gavin on life

York Races Photos

gavin — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 12:05:57 +0000

There are lots of York Races Photos and Fashion on the Field Photos now online I see from the 2011 Ebor Festival.

Shameless plug

gavin — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 14:37:31 +0000

This is a shameless plug for the portable hand controls and wheelchair accessible vehicles that you can buy online at Alfred Bekker.

Interesting new site on the horizon

gavin — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 10:38:44 +0000

There is an interesting new sure on the horizon that appears to be all about disabled hand controls

foto.com review – poor quality print

gavin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:36:48 +0000

Just a quick review of my experience with foto.com

Having just received an order from foto.com that I am not particularly happy with I thought I would give it a quick review. I ordered from foto.com in the UK and went for their two sided greetings cards – Classic 10x15cm.

The quality of the print for the front image is fine, but the text inside the card is fuzzy and not acceptable. I used their online ordering system and went for an italic font for the writing and you can see the result below where it says ‘August 2010′. Interestingly, the ‘product: 10×15′ text is just a part of their packaging that is printed on the same cards and that text is perfectly clear and acceptable. I appreciate the image below is a scan but you can see the difference and that difference matters when looking at the finished product. The printing is poor quality, fuzzy and looks rubbish.

OK, not a problem I will contact Customer Services and send them my scan. Here is the response from foto.com customer services …

Dear Customer,

To be honest, I don’t quite understand because when looking at the scan you provided the quality of the printing seems perfectly fine. Of course it isn’t as clear as the reference text but that is because you chose a more elegant font that is in italic.

I could, if you wish, ask for a reprint, but the result would be the same. However, if you still want a reprint, could you please send us proof that you have teared up, shredded or destroyed the order? Simply take a photo with your digital camera of the destroyed order and send it as an attachment to my email address.

This is standard procedure and we need this before we can refund or reprint the order.

Kind regards,

Jonathan
English Customer Support Foto.com

So it is my fault for choosing an ‘elegant font that is in italic’. Surely if they cannot print that font properly they shouldn’t give me the option to use it. It was nice of them to offer to reprint them just as poorly again but I didn’t take them up on the offer. It’s that poor customer service that puts you off a company.

Lesson learnt. Don’t use foto.com again.

Anybody else had poor quality printing from foto.com ?

UPDATE: it seems I am not the only one unhappy with foto.com judging by the comments below, others have experienced poor quality and bad customer service.

UPDATE 2: This page is now being seen on average 12 times a day by people doing a search for foto.com review, foto.com quality that is 360 people a month hearing about my bad experience. I wonder how many of them are likely to go on to place an order with foto.com ?

UPDATE 3: I have now received a full refund from foto.com for this order. Thank you.

BBQ Recipes

gavin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:56:12 +0000

There is a great new site for bbq recipes on the web. As a massive barbecue fan there is nothing better than new and free barbecue recipes to try out.

Sony Ericsson C905

gavin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:34:07 +0000

I recently got a Sony Ericsson C905 connected to Orange – so far not too impressed with the signal strength. It gets a 3G signal then a second later loses it, flips to GSM and back again all the time.

Last week it completely locked up and refused to start up again. I managed to connect it PC and used SEUS to flash it back to life.

Permanent 301 Redirect to new domain using IIS6

Gavin — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 23:00:02 +0000

I’ve recently had to move an ecommerce site from a .com domain to a .co.uk. Since the .com was well indexed by the search engines I wanted to use a 301 Permanent Redirect method. The site is hosted on Windows 2003 using IIS6 so I set about finding a solution. It turns out (although it is poorly documented) that you can set it up in IIS directly. Since I found it a struggle to maintain the querystring when redirecting, this is how to do it…

The following steps show how to move from domain.com to domain.co.uk and retain your directories and querystring information. For example, www.domain.com/shop/product.asp?pid=100 will be redirected to www.domain.co.uk/shop/product.asp?pid=100 with a 301 header telling the browser it is a permanent move.

Set up your new site at domain.co.uk
Open the properties for your domain.com site in IIS
On the Home Directory tab for domain.com choose ‘A Redirection to a URL’
In the redirect to box enter http://www.domain.co.uk$S$Q (note there is no slash after .co.uk)
Tick the ‘The Exact URL entered above’ and the ‘A permanent redirection for this resource‘ options.
Thats it

If you care about how it works, the $S tells IIS to take the subdirectory location and script e.g. /shop/product.asp and the $Q grabs the querystring. You might think it would make sense to not tick the ‘The Exact URL entered above‘ box, but if you do you get a very different result.

I hope that helps somebody, as it had me stuck for a while and the documentation isn’t very useful.

Google offer overflow storage for sale

Gavin — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:02:00 +0000

Google are now offering overflow storage space to those that need it. If you are one of the people who have managed to use up the free quotas of 1GB on Picasa and 2.8GB for Gmail accounts then you can go and buy yourself another 6GB of storage for just $20/year. Sounds like a bargain, but judging by my current usage (see picture) they won’t be getting $20 from me for quite some time.

Photo published for travel guide

Gavin — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:07:25 +0000

I was quite pleased today to see that one of my photo’s of Cologne Zoo in my sleeping flickr pages has been selected to be used as part of an online travel guide. I don’t think the photo is that great, but I guess they wanted a picture of a reptile. The Schmap!! Guide to Cologne can be found here with my picture.
TEST

Social Networking sites – Corduroy Seagull

Gavin — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:25:39 +0000

I’m sure I could rant on for hours about how pointless most of the social networking sites are but I really can’t be bothered. It does makes me chuckle how people defect from one site to the next ‘cool site’. Are you one of the 192 million people still using Myspace? Haven’t you heard it’s not cool anymore and that people are moving to Facebook? Think for a minute – is there any point to any of these sites? If after thinking and you think there is then I suggest you get yourself along to each of the following that you have never heard of yet and sign up to each and every one of them and share your ‘world’ with the advertisers.

Bebo
Myspace
Windows Live Spaces
orkut
Hi5
Xanga
Facebook
Classmates.com
Reunion.com
Broadcaster.com
Friendster
Twitter
Netlog
Pizco
Faceparty
…

If you are a proud member of all these then all I can suggest for you is that you join what looks to be the very latest in the long line of these pointless sites – the ‘soon-to-be-cool’ VelvetPuffin. We have been working on Corduroy Seagull for some time now and think they must have a mole in our office to have come up with their name.

As a side note, I wonder how long it will be until we are ranked number 1 in Google when searching for Corduroy Seagull?
UPDATE: It took just 2 days to top Google and ~~Msn~~ Live with searches for Corduroy Seagull. Have a look at the following screens for it. Also note the idiots who don’t take any care about their sponsored ads. Surely they should be a little more specific and not be showing up for phrases such as Corduroy Seagull.