11/15/2005

Lulu Arrives

The first calendar via Lulu arrived. I wasn't expecting anything great but it was worse than expected. The cover, which is on a heavier stock than the inside pages, is okay. Once you get inside there are streaks of magenta ink in various places; usually showing up the most in the lighter areas. Not the type of thing you need to look closely to see. It's almost as if you took a little magenta, mixed it with water and did a bit of watercolor painting in the lighter areas.

There is also a cross-hatching (what I'd call banding on an inkjet, but this one goes in both directions). And of course the maximum black is nowhere near an inkjet print. What else can I say - it basically looks like a badly made calendar by an inexperienced high-school student on a xerox machine.

The next calendar to arrive has sharpening