Bankwatch: RBS introduce
More evidence of the banks' cash-grabbing antics emerged today in a report by the Evening Standard, as they report that the Royal Bank of Scotland group (which includes Mint and Lloyds TSB) are introducing a
Posted by Alex on Mon 30th April 2007
Bankwatch: Judge attacks “timewasting” Lloyds TSB
Following the latest on bank charges is becoming a tiny bit of a hobby for me now as - in common with millions of other customers - my bank takes more and more of my money in penalty charges to cover their “costs”.
If you've read much of my blog, you might have spotted that a lot of my charges come from one charge taking me over my overdraft limit, with more charges piled on top to add insult to injury. Again, this is a common problem for lots of bank customers.
In the news today, I spotted this story about Lloyds TSB being accused by a judge of timewasting behaviour - not the first time such tactics have been used by the banks according to the BBC's article - and another story involving my personal favourite bank, the Alliance & Leicester (not that I ever write about their poor service or anything… ahem) tacitly admitting their charges should only be around the
Posted by Alex on Fri 27th April 2007
More little touches: rolling out better accessibility for UPSU.net
I know I should be doing coursework, but while doing some research on the BBC's Access 2.0 accessibility blog for my final year embarrassment project, I realised that the alternative high-contrast stylesheets I put together to provide a text-only version of the UPSU.net homepage could be very easily rolled out to all the other pages on UPSU.net with a couple of simple code changes.
So, now, if you're a Firefox (or similar browser) user, you can change the stylesheets on-the-fly by going to the “View” menu, and choosing a different page style - 2 or 3. Layout 2 - light text on black - is designed to be easier for partially-sighted and dyslexic visitors to use, while style 3 - dark on white - should make also make viewing easier for visitors with certain requirements.
Naturally, this isn't a complete solution to our commitments to providing greater accessibility on UPSU.net, but it's a short step from here to enabling every page to respect the settings of the homepage's high-contrast choices, and also to allow visitors to choose a different level of accessibility as they browse around the site.
One day, maybe, I'd love to see UPSU.net making use of the accessibility features the BBC are trialling on their homepage layout customisation tool.
As always, I'm keen to hear feedback from everyone who visits the site, although I'd much prefer to read the reasoned and well thought-out criticisms over the ranty, angry comments (but anything's better than the tumbleweed of a quiet blog… ;o), so please let me know your thoughts on accessibility, or UPSU.net in general.
/al - I need to get out just a teeeeeny bit more….
Posted by Alex on Thu 26th April 2007
Nice one London Underground -
What a bunch of numpties: a London Underground graffiti removal team has painted over guerrilla graffiti artist Banksy's Pulp Fiction mural near Old Street, valued at around
Posted by Alex on Sat 21st April 2007
Ooh, UPSU.net’s won something! … Just not sure quite *what* yet…
Steve Baker's just told me that UPSU.net's won some kind of design/marketing/something-or-other award.
… Aaaaand that happens to be the sum total of my knowledge about the award at this point(!) - no doubt, as soon as I know more, I'll ramble on about it in here. Hopefully though, some of the parts of the site I've created will have helped us to get this award.
In the meantime, can I direct you to our webteam page which says who does what on UPSU.net? Ta!
Until then, toodles :o) /al
Oh, a quick p.s. - I don't *think* it's a wooden spoon award…
Posted by Alex on Thu 19th April 2007
Bit of a slow news day in Hampshire…?
Just spotted this on the BBC Hampshire homepage:
Out in reader-land, you might not appreciate just how long a wait it's been for me to see some serious journalistic reporting on my favourite subject - namely, salad ingredients.
I think a short visit to Alresford is needed. Four days should do it - the place sounds like a regular metropolis of action-packed fun.
All I need now is a televised debate to determine the better of spinash and rocket lettuce, and my year will be complete… Ahem…
/al - playing with the new HD telly - it's huuuuuuge :o)
Posted by Alex on Tue 17th April 2007
Bank charges scam-watch: Natwest pays out
In the latest of the virtually unbroken series of embarrassing defeats for banks being pursued through the courts by customers sick of being hit with penalty charges - decreed as “unlawful” by OFCOM - Natwest bank has repaid
Posted by Alex on Tue 17th April 2007
Twittervision - pointless but hypnotising
This is absolutely fascinating - twittervision pops up status updates from people around the world. Totally pointless, yet totally absorbing (more from timesonline).
