Category: General

OK, so its a semi-silly post title since if it works you’ll see this message.  But after my hassles with IMHO, I thought I’d try this guy out.

[IMHO ate the post again… 🙁 Must find another tool to create my blog entries in…]
After this morning’s issues with ABSA, I have some more sad banking news… Well its sad for me even if it isn’t sad for anyone else.  Today my bank (not the “My Bank is My Bank” bank but rather *my* bank/the one I use) is no longer my bank… I was with 20Twenty and I’ve loved dealing with them every time… (well, except that once when I called at about 11pm to find out about a forex thing and the person I spoke to wasn’t very clued up.  But that’s one bad experience in about 3 years, and anyway at least I had someone I could call with 20Twenty… no other bank would be open at 11pm)  Ok so back to the story…

20Twenty was bought by Standard Chartered Bank after the whole Saambou fiasco.  And no, that’s not Standard Bank or SCMB… Standard Chartered Bank is the huge international bank with a large international presence… I’ve even seen one of their branches in Botswana of all places.  But now Standard Chartered have decided that 20Twenty’s banking clients are not their core focus so they’re basically transferring their clients to Pick ‘n Pay Go Banking (A division of Nedbank).   I’m still a bit confused as to why Standard Chartered made that decision, but that’s another whole story.

So far Pick ‘n Pay have been really nice, their call center staff have been helpful and friendly.  Its just a pitty that the people at the Nedbank branches aren’t of a similar mindsets.  One example I have found is that Pick ‘n Pay Go Banking sent us an e-mail to say that when we pick up our cards we can present (amongst other things) a bank statement from another bank that contains our physical address.  Unfortunately the employees at the Nedbank Branches don’t seem to think that this is an acceptable proof of residence, so I know of a few people who have turned away frustrated.

But fortunately for me, the Nedbank Branch employee who gave me my card didn’t bother to read the instruction she was given that told her to verify my residential address so she never did. I’d brought a copy of my rental agreement and, as I found out afterwards, it was 3 days over 12 months old and Nedbank don’t accept copies of rental agreements.  They insist on the original which any tenant can tell you is never going to happen.  I don’t think I’ve ever had a landlord who has given me the original lease, while they sit with a photocopy.

On another note, my petrol card has always been at Nedbank (20Twenty didn’t offer a petrol card when they started) and when I had to get my address verified for our “FICA” requirement they gave me quite a runaround.  I don’t have mail sent to my home address, its just not a very reliable place to get my mail delivered (I’ve had quite a few things go missing).  So eventually I was debating taking out insurance just so that I’d have something that was related to my physical address printed out on a statement.  So I had a faxed quote with me when I went into Nedbank to ask if perhaps a letter from my landlord would do.  The answer was no, and the lady behind the counter was not willing to give me any other information that might help me… but then she spotted the quote in amongst the papers I had and she said “give me that, it will do”. 

I think she was either high, or wasn’t able to read properly because she clearly failed to read the bold words at the top that said “Insurance QUOTE”… So I could have called any insurance agent, asked them for a quote for insurance on any residential address and used that to “prove” where I live.  Very silly, but hey… it worked and I was able to carry on using my garage card.

So.. back to the main title… Today my 20Twenty account was settled and closed.  And I must say good bye to my favourite bank, the one that cared  (or at least seemed to) about me, the one with the fun colours, attitude and vibe.  It is a sad day indeed.

Damn… IMHO lost the body of this post, so here’s a rewrite of it…

For christmas my wife bought me a webcam that I could use to chat to relatives overseas. (We’re not very good at waiting until christmas day to give our gifts)  Ever since working on AfriCam’s site in 2000 I’ve liked the idea of setting up a webcam, so I did some searching and found Dorgem which does pretty much everything you could want some webcam software to do.  So I quickly setup a cam at home, and the next day I showed it off at work.

Charlie, who works with me, had won a small digital camera that also works as a web cam at an end of year function so we quickly set about getting images of our office on the net.  So with a little bit of .net code we now have a few pages WebCam, History, and a WAP based page. 

Beware you wap users, the images are probably bigger than your screen so you might have hassles viewing them… Oh, and they’re JPEGs so some phone’s won’t be able to show them… we tested them on a Nokia (didn’t like JPEGs), Sony Ericsson (didn’t display the whole image, and wouldn’t let you scroll across it), and my iMate (which worked perfectly, it either automatically resizes the image to one that fits the screen or lets you scroll around the image to see it all).

Shortly after that I found some issues with my home webcam so I’ve returned it to the shop and will only get one when I get back from holiday (in January), so for the moment you can watch us at work.  It is quite possibly the coolest web cam in the world, and in fact in the entire history of the world. 😉  So check it out at http://digitaltinder.com/webcam.