I have an HSBC Advance account. It's a premium personal current account (ok, you can stop looking at me like I'm a fool – I get travel insurance and stuff. OK, OK, and I'm gullible!) You would think that one feature of a current account in this day and age, whether premium or not, would be the ability download previous statements in a data format or some sort.

In fact, for some inexplicable reason which must make perfect sense to you if you're a fat cat making billions after being bailed out by taxpayer's – i.e., our – money, HSBC allows you to do download statements in a variety of formats but only for recent transactions. As of this writing, my recent transactions only go as far back as the start of January, 2011. I also have access to "previous statements" that date back to the start of last year but – and it's a big but – I can't download them. I can print them but that's about it. WTF indeed.

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I love trying new things with Moo cards whenever I run out of a batch.

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Update: This post is barely a week old and already outdates. See my updated post and The GAE SWF Project to get started quickly buildingFlash and Flex applications on Google App Engine.
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If you're implementing PayPal Website Payments Pro Direct Payment in Flex, you're most likely going to need a ComboBox of country names and their ISO codes as expected by the PayPal API.

There's some freely available code for HTML but I couldn't find anything for Flex. It only took three find and replaces, however, to transform the HTML code into a lovely little Flex component. Here it is in hopes that it will save someone else the trouble in the future.

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