This is my blog. General tat, some insight.

Today I tried to order a photo print online. I snapped the image below on a day trip to Blackpool and I quite like it, so thought that rather than let it sit forever on my hard drive I'd get it printed on some nice paper and get it up on a wall or something.

It turned out, however, that this is a lot harder to do than I thought!

I had already uploaded the photo to my Flickr account and so thought I would look at ordering through there. After all, Flickr could probably use the revenue given that it seems to be falling out of favour. Dutifully, I clicked through to order the print and ended up at the Snapfish website waiting for it to import the photo from my photostream. They tell me I can use the code FLICKR to get a free 12" x 8" print. Wicked.

After waiting for 15 minutes I gave up and went through the Snapfish homepage instead. I managed to upload the image directly to the site myself after exporting it from Lightroom. I then discover that the discount code that the Snapfish website had touted just minutes before had now expired; that's some rapid turnover in voucher codes!

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Click here to download:

ordering-prints-online-is-hard-to-do-yrmaofeixwawyzdffkaI.zip (52 KB)

VERDICT: They didn't get my cash.

Jessops

Next, I tried Jessops. I'm a fan of Jessops. The guys in store are genuinely very helpful and in terms of price they're not too far off the mark. Seeing as they're always shouting about all of those free prints I thought they're a logical second choice.

So, let me get this off my chest first of all. My browser zoom level is set to 100%. I should not have to decrease this value in order to see the 'continue' button on your website's photo upload tool. It is incredibly frustrating.

Once I'd figured that out I moved on to ordering my print. But wait! I'm only being offered 5 sizes when right at the start of the process I'd selected poster prints / enlargements. Maybe I did it wrong? I tried again, changing my browser zoom level as I go.

No cigar. Turns out that if you want to buy poster size prints from Jessops you need some kind of ESP or other supernatural print purchasing power.

VERDICT: No dinero spent here either. On to the next..

Photobox

When I was a student I used to order prints from these guys and they were good. Let's give it a go.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't get much further in the process here before it went to shit than I did elsewhere. At least this time I'd manage to select the print size that I wanted before the photo upload tool asked me to 'just wait a couple of seconds'. After another 15 minutes I gave up on that one, particularly as there is no way to do it other than the Flash app they have.

VERDICT: Slightly red in the face and, again, no money yet spent.

Bonusprint

Remember these guys? Mums love them. They used to have leaflets dropping out of every women's mag and daily tabloid for years. Let's see if they are any good.

I'll save you the lengthy narrative. They're not. The Java applet they wanted me to use failed to load. A sodding Java applet?! Are they serious.

VERDICT: The money in my pocket is staying where it is.

Where does this leave me?

Well, it means that until I perfect printing at home I won't be getting a nice print of my photo of Blackpool pier. Had it been that I was tech illiterate, working on an age old machine full of bugs, and completely unfamiliar with this sort of thing I'd have thought that this bizzare series of photo website failures was my fault somehow.

If any of you have any luck doing this, please enlighten me and I'll update this post. In the meantime, given the decline in people taking such products due to the prevalence of digital, someone really needs to make this a much simpler and painfree process. Please! I beg of you!

This is lovely. Take ten minutes and watch this.

SILVER & LIGHT from Ian Ruhter on Vimeo.

It's been a while since this site was refreshed and this weekend I launched its new look. Gone is the reliance on background images, which have been the hallmark of my site for years. Crisp and clean block colours are the order of the day.

There's also been a change to the design of the site in the background as well, with the blog content moving to the blog.mathewcropper.co.uk subdomain. The main site, for now at least, is a hop off point to my profiles elsewhere with a few Flickr images and links to semi-decent blog posts to boot.

I've also taken the step of removing the comments features from the blog theme, making the site read only. Let's see how that one goes. If you want to tell me what you think, drop me a line on one of the sites above!

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This week I moved back up north. Here are some photos of us settling in and wandering around the Northern Quarter for a bit. More to come ;)

I'm moving house. Whilst packing it became painfully clear that I still have a load of books that I don't want, haven't read, and don't intend to read. For that reason I'm selling them, but not before you fine folks have chance to get first dibs.

Books are all used, some more than others, and may have writing in them. I'll be honest, though; I didn't take my studies too seriously, so the books on language and grammar are likely to be only very lightly annotated.

I cannot promise that the Blair Years won't bore its next owner to tears, and Danny Wallace is sickeningly perky in Follow Me.

Here's a list of books. If you want them, let me know. Pay what you think it's worth (plus postage of your choice).

1. The Times, Top 100 Graduate Employers 2006-2007. Probably completely useless now, right?
2. Coffman Crocker, French Grammar Fourth Edition (Schaum's Outlines).
3. Danny Wallace, Join Me.
4. Alastair Campbell, The Blair Years. My bookmark made it as far as page 47 before I got completely bored and stopped.
5. Michael Gerber, Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody.
6. Pountain and De Carlos, Practising Spanish Grammar: A Workbook. Hardly touched and can't actually tell whether I've opened this book before. Clearly, my Spanish grammar is appalling.
7. Muñoz and Thacker, A Spanish Learning Grammar. I wrote my name on the inside cover. That's all.
8. Butt and Benjamin, A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish Fourth Edition. As above.
9. Hawkins and Towell, French Grammar and Usage Fourth Edition. This one has been opened.
10. Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching Third Edition. This is, in fact, a very good book. If you're looking to do a TEFL / EFL course, this is a good one.
11. Griffiths, Before You Go: The ultimate guide to planning your gapyear. I didn't even want to go on a gap year. Lord knows why I got this.
12. DeLuca, Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions. I have never asked, or been asked, any of the questions in this book.
13. Shavick, Psychometric Tests for Graduates. I failed the mathematics psychometric tests twice at PwC. Not sure how good this book is.

Will add more to the list as I continue to clear out! Enjoy.