(chris) NiXoNbyname.com   the way i see it

Up until recently, Photobox have been my photo printing company of choice. They were very quick, and the quality of their prints was brilliant. When ever somebody asked me about photo printing, I would send them to Photobox.

A couple of months ago, they relaunched the site, and gave it a snazzy new look. The interface really was vastly improved, and it had a much cooler and updated feel.

Unfortunately, this is where things went wrong with my Photobox experience.

When it came to placing my first order under the new interface things kept going missing from my basket. It would show 32 items on the page, but when I clicked through to the basket, there would now only be 21 items. I would try again, and completely different things would go missing. It was a fairly complicated order, so I gave up after three attempts.

I emailed to alert Photobox about the issues, and they replied saying that a lot of their customers were experiencing similar issues due to a technical problem with their server, and that I should try again in a few days. I left it a couple of weeks, and tried again. This time success…or so I thought.

In the past, Photobox quickly got their orders out by 4pm the same day. In this case the dispatch took six days. Far too long, but OK, they must have been busy catching up with their server issues. However, that order has still not arrived over two weeks later.

What annoys me most is that I have emailed their customer service three times without any sort of reply. Each time a little more angry than the previous, but still polite. Today I’m furious. I’ve asked them if they could recommend a good photo printing site, written this piece, and I’m going to cancel the credit card transaction.

I can only presume that the reason they can’t be bothered to respond to my small problem is that they have much bigger problems to deal with.

In the mean time, I’ll turn the question over to you guys. Can anybody recommend a good UK online photo printing service? I’m looking for good quality printing at a fair price.

I was listening to Kevin Smith’s SModcast during the week, and he was talking about a documentary called King Corn. It sounded interesting so I stuck it on the rental list.

We sat down to watch it last night, and I’m glad we did. It’s about how the American diet is now completely dominated by corn, and corn-fed meat. It follows two guys who return to their roots, and grow an acre field of corn, and look into where it goes.

It turns out the corn that is used for all this animal food and high fructose corn syrup has bugger all nutritional value (and tastes really bad), and as a result of this, the current generation of Americans have a lower life expectancy than their parents for the first time in recorded history.

I have no idea if the same can be said for us Europeans. We don’t have the same systems of government corn subsidies that make it a worth growing to the same extent that they do in the States, but I’m sure they are exporting the hell out of this stuff too.

Anyway. It was a very interesting documentary. Well worth spending 90mins of your life on.

I’ve spent the last six months worrying about getting a proper off-site backup solution for my photographs. It’s all very well backing up to an external hard-drive, but what I the house goes on fire or an electrical surge blew the lot? Until now I have relied upon Flickr and SmugMug until now, but they weren’t able to act as back-up for my precious RAW files.

Yesterday SmugMug announced SmugVault, a new service that would allow users to back-up those RAW files too. I was extremely happy, and hurriedly signed up for the service. Unfortunately, I was quickly disappointed. I had thought it would “stack-up” the RAW files with the displayed jpeg files. This wasn’t the case. It was just a manual service where you could upload the RAW files alongside the jpegs, or keep them in a different folder.

It became apparent that the service was not for me.

Within minutes, however, it was suggested by Phill Price that I took a look at Mozy. An unlimited set-it-and-forget-it service that would back up all my important files, and for two computers would only cost me a fiver a month. I never have to worry about remembering to back-up. It takes care of all the thinking.

I’m still in the process of my initial back-up, but so far it has been extremely smooth and easy. The software is simple to use on both the Mac and the PC. It begins by suggesting the files that need uploaded to which I added a few (a lot!) more, and I hit go.

It really has been as simple as that.

Check back for a follow-up post next week as I update you on the completion of the back-up and the incremental updates.

OK. The headline is a bit misleading. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a disappointment. The reason everyone is wrong is why it doesn’t match our expectations.

I went in the theatre with fairly low expectations, but I was definitely there to enjoy myself. I still felt let-down.

Everybody places the blame squarely on George Lucas’s script. Everybody is wrong. The dialogue is cheesy, and the plot is implausible. The same, however, could be said for all Indy movies (and most other action movies). In the past it didn’t matter because because Indy was cool. So while this is a fault, this isn’t the reason why the movie was a let-down.

The reason why this movie hasn’t matched our expectations is that it was rushed and cheap.

Every dialogue scene looks like they’ve settled for the first take. The actors haven’t been given a chance to get into character for the part. It’s as if the directorial instructions were, “Get you lines said, and move on!” From the very first scene where Cate Blanchette is speaking to Harrison Ford. I couldn’t have been less convinced. Speilberg would have seen this on set, but time restrictions meant he had no choice but to move to the next bit.

Despite the extensive use of CGI, the movie looked very cheap. Indeed these things often go together. The sets looked unconvincing. Everything looked like it was filmed on a badly lit stage on the Paramount lot. I think the university car/motorbike chase was the only set I was convinced by.

It all smacks of a rush-job. Getting these titanic figures of the movie industry together at the same time was it’s downfall. Maybe Lucas or Speilberg (or both) didn’t need to be so involved after all. Perhaps if they were less involved, there would have been enough time to make this a great movie.

In a month which has seen some pretty major changes in NixonByName it’s also been a month that’s seen a huge increase in visitor numbers. I now feel a motivated to provide some proper content. I hope you are not disappointed over the coming months. This blog will always cast it’s net wide and take inspiration from whatever inspires.

Here are the top five posts from April 2008.

1. (L) China (H) Human Rights Violations: Apparently today Chinese internet users are saying “enough” to international bullying. Here’s my tuppence worth.
2. FriendFeed Interesting People: A top ten of the most interesting people I follow on FriendFeed. Scoble, Hawke and Arrington all make an appearance.
3. Productivity: Todoist: A post from 2007 that’s getting new attention. I’m a big fan of productivity tools. Here’s my take on a great GTD online application.
4. Apparently You’re an Audience: NixonByName has been going for nearly a year now, but with the recent relaunch I’ve only just discovered the size of the audience.
5. Getting the Hang of It: My favourite photograph so far of my wife and daughter together. Both look so happy that it’s now the desktop background on my PDA.

Well thanks very much for paying attention over the last month. I appreciate that people are interested in what I have to say. Even if it is sometimes ill thought out and badly judged.

Yours Aye.