For anyone thinking about moving to the UK (or maybe any European country), here's some tips that I wish I had when I came over.
The banks that have been the most helpful:
NatWest required proof of address, and suggested that I get my bank at home to mail a statement to my temporary address here in the UK. Had I known that earlier, this would have been the best option.
HSBC has an account for incoming international people. You can (and should) apply for it before you come to the UK. They call it the Passport account. They do some background checks that took about a week for me. They then required me to prove my address back in the States. Unlike other banks, they accepted my proof of employment letters as proof of address (they had my US address on them.) The one down side is that their account costs 8 pounds per month. When you can't get an account any other way, that doesn't sound like so much.
The bank that sort of considered helping me, but screwed up with paperwork and cost me 3 weeks:
The co-operative bank
The banks that outright denied me any consideration:
Lloyd's TSB
Royal Bank of Scotland
Dear UK Bank system,
In case you were wondering, I hate you. Your absolute refusal to even consider any piece of reasonable evidence that I am worthy of an account (aside from proof of address) is ignorant, irrational and most of all irritating. You acknowledge that I cannot obtain an apartment (and thus an address) without a bank account, yet you insist on proof of address. This is in spite of my proof of employment, proof of clean background check for entry to your national laboratory, and proof that I have paid over 1500 pounds as a deposit on an apartment, which I cannot move into until I have a bank account. Truly your stubbornness puts even retarded donkeys to shame.
Sincerely,
An employed American with a Ph.D. who has zero debt, has made one late credit card payment in 10 years, and now would prefer to put his money beneath his mattress, if only he could actually be paid without your slimy services.
In the name of ergonomics, I'm training myself to not touch the mouse and keep hand movement to a minimum. Here's a few tips that have been the most helpful to me:
- changing tabs in firefox: use alt-numbers. I keep gmail open in tab 1, so switching to it would be alt-1. mostly, my most recent tab is the furthest one out in my bloated tab bar. To get to the last tab, press alt-9. Great for quickly checking any email, then switching back to whatever else I was reading.
- Code editing with emacs/vimpulse. I'm no pro, but I have used vim for about 5 years, thanks mostly to Gentoo Linux tutorials. I admit to being the typical noob, and staying almost exclusively in insert mode. As part of my experimentation, I followed the superb vimtutor tutorial (just type in vimtutor at your command prompt if vim is installed). vim is awesome! you can move about so easily! However, all of my internet reading suggested that the architecture of emacs would get me a little further in the long run. In emacs, moving around in files is not quite as easy. This is where vimpulse (or viper) comes into play. It lets me use vim commands to move around, but allows me to do so within the framework of emacs. Best of both worlds!
I'm out for now, but I'll update this post or make new ones as I explore.
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