Blog Title: SDJL.co.uk

We can’t take your money

Had a bit of an interesting one with Alliance & Leicester yesterday. We use them for our business banking and I had a couple of fairly large cheques to pay in. Normally I pop them in an envelope and take them into a post office, but this takes over a week to get them into our account, so I went to a local branch and used their deposit machine.

Their deposit machines are pretty neat, in that they take a photo of the cheque and put it on your receipt. Yesterday however, the machine couldn’t work out the value of one of the cheques, so it used a zero value. I cancelled the transaction and used the old fashioned paper paying in slip and took it to the counter. The lady behind the counter noticed it was a commercial bank account and promptly told me that I couldn’t pay money in over the counter.
Apparently our terms and conditions with the bank mean we can’t pay in money over the counter, only via the deposit machines and the post office. A little odd really seeing as the local bank will just empty the deposit machine and process it there.

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Remove flash

I went to install an older version of flash player yesterday, as the WordPress image uploader doesn’t like version 10. Soon after starting the installer it flashed up with an error that a newer version was installed, and that it couldn’t overwrite it. So I trundled off to find a way to remove the other version and found that you have to download and run a completely separate application. I did that, and this is the window that was displayed for a good ten minutes.

The fact that the installer flashed up a new version was already installed within a matter of seconds, makes me wonder why the uninstaller took so long to find the plug-in! Is this a ploy to get people to quit the uninstaller in the hope they will carry on using flash?

Aperture BorderFX

Came across a good free plugin for Aperture this afternoon whilst working out watermarks for posting images here. It’s called BorderFX and it allows you to create watermarks outside of the actual image, in the border. I’ve been searching for something like this for a while, as it’s never too nice to overlay a watermark on an image.

You can do more than just watermark or overlay text, such as create borders and framing, crop and resize and also overlay other meta data. As an example of the border and text overlay, here’s another photo from our trip to the US.

El Capitan

I’ve scrapped my photoblog and moved it in over here. That means periodically you’ll be getting some photos posted. To start the ball rolling I’m going to post some of the photos from our trip to the USA this October. Here’s one of El Capitan with Half Dome in the background. Tim and I have aspirations that we’ll climb both of these one day.

Keane

We’ve got Keane playing tonight. They were pretty good last year. I arrived this afternoon around three to find a contingent of fans sitting/sleeping/standing at the front doors. Apparently they’d been there since about 9am.

There were three in particular who made me write this post. They had been to see Keane at two other European destinations in the past couple of weeks, and had been at the front of the queue each time! What possesses people to constantly spend vast amounts of money to follow their favourite band around!?

Live music

This week has been a cosy little number for me. I’ve spent the past seven days at Union Chapel lighting various bands. Sometimes it’s been for TV, but mostly it’s just for the audience. Either way it’s meant I’ve been getting paid to see some great live music.

So far we’ve had roughly 25 bands and I’ve still got two days left. We’ve had the likes of The Killers, Stereophonics and Biffy Clyro, Cage The Elephant, James Morrison and Adele, Esser, Damien Rice and General Fiasco, Angus & Julia Stone, Seasick Steve and Sam Beeton, Kasabian, Reverend & the Maker and Katy Perry.

This week has been great, not because I’ve seen lots of bands for free, but because it highlights how important live music is and that there are still lots up great musicians producing some amazing material.

Business Striped Bare

[We]…relaunched Virgin Cola with a further $25 million investment. Our goal: to take on Coke on their home territory. Coke wanted war. So we drove a British tank into Times Square in New York and fired a mock round at the Coca-Cola sign (we’d secretly had it wired up the night before by a pyrotechnical team and it looked like it had gone up in smoke) before ploughing through a massive wall of cola tins. Sightseers ran wailing from the square and we nearly ended up in jail.

Business Striped Bare by Richard Branson is a fantastic insight into the Virgin brand. It’s a great read, which is insightful, entertaining and well written.

New Look

For those of you that actually stop by the website every now and then, you’ll notice it has a new look! Nial has spent the last few days making this new design work that he created.

It brings a welcome change to the website as the old style was getting a little stale and needed some love. I’m pleased to say Nial has done a great job as usual. There’s bound to be a few teething problems somewhere, but if you just bear with us, everything should be ironed out in the next couple of days.