Month: September 2005

An after-school percussion group playing DJ Shadow’s Building Steam with a Grain of Salt and Changeling – pretty near perfectly as far as I can tell. This is fucking awesome! For high school drum geeks a project this has got to be infinitely better than playing Wipeout at the pep rally (right, Dave?).
The Shadow Percussion Project (movie file)
Note: The file is around 65.4 megabytes and plays much better if you save it to your own computer first by right clicking the link and selecting “Save As”.
(thx to steveo for the tip)

McSweeney’s delivered:
7 Habits of Highly Successful People.

Cooing at new-born babies banned
“A West Yorkshire hospital has banned visitors from cooing at new-born babies over fears their human rights are being breached and to reduce infection.”
That is all.

Japanese scientists (AKA “ika otaku”) have caught Architeuthis on film!
GO GO GO

Regarding my previous post about QOOP, the fact that the service rep found the review I wrote and responded in the comments in less than half a day just blew my mind. I imagine that they probably found my post by monitoring a search subscription like this, which, I might add, is a really smart thing to do when a significant portion of your target market is likely to have a blog.
QOOP states publicly in my comments that they are improving their service and willing to make good on the product with which I am less than happy. That’s just awesome! Other companies, take note.
I really want this service to work out – if it does, QOOP has gained a loyal customer and free advertising via any future commentary of mine as well as the photo books I will be showing off to everyone I know.
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The other thing I wanted to mention is that Technorati really got their act together just as Gen Kanai promised in an earlier post here, and as Technorati founder/CEO Dave Sifry posted on his blog. Searches are super fast again, and Cosmos (URL) search is back up. This is great news, because when Technorati was suffering from overload (a product of their own popularity), I searched long and hard for a suitable replacement. There was none.

The photo book I ordered from the QOOP flickr Photo Printer arrived today. I had chosen these photos and a few others from my flickr photostream to publish as a photo book. The short verdict for this service is that the cover and the binding of the book are nice, but the inner pages and print quality could be greatly improved.
The stock used for the inner pages is just too thin, and photos are visible through the opposite side. That’s all there is to say about that.
The print quality on the cover is decent because the cover is thick and glossy, like traditional photo paper, but the quality of the printing on the inner pages leaves a lot to be desired – I can get much better results even when printing on copier paper with my HP inkjet printer at home. For this photo service to be viable, this issue must be addressed before anything else. The color correction is horrible and all the photos are lackluster and almost look like they are printed at screen resolution in some cases.
I realize this service is in beta, but print quality of the photographs should really be their first priority. It’s a shame, because easy printing from flickr is a great idea and the web interface for the designing/ordering system was impressive. If they improved print quality of the final product, I would probably use them again, but not until then.
UPDATE: Check out the message that QOOP left in this post. I must say, this is very impressive. I believe I will give them another try when they switch over to the glossier stock, because the company is obviously trying hard to please its customers. I respect that.