Today I tried to open a current account for a local users group, and I discovered that most of the banks suck.

I assume that the Northern Bank sucks, as I was advised not to go near it at all.

The Nationwide didn’t suck: they were friendly and clueful, but unfortunately none of their accounts were actually suitable.

Of the banks I tried, the First Trust is the worst. In the first branch, nobody spoke to me at all. I tried another branch where someone did try to help, but quickly admitted that he had no idea how to open an account for a society, and he might phone me next week if he found out.

The HSBC also didn’t know what to do, but they were a bit faster and more polite.

The Bank of Ireland did know about suitable accounts, and told me what I needed to do, but they seemed to want me to just go away, so I did.

The Ulster Bank were awkward, but they tried to help, answered questions, and gave me the forms I needed. They were the least sucky.

The day was saved by the Alliance & Leicester, who were helpful, friendly, answered all my questions, and gave me a glossy /Clubs and Societies/ brochure with all the details and forms. They were the only bank who seemed pleased that I wanted an account with them, so they can have it.

It seems I don’t need to bother calculating the odds for the Fibonacci straight, since Marc told Jeremy at “Love and Casino War, who knows what he’s doing and worked out the odds.

Jeremy obviously has much more poker experience, so I agree that ranking fib-straights and fib-straight flushes the same as normal straights and straight flushes would be the most practical way to play them, but I think it would be more /interesting/ to play them in a class of their own, especially as a fib-straight is better than a full house and a fib-straight flush is better than a straight flush. I suppose we really need people to play it both ways and give some feedback.

BT emailed me today to let me know that they are bringing ADSL to Whitehead. The expected activation date is 2003-01-07, but I’m hoping we’ll have it by Christmas.

So, it’s time to intensify my quest for an ISP. I know what I want, so I tried the ADSLGuide advanced search.

Leonardo Fibonacci was an amazing mathematician. His greatest achievement was introducing the western world to decimal number system. I’m not sure if I should be grateful for this. There is no doubt that decimal is better than the Roman numeral system it replaced, but the choice of 10 as the base is not optimal except for counting on your fingers. Fibonacci himself seemed to prefer base 60, but I don’t think that would be a good default either. Hackers would prefer 8 or 16. For everyday use, 12 would be much better than 10.

Fibonacci, though, is not famous for decimal numbers: he just popularised them; they had been used in India and Arabia long before he found them. He is famous for a eponymous sequence of numbers.

The Fibonacci sequence starts with 0 and 1. Subsequent values are obtained by adding the previous two values, so the first 10 values are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34. Patterns from the Fibonacci sequence occur in nature, and the related /golden section/ is interesting too.

I was watching to Karen, Marc, and Tony play poker this afternoon. Tony mentioned a Fibonacci straight, probably in an effort to fleece Marc out of his money. I think it’s a great idea, and we should include it in all poker games. To do that, we need to know what it is and where it lives on the poker ladder.

A Fibonacci straight is a hand of 5 cards forming a subsequence of the Fibonacci sequence. So, in poker there would be three such straights: A, A, 2, 3, 5; A, 2, 3, 5, 8; 2, 3, 5, 8, K. The latter two can occur in /flush/ form too.

I haven’t had a chance to calculate all the odds yet, but a Fibonacci straight is higher than a normal straight.

It must be something in the air, or maybe it is the heat.

Until my laptop disk died a few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen a major disk failure.

SWM had a similar problem a few days ago. And this morning, after an unexpected power shutdown at a datacentre in the middle of the night, I observed a catastrophic disk failure on a webserver.

I hope it doesn’t continue.