captivity - two thrillers (horror?) so over 18s only for entry to this prize.
• A farewell to arms and The snows of Kilimanjiro - two classics based on Ernest Hemingway novels
• Shaft and Deep blue sea (pictured) - two films starring Samuel L Jackson.

Closing date is 14th October 2009.

We will be adding regular new competitions so keep checking back. Hopefully the prizes will get better as the site expands!

If you are a business looking to promote your products and would like to sponsor a competition please contact us by email (link is on our home page). We will be happy to give you some space to get your message across in return for some great prizes for our visitors.

As I'm the first one to start shouting when I receive bad customer service, and I've had a rant at Virgin before, it seems only fair that I report when I have some good service from them.

It didn't start well. I called them on Saturday to report my mobile had stopped working. I got straight through and we established that the phone was still under warranty. Then the phone line went dead.

I called straight back and got put in a queue. 15 minutes later I was still on hold and decided enough was enough. I put the phone down and got onto their website.

I managed to register my account with them and from there send an email to tell them the problem. They promised a reply within 48 hours but I wasn't holding my breath.

I've just received the promised contact, a phone call, and the nice man on the phone has arranged for a courier to come out and swap my phone for another one. Marvellous, well done Virgin Mobile.

Of course it could still go horribly wrong with courier problems etc. but for the moment I'm very happy that this problem has been sorted out without any fuss.

My contract is due for renewal in the next couple of months and if this all goes smoothly I will probably renew with Virgin Mobile. Listen up businesses - GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE WORKS!

On the subject of customer service, complaints and Virgin, if anyone hasn't yet read the Virgin complaint letter which is thought to be one of the funniest ever, you must have a look at it. It made me cry with laughter.

There are rumours it is a crafty PR stunt however that doesn't stop it being hilarious.

I got home from work last night and my wife told me about the photos she had taken that day of our son taking his first steps. When I went to look on the camera the message came up "No Picture". All of the photos had been wiped from the XD card.

Not only had we lost that days photos but also his first birthday and a weekend holiday we'd all had with family. My wife was distraught.

I don't have an XD card reader so I quickly drove down to ASDA to put it into one of their machines to see if they could see the photos (maybe it was the camera that was faulty). They couldn't see the photos either.

Next it was onto the internet to see if it was possible to recover them. Apparently so as the photos are not physically deleted from the card but overwritten with new data when more are taken. Phew.

Now all I had to do was track down the necessary software, preferably free, to recover the photos. After several downloads of software that claimed to be free but wasn't, or that just didn't work, I finally found the answer to my prayers.

A completely free program to recover photos from my XD card. The website guided me through it all step-by-step and it worked perfectly. It took around 45 minutes to recover 417 photos on the card, including all of the missing ones.

I've put the link on my free stuff page as I was so impressed. Thank you so much the people at ZAR, whoever you are, for this excellent program. You've made my wife very happy!!

Just got really excited as I received an email with the subject line - "Daily Mail Euro Prize Giveaway - Winner".

With it being a large daily newspaper I anticipated opening the email to see I'd won 500 euros or similar. How disappointing.

Apparently I've "won" a prepaid MasterCard® loaded with 5 Euros. About £3, and no doubt there will be some sort of catch that it can't be withdrawn!

Not sure whether to claim my "prize" as I am not intending to go overseas in the near future and I don't want to end up getting caught out with the small print and find I end up out of pocket! That would be just my luck.

In any case I already have a prepaid credit card which I'm happy with so, on reflection, I'll give it a miss. It's not being added to my list of prize wins either. Thanks, but no thanks.

Fingers crossed for some better news next week on the competition front. We live in hope.

A holiday would improve my future. I was planning a big one in December for my 40th but that is pretty much on ice now due to financial constraints.

For those that want to get some winter sun my parents apartment in Spain is available to rent for only £25 per night (plus £30 laundry charge).

It sleeps up to 6 so if you had a week there it would cost you £205 total, less than £35 per person! My parents recently got flights over there for only £10 each INCLUDING taxes so it would make for a nice cheap holiday.

I've been putting the website together at www.spanishgolfapartment.co.uk and on there it tells you a bit more about the local area, beaches, eating out, days out and the golf too.

The apartment itself is on Las Ramblas golf course with swimming pools, clubhouse and other facilities. Most people who have gone over so far have been non-golfers so it is suitable for everyone.

Give it a read and if you're not interested yourself pass the website address onto someone else for a look. We may be running a comp soon for a weeks free accommodation so keep in touch.

Just arrived this morning, a DVD of "The Young Victoria" courtesy of Compton and Woodhouse. This has been added to my list of competition wins in 2009.

Not sure it's going to be my sort of thing but I will give it a look and  could be enjoyable.

My last comp win, Max Manus, was a pretty decent watch. I would probably give it 6/10.

No notifications of any more wins in the pipeline. I'm managing to enter quite a few competitions currently so hopefully this extra effort will pay off in the future with a decent holiday or some vouchers to spend.

