Friday 26 June 2015

The Camera Never Lies?


I wanted to get a full draw pic of the spliced billet bow so I set up the video camera . The resulting picture grabbed from the video made the bow look odd, the lower limb looked short and like it was bending too hard. What was wrong?
Ah, I tend to cant the bow which brings the top limb closer to the camera, it's also important to get the camera height about the same height as the bow hand. We take our modern cameras for granted but they all have limitations. Take a picture of something with verticals at either edge of the frame and the limitations soon become apparent.
So I took the video again, taking care to have the bow upright. I didn't get quite such a full draw this time, but you can see the difference.

Looking at it closely, I think I possibly have the camera too high still as my bow hand is fairly low. Just for the heck of it I'll take another one with an extreme camera position to see what that looks like.

Ah it looks like the canting of the bow is the real culprit. Flipping between the pics, the last two look pretty similar, it's the first one where I have the bow canted that looks odd.

Enough of this, time for a little rant about banks.
Look away now if you work in that business.

I received a cheque for $150 for a magazine article I'd written.
I went to the Nationwide building society where I bank to pay it in and was told "We stopped accepting foreign currency cheques a few months ago".
I find this sort of thing really irritating.
They couldn't or wouldn't explain whether this was by choice or they were actually physically unable to process them now. The high street banks were all totally unhelpful, one said if I opened an account they'd pay pay it in for a £10 fee?! What a bunch of shysters, they have staff sitting there all day... how does actually having to make a few key keystrokes on a computer cost them any more?

Anyhow the way to complain these days is on Facebook (a fairly loathsome piece of software which doesn't let you put carriage returns in your comments.... it thinks that's the end of the comment) . I pretty soon got a response, it was a trite reiteration of the fact that they no longer accept foreign currency cheques.... (D'uh? That's what I'd just said) and an apology.
Not good enough so I told 'em I didn't accept the apology but wanted reasons or action, suggesting maybe I should take all my money to Santander who would at least accept the cheque.
That got a prompt response suggesting I could get the payment made using the SWIFT system.
All well and good but what is it and what's required?
Eventually they spelled out all the various codes and numbers which are needed to make the transaction.
Now why couldn't that information have been told to me when I walked into the branch?
I do realise that technology moves on and systems change, but banks seem singularly oblivious to the needs of their customers.
The news often refers to the "Financial Services Industry" IMO it is neither an industry nor much of a service.
It's not an industry because it doesn't actually produce anything, it just sponges of the efforts of others whilst stuffing it's own pockets.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Derek,
    Re the Facebook/carriage return thing - I've gotten into the habit of using Notepad* to compose any replies which might require a CR, then copy/paste into Facebook.

    *set up Notepad to start with a hotkey - I use
    Nice & easy!
    Bob S

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  2. Dammitt! The keystrokes were stripped out...
    That should have been "I use Control-Alt-N"
    Damn' computers are getting too clever by half...

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  3. Good tip. I eventual found how to go back and edit the comments too. There's an almost invisible edit symbol at the top of the post.
    Mind I do try avoid using Facebook, I probably write on there once every couple of years.

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