I have now formally ceased blogging on this site, and have moved my web presence to danfoy.com.
This blog continues under a new guise at danfoy.com/blog (with a new RSS feed).
This blog will be archived, and in time orangeacid.net will become a portal for the other sites it hosts:
Dear Natwest, the ‘Helpful Banking’ establishment,
Please allow me to explain why your motto is criminally misleading, and why you annoy me to the degree that I have taken 30 minutes of time out of my life to write this whingey yet psychologically soothing open letter regarding how much you suck.
A few minutes ago I attempted to pay the outstanding balance on my credit card with you, only to be told that my browser isn’t ‘supported’ by you. I am using Safari 5, the most recent, most secure version of the default browser for Mac OS 10.6. What you mean by ‘supported’ I have no idea, as your site is perfectly capable of being rendered in Safari 5, and it certainly isn’t less secure than Safari 4. If this is just a bug of a system designed to stop me using old, insecure browsers, or scary browsers that you haven’t heard of, then that’s your problem. Actually, wait, no, it’s my problem isn’t it, because I’m the one that has to download a separate browser just to pay off my card.
At least I can’t complain that this is out of character of the ‘helpful banking’ corporation, who helpfully declines to print account numbers on their debit cards in doubtlessly well-meaning but, utterly counter-productive security measure. I want to buy things online and sometimes I want to set up direct debits for bills. At work I need those details to set up payment plans for my customers. I am never, ever going to forage around for a statement and search for my account number when all the other banks print them on their cards, which I’m actually likely to have with me. I can only hope that – if you ever decide to let me on your site with my browser of choice so I can transfer money around – any criminal who decides to steal my card finds it as hard and impractical to use as I do.
That isn’t to say that I’d use your cards offline, either, or feel inclined to carry them around with me. I opened up an account purely for the railcard perk that appeared to be worth something like £120 a year (although in reality is worth that only if you bought a railcard annually for half a decade), and opened a credit account at the same time to use as another source of credit-rating-friendly mainly un-utilized credit. In reality I use neither – the debit card because it is such an arse to move money into, and the ‘student’ credit card because frankly I’m embarrassed to even look at it. Whose idea was it to adorn it with huge paint splodges? I find the suggestion that people of legal age to be offered credit will find this ‘cool’ pretty offensive. What do you think I am, a preschooler? Fingerpainting ceased to be in vogue when I turned 4.
I think your pledge to become Britain’s most helpful bank through 14 commitments needs some revising, too. You plan to have ’600 branches open on Saturdays by the end of 2010′? How many branches do you have that don’t open on Saturdays? Admittedly I’ve only ever lived in urban areas, but to suggest that your branches close on the two days that most people are off work (and therefore able to go to the bank to sort things out if your website decides to lock them out) is a pretty shitty commitment to current customer service levels if you ask me. You’ll promise to ’stay open for business if we are the last bank in town’? That you’ll happily run a monopoly on local services isn’t much of a draw for me considering that no-one is ever more than 10 minutes from a free cashpoint and I personally haven’t stepped foot in one of your branches since I opened my account.
I think ‘Our call centres are UK Based’ is the funniest, though – like I care where your call centres are, they could be on the moon and it would make no difference to me as long as you dealt with my issues quickly. Come to think of it, I’ve had much better service from the cheerful Indians at Adobe and Orange than the pervertedly unhelpful and condescending Scots at the Student Finance England, and I wouldn’t say that either accent is any easier to understand.
If you’re from around Derby, or are especially into photography and live in England, you may have heard of the FORMAT festival. It is a supposedly annual photography festival, based in Derby, England. It took it break last year whilst the organizers had new premises built, but it’s back this year and it is the biggest yet.
I’ve been doing some stuff with QUAD, the festival’s organizers, for the past year or so. As part of this I’ve been asked to contribute towards an exhibit in Derby Museum and Art Gallery during QUAD. I’m working with a group of four, and together we have chosen the FORMAT 09 theme of ‘tension and suspense’ and have based our pieces around the sub-theme of masks. Each photographer is creating a series of three images. Here is an in-progress version of the final frame of my piece.
I uploaded it here because I wanted to gauge perceptions before I went further. I showed this to the youth officer at QUAD and she was pretty disturbed by it. I’m guessing the vibe that people get from this is going to be fairly varied according to the viewers’ attitudes and life-experiences.
This frame is actually a composite of two separate images. Yes, Nat really is bound with duct-tape and stuck under a park bench. I took shots of Nat in multiple positions under the bench, and Phil in various positions on and around the bench. This gave me a wide choice of positions to choose from for the final images. Obviously this means that the shot above is actually a composite of two separate shots. This is actually an easier process than trying to get both subjects to pose perfectly for the same picture, but did throw up some problems.
Firstly, although I shot this with the camera on a tripod with a remote shutter release, the flash – which was being held high above the camera on a coiled cord – pulled the camera in such a way that the images were slightly misaligned. Much harder to fix was the differences in white balance, due to me forgetting to set manual white balance settings, and harder still was the variable output of the flash, which I had also forgot to set to manual.
But anyway, let me know what you think.
Last Monday was the one year anniversary of Rhianna Page’s death. Rhi was a student at Landau Forte College in the year above me. I knew her from hanging around with her in a group of mutual friends at the square, walking back home through Morley with her, and her supporting The Lowlifes before we quietly faded into the background.
I’m not going to pretend that she was my best mate, that I think about her every day, or that I presume to know what she’d want people to do now she’s gone, because frankly I think all those things are an insult to her memory… although clearly she touched the lives of many people. What I will say is that she was an immensely likable, gentle but fun girl of wholesome character, without whom the world is a slightly darker place. Read more…
A couple of weeks ago I promised to myself that I would stay awake until my I.T. coursework was finished. I ended up working from 6 p.m. , way past midnight, had a break for some munchies about 4 a.m., ran a final spell-check at about 9.30 a.m., printed it, and was in college for 10.30 a.m. I had a 10 minute nap during a free in the afternoon, was rudely awakened by the head of year, and remained awake until 9.30 p.m. All in all I was awake for around 38 hours. Why wasn’t I tired? Read more…
Why is it that such nuisances as A-levels must distract me from my geekery? That in the distance is my computer, and in the foreground a short essay that has been bothering me for the last couple of hours. It doesn’t contribute any marks towards my final grades, but nonetheless it was due in about a week ago and people are still going to get very annoyed if I neglect it for much longer.
But alas, I can’t find the bastard plan for it which means I have to continue it by ear, not something I want to be doing at midnight when I have much much serious IT deadlines.
I guess this is what you get for procrastinating. And now I’ve taken the time to write a blog post and edit a photo. What a failure I am.