Didn't manage to sell my hard disk system on Ebay which was a bit disappointing. If anyone is interested in buying it let me know. Email address is on the website.

It's an Imation Odyssey system with one cartridge and USB adapter. Apparently retails around £168 but only want £50 for it so I can get a couple of Wii games.

A quick update on a couple of the programs that are advertised on this site.

Hypnotic Tracks, featured on the health page, are now offering hypnotherapy tapes for sexual enhancement. This includes impotence, sexual confidence, animal magnetism, sexual energy and orgasmic pleasure!

You can find out more directly by clicking here.

Proactol, featured in the weight loss page, have contacted me to make sure I don't forget to mention all of the benefits of their fat-binding weight loss product!

These include:

It's been slow going updating the website as I've been busy with work and family commitments (this is also my main excuse for failing miserably in my weight loss endeavours!).

I should have more time soon and I hope to be focussing on the main reason why this website was set up - to help people make more money.

I want to feature a range of different ideas. Over the years I have tried many of them myself plus I have my father and sister who have also tried out different ideas themselves.

As none of us are now rich you will gather that they have not been spectactularly successful, but some of them were only to make a part-time income.

Having been through the process I can also point out some of the pitfalls, scams etc. which many people don't manage to avoid.

I will also be putting up a page about saving money. If you are currently struggling to make ends meet, as many of us are, it may be that you could save enough money to balance the books and get on top of your finances.

These pages should be up this week so keep your eyes open and keep coming back.

It was around this time I anticipated posting my first excellent news about how much weight I had lost. However.....

Things have not gone to plan and I haven't lost any weight at all so far. Only good thing is I haven't put any on either. I've bounced around within a few lbs like a yo-yo.

In Wii Fit terms I have been bouncing between the top of overweight and the bottom of obese. Whenever I hit OBESE it gives me an extra push to exercise a little more just to get back to overweight.

I could go into a number of reasons for my lack of weight loss, however I'm old enough and wise enough to realise that I would just be making excuses. I just cannot seem to get motivated enough.

In an effort to motivate myself I'm going to set myself a goal of losing three stone by the end of the year. I might even consider getting sponsored to do so to give me a little extra push.

It is ambitious, but I would rather set a hard goal than make it too easy and try to do it all at the last minute. Three stones in four months means I have to start now and start working hard straight away.

I'm going shopping later and I will take a look at the diet pills and products whilst avoiding the cake and biscuit aisles.

The lack of service from Camelot about their lottery website did get me thinking about the other companies I've received terrible service from (Lloyds TSB and Vodafone being the two worst recently).

I've just got off the phone to Virgin Money and I had to laugh about it. I've moved to a prepaid credit card and so decided it's time to cancel my card with Virgin.

So I ring the number on their website. Straight through to an automated system, but no ordinary automated system, instead of pressing buttons it uses voice recognition technology.

It asks me about my problem. I tell it that I want to cancel my credt card. It doesn't understand. I make up an answer it might understand in order to get put through to a real person. It doesn't understand. I try again, this time using cancellation instead of cancel. It understands!

Now it wants to know what I wish to cancel. My credit card or payment protection (which I don't have). Easy enough.

Now it wants to know my card number. Gets it right first time. Then my date of birth, this bit took two goes. After all of this it tells me it will connect me with someone who can help. Hooray!

Then I get another automated voice - "we cannot connect you now as no-one is here. Our normal office hours are....Saturday until 1pm"!

Another four minutes of my life wasted. Why didn't they just say the office was closed to start with?

Only consolation is that the call was freephone so Virgin were paying for it. If I was in any doubt about cancelling my card this has definitely made my mind up. Cheerio Virgin, you won't be getting my custom again.

When will companies realise that automated systems and foreign call centres don't provide the level of service that customers want. Just put me through to someone I can talk to.

Unable to access the National Lottery website at the moment and it's been the same all morning. Getting very frustrated now as my wife has given me some numbers to put on and she's not going to be very happy.

This isn't the first time I've had problems playing the lottery online. When they had the massive EuroMillions jackpot a little while ago I tried all Friday afternoon and it just came back saying it was busy. I couldn't play at all.

When I wrote to the "Customer Service Team" about the problem I got the most pathetic response I've ever had about any problem ever (which is saying something these days)! Basically they said the site was very busy because of "unforseen demand".

Unforseen? It was the biggest jackpot in EuroMillions history and THEY had been advertising it wall-to-wall on TV and radio all week! What were they expecting?

Anyway, for a few weeks after I didn't play with them in protest but the lure of the jackpot has got me again. I do still have time now to put today's numbers on in the normal manner, although that will also involve a trip to the cashpoint.

For your information my numbers today are 5, 10, 13, 22, 30, 41 / 6, 10, 13, 19, 22, 47 / 3, 13, 14, 21, 22, 32. Wish me luck.