Online Processing

Harping back to yesterday’s post about online photo processing and the like, I opted to try the top three from the Amateur Photographer testing. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve decided to enter yet another competition with a couple of photos, and they need to be prints rather than on a CD. So obviously I want to get the best results I can, and it seemed like a good opportunity to do some comparison testing. I was only going to try the best processor, but well – I couldn’t.

The top three (in order) were :

1. Colourmailer
2. Truprint

and

3. one whose name I can’t remember, but will edit later

(it’s one of those days)

Colourmailer were OK-ish – reasonable prices for larger prints, although the standard 6″x4″ are more expensive, the upload stuff seemed to work fine and so on, but the useless bastards only take visa and mastercard. So that’s that plan stuffed.

Truprint (supposedly a really good site) which had the joint problems of a) being IE only, and b) still having errors in IE, so it wouldn’t even upload the photos.

And the third one wasn’t actually available. (Which is why I can’t remember the name of the company – it just kept on coming up with a DNS error)

So all in all, I’ve deciced that for the moment I’m going to stick with
Photobox. They might not be the cheapest, but I’m yet to have a problem with them, and the stuff they’ve printed for me so far has been excellent, all the way up to A2 size prints.

So now I just have to see how the prints come out at A4 size for the competition. They should arrive tomorrow…

Desperately Sad

Yesterday I got my complete West Wing Season 4 on DVD. I haven’t seen any of that season, as Channel 4 are utter bastards, and only started showing it two weeks ago.

Anyway, is it exceedingly sad at that point to have already watched the first three episodes last night?

Photographica

The photos from Photobox, and the quality of them is superb. As always with their products, I’m so pleased with how they’ve turned out. A while back one of the photography magazines did a review of the online developers and they came out as “average” – I must admit I haven’t tried the reviewer’s favourite yet, but if Photobox are average, then the other lot must be fantastic. I’d hope.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I’m going to be putting together some more prints on a larger format again, so I might experiment with Colourmailer, who were the top scoring online lab in the survey. It’ll be interesting to do a comparison!

Dentistry

Well, all went well – Manchester Dental Hospital seem to be people who actually know what they’re up to. So all’s been done, and all gone well.

Criticism

From this morning’s comments, I couldn’t resist posting more about adso’s one in the post below. I’d offer a link or a mailto, but they’ve not been brave enough to leave a valid one, sadly.

Jesus Christ you’re a miserable cunt aren’t you!

Really, life is too short to have such a cynical attitude as yours. There aint nothing cool about being jaundiced. You need to change your attitude before your life turns out to have been a complete waste of air.

I’m not quite sure how, in a post containing the phrase “find it funny” I get to be called a miserable cunt. But there we go – freedom of speech and all that jazz.

As for life being too short to have a cynical attitude, I’d disagree. Yes, I can be cynical (Shush, you at the back there) but it’s not a permanent state of affairs. Jaundiced? Yeah, I resemble that comment on occasion too.

But what adso has failed to realise in all his wisdom is that it’s all a matter of perspective. The stuff here is one facet, and there’s much more. But even here I’m not solely cynical and jaundiced, and if the divvy little git had read further, or perhaps removed head from arse, they’d have realised that.

All the same, it’s fun to get hatemailcomments every so often, even if only for a bit of a reality check.

Inspired

Yes, I’m sure it was “in bad taste” but I can’t deny that I found it funny seeing the story about staff from a private gym handing out promotional literature as the nearby council-run gym burned down. It takes a particular form of warped logic to seize the opportunity on something like that, and while I might disagree with the principle, I do still find myself with a slight respect for anyone brave/quick enough to take that initiative.

Frustration

Ever have one of those days where people all around you appear to be experts in fuckwitdom? Today’s been one of those for me.

Not content with the already-posted cretins of the workplace, I come home to a card on the doormat. The contractors who were supposed to be here on Thursday have decided they’d come today instead. And the mobile number they left on the back of the card was – you guessed it – wrong.

Then BT called – well, their Indian call-centre. “You haven’t paid your bill”. “Yes I have”. and so on. I ask to be put through to customer accounts. “We can’t do that from here, we’re just here to tell you you haven’t paid”. Grrr.

Then the person who was supposed to be helping my house-mate after her wisdom-tooth extraction tomorrow has decided he can’t make it after all. She’s going to be sedated for the operation, and I know how bad that can make you feel. So I’m going to be taking some time off (again) to make sure she’s OK.

It’s one of those days when I could just spit.