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Archive March 2009
Saturday 14 March 2009
I went into my bank (Barclays) the other day, to ask about making an international wire transfer while I'm in the other country. Can't do it, they say, have to fill in a form in the branch to make wire transfers, unless you have a premier account then your manager can do it for you.

Okay, I said, then I shall see about having a premier account. So they rambled at me about what benefits a premier account provides, how you can phone them up at any hour of the night and they'll, eg. buy your mother flowers for you, or find you a deal on a flight when you can't be bothered, and get you preferential treatment at airports. Then they went to ask one of the premier managers about the specific thing I wanted, the ability to do wire transfers while away, and it turns out they can't actually do that any more.

Just to reiterate:
  1. Bank.
  2. Will blow your nose for you.
  3. Will not facilitate the transfer of your money.
The nose-blowing features did sound quite nice, but not £25 a month of nice when they're still not even letting me have access to my money. So now I'm looking at HSBC, who tell me that with them I can do a wire transfer using internet banking. That is all I need from a bank. Sure, I would like them to deal with the snake-charmer agencies for my snake-charming parties on my behalf, but I'd rather they do their job. [05:56] [1 comment]


Monday 2 March 2009
Games!

If you have fond memories of Elite, play it again only not quite as good, with Oolite. And then you'll remember how tedious Elite often was.

Or play Elite crossed with Asteroids and Nethack that is much better, with Transcendence.

Or play one even Nethackier, with ascii graphics and Nethack-like ground battles but real-time ascii space battles, with Privateer: Ascii Sector.

A curious thing, that games such as these and Spelunky and Nethack, and most roguelikes for that matter, whose play-lifespan is indefinitely long, tend to be free, while games which entertain you for about 12 hours and then are finished tend to cost 40+ currency units. Perhaps there is a division by zero error in figuring out the pricetag of an indefinite-length game. [07:58] [0 comments]