What a company!

I bought a CD from a web based store yesterday. Today I got the shipping note. I'm reproducing it here because I think it is wonderful.

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, August 30th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

I'm very tempted to buy something else, just to see if I get a different message.

Author! Author!

My book is now out! People with an urge to learn programming and 6.99 to spend can now mosey on over to Ab-Libris and invest in an electronic copy.

This is the book that had to be written. That tells it like it is. That pushes back the frontiers of learning and lays bare the truth.

Oh, and it teaches you a bit of C# as well.

Live Writer Flickr Inkifier now available

I've finished writing the code for the latest Live Writer plugin. It lets you grab images from Flickr, annotate them with ink and then post them back. It also has a few image processing feature, including a "wild" thing which is quite fun. You can find out more here.

Update on Sunday, September 3, 2006 at 11:33AM by Rob

I've fixed a couple of issues with the plugin. It now responds sensibly if you use it on a machine with no network connection, or a non-tablet device.

Partycrasher

Ever held one of those parties where folks turn up uninvited, drink all your booze, trash the place and then stay around for months afterwards 'cos they figure you want them around?

Well, I haven't, but they sound terrible.

I had something similar though when I installed my new camera software. Normally I avoid installing programs that come with things like cameras. I've got my own image processing software (Microsoft Digital Imaging Suite since you asked) and it works fine thank you very much. Normally a camera is recognised by Windows as a storage device, and I've found that things go pretty smoothly even if you ignore the draconian "Install software before placing camera within a 1000 metre radius of the USB socket on your computer" warnings that they come with.

However, the new camera that I've bought has a RAW mode, where it captures the image information directly off the sensor and passes it to the computer for processing. This is great if you want the ultimate in quality, but it means that you need software to unpick the picture when it arrives. This is usually tied to a particular camera range. So I figure I have to install the software.

Which does the digital equivalent of drinking all my booze, trashing the place and then refusing to leave. It installs yet another icon in my full to bursting system tray. It gets in the way of any other cameras that I might dare to plug in. And when I remove the darned thing, it stops the system automatically recognising other USB devices.

Pesky driver software.

I've heard that Windows Vista is a lot less accommodating to newly arrived drivers from hell. I hope so.

Roman Holiday

Last week I bought a new camera. I really shouldn't have. But this was a real bargain and so I liquidated all my ebay assets and sallied forth to Currys to make the purchase. I wanted the camera because it has a very long zoom lens.

So today we went off to Sewerby Park, where they were doing some Roman re-enactments. And out came the camera...

Sewerby House looking good

A local parrot

They do have some superb gardens here.

Bridlington Bay

And looking the other way..

Apparently it is rather hard to shoot an arrow from horseback.

Testing the troops