It’s with no small amount of embarrassment that I admit I sort of fell for LG’s fake adverts for Scarlet. I caught the end of one - part of a scene in which Natassia Malthe (aka Bloodrayne) walks out of an explosion, and then her eyes glow red, and the credits roll - and I believed it was, as it appeared, an advert for a new TV series.

And yesterday it turned out it was - just not in the way you’d expect. Instead of being a new drama about a secret agent or superhero or whatever, Scarlet turned out to be - drumroll! - a new range of LCD TVs. “TV series”, get it?

It’s like one of those jokes out of a Christmas cracker, where instead of laughing, you just groan. Admittedly, LG’s little prank is nowhere near as crushingly embarrassing as Sony’s All I Want For Christmas Is A PSP blog, and at least, unlike LonelyGirl15, LG actually has a product to sell us, but it still feels a bit, well, rubbish. Especially since lots of bloggers and forumgoers had already busted it, having checked out the IMDB and TV listings and having clocked the fact that there wasn’t any time or network information included in the ads. Moreover, having not been at the Hollywood launch, I’m now in the position of having seen the ads, but not what they’re actually selling - and while this advertising technique is admittedly clever, doesn’t it sort of imply there’s nothing particularly marketable about the TVs themselves?

Meh, maybe I’m just bitter about having been caught out. After all, Sony’s Bravia ads don’t exactly explain the exact specs of the TVs they’re trying to sell, and everyone loves those. Having rewatched the Scarlet ads again, there definitely is something off about them, something that implies they’re a spoof or a trick of some kind, so maybe if I’d been paying a bit more attention, I could have joined in the online speculation and enjoyed the playfulness of the campaign a bit more. The lesson here, then, is that I should watch more TV, in order to keep on top of this sort of thing…

The world seems to believe I’m made entirely out of magnets. This week, everything I touch seems to be going screwy; my mobile phone keeps claiming it doesn’t have a SIM card, my PC decides it doesn’t feel like starting up, my washing machine floods everything… and I can’t be the only one having non-stop problems with Firefox, can I?

Bah. I’m torn between trying to fix everything, and just going back under my duvet til things decide to work again. (Or until Mozilla sorts out Firefox, at any rate.)

We’re constantly being told that we need to be vigilant online, protecting our bank details, only using our credit cards on reputable sites, watching out for phishing scams, using electronic card readers and PINs and passwords and security questions and all the rest of it. And, y’know, yeah, fair enough, we should be careful with our information online. But what about offline?

My mother always, without fail, shreds documents containing confidential information, so that no-one could steal post from her bins to rip her off. I use a slightly less high-tech method known as “ripping stuff up” whenever I throw anything away, and when I moved house, my bank was one of the first to know about it. (Though, granted, they still reckoned it’d take weeks and weeks before my change of address actually kicked in.) Yet I’m still getting bucketloads of post to my new flat addressed to the previous tenants.

Very often, this post is just spam - letters from Weight Watchers begging the previous tenant to come back to them, for instance, or appeals from charities. But in the last week or so, I’ve started getting slightly more important mail. Like a credit card (which handily signalled its presence via a clear window in the envelope). And bank statements.

I moved into this flat at the end of February: seven weeks ago. Even taking into account delays in getting things changed at credit card companies and banks, I shouldn’t still be getting this stuff. I’ve been diligently writing “no longer resident at this address, please return to sender” on all the envelopes and entrusting them back into the care of Royal Mail from the beginning - now I’ve started writing “no longer resident at this address, please return to sender SO THAT THEY MIGHT UPDATE THEIR RECORDS” on things. I actually got a letter back from one company addressed to “the occupier” telling me that their records showed Miss A. Previous-Tenant lived at my address, and if that was no longer the case and I had information about her present whereabouts, I should contact them and let them know. But of course I haven’t got any such information — I never met the previous tenant. She’d moved out before I moved in, and so all I know about her is that she used to be a Sky customer, used to be a member of Weight Watchers, and, oh yes, which bank she’s a customer of.

If I were inclined towards identity fraud, though, it really wouldn’t be difficult to take her for a ride. She’s dropped all her information into my hands. I have all her bank details, and I know her name and address. I had, before I sent it back, an actual credit card, and probably the PIN for it in another letter, too. No matter how obsessively she might check her credit card statement, she wouldn’t know if I’d run up a debt of several thousand pounds, because the statement? Would be delivered to my address.

This is starting to drive me batty, quite frankly. I’m fed up of my mailbox being full of someone else’s mail, and it makes me cringe when I realise how careless she’s being with so much information. What’s the point of being careful with your credit card online when you’ve delivered all your personal information to someone else - someone you’ve never met, wouldn’t recognise on the street, someone you know literally nothing about? Please, if you’re out there, and you know you recently moved and didn’t update any of your records: LET YOUR BANK KNOW YOU’VE MOVED. I’m not going to rip you off, I’m going to keep returning your mail to sender and hoping they somehow manage to get in touch with you, but really, this is beyond a joke.

So, Facebook has added a chat function to its social networking site. It’s currently being rolled out across the site’s thousands of users, but will eventually be available to everyone, displaying in a bar at the bottom of the page and allowing users to talk to their friends in real time, rather than via messages or wall posts.

MySpace has had a similar service for donkey’s, and Gmail’s chat function will let your AOL or Gmail contacts talk to you in real time, too. (And anyone you e-mail at a Gmail address automatically gets added to your contact list, aggravatingly, so if you don’t want someone to know you’re online and be able to contact you, you’ll have to take ‘em back off.)

While I’m not being forced to use Facebook Chat, obviously, and I can choose to be signed out/invisible on all of these services, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s possible that I’m mildly OCD - I really hate having multiple programs hanging around that essentially serve the same purpose, and I already use MSN Messenger. I guess I just don’t see the point, and am frustrated with having to always turn things off, instead of on. Facebook is enough of a pestering-machine as it is, what with the constant stream of application invitations and the “poke” function; adding a chat function is overkill.

What’s the point of using a social networking site to IM, anyway? The two are different and, in my opinion anyway, should be kept separate.