This, on the other hand, is rather boring, but it's coming along nicely. Needs a couple more admin features and an “invite” thingbob, but apart from that it's almost ready… To do very little, right now. Soon, though, it'll become part of the UPSU.net core code and my life should begin to get a lot easier horribly complicated.
It's 5am. As the birds rise and my noisy housemates are still being, well, noisy (and drunk) in the front room, I should be going to bed now, but - thanks to the A&L - I have to stay awake long enough to go to the bank tomorrow and pay in
Posted by Alex on Sat 14th April 2007
More proof that more money doesn’t equal more quality
I've written - no, ranted - before about how embarrassingly poor the Alliance and Leicester website is, when their badly-designed personal banking website managed to cost me a lot of money in penalty charges.
Checking my balance tonight (ok, I'm waiting for my student loan to come in so I can pay off some debts and, err, maybe spend some of it on a posh widescreen telly. Maybe…) I noticed an advert-style link at the bottom of the banking website. Apart from anything else, this position is one of the worst places to tuck important information as advert blindness tends to set in for anything placed in this part of a web page.
I'm a cynical git by nature - when I'm not off upsetting people, being embarrasingly drunk, or just being plain embarrassing - and decided to see what wonderous information the A&L were going to provide its customers that one can't already find out by reading any number of existing - and respected - websites (for example here, here, here, here … etc).
The first thing to annoy me when I clicked the link was that it opened a new window. Not a major issue for most people, maybe, but I consider it bad manners to start popping up new windows on your visitors' computers unless you have a very good reason to do so.
The second annoyance - and this is the point where I decided I had to write a ranty blog entry about this - was the completely gratuitous 2-step entry process - first I was shown a picture of a safe, with some text fading in and finally a “[click here to] enter” link appearing in the middle of the safe's combination dial thingy:
… followed by an equally gratuitous animation of the safe opening:
… and after a few seconds, you're presented with this completely Flash-based website:
Very pretty, lovely… Just one question - why has someone gone to all the trouble to pay - probably a lot of money - to have a Flash website developed to do this, when a plain, boring - but just as pretty - HTML website would have done *exactly* the same job, been a lot cheaper to develop and bug-test, loaded faster, provided a much higher level of accessibility and user friendliness, and would (eventually) have found it's way into the Google indexes??
However, I ought to balance this argument out a little - the information in the site isn't completely crap, although it's extremely basic and does little to help people make use of the myriad free anti-virus and anti-spyware tools available on the net. Oh, and there's also a link to the security centre on the A&L online banking log-in page:
The only problem? Clicking on the link in Safari does nothing - the HTML is all there, but it won't do nowt. The mouse cursor doesn't even change when you hover over the link. That might have something to do with the fact even this little web page has more than 30 code errors, according to the W3C validation service:
Good going, A&L ;o)
The thing that really disappoints me about all this is that, while paying undoubtedly huge sums of money to their web developers to do work which looks like the production work of a ten year old learning how to use Flash, A&L's customer service still leaves a lot to be desired - my heart goes out to anyone who has to enjoy the less-than-pleasurable experience of dealing with their Leeds-based call centre if you're trying to get a charge refunded, or cancel a direct debit.
… And, no, I'm not just pissed off because they took
Posted by Alex on Wed 11th April 2007
Google Desktop for Mac - like Spotlight, only better
(Boring geeky ramblings below…)
Up until recently, I was a Windows user, and made a lot of use of Google's desktop search toy. Secretly though, I wanted a Mac so I could use the wonderful Spotlight search system.
Fast-forward a year or so and I barely ever use Spotlight because it's horribly, painfully slow. Quicksilver has deserted me - it crashes within a few minutes of opening it - and I miss my trusty Google desktop search.
Now Google have released a Mac desktop search toy, and I'm about to give it a go. You can find out more and download it from their free Mac software page, and read more about it on the Hawk Wings blog. If you haven't already installed this free wonder of technology, you really should give it a go :o)
Google might be trying to take over the world, but until I figure out what's so evil about their great free software, I'm happy to keep telling everyone I know how good I think it is. Sad but true… /al
Posted by Alex on Wed 11th April 2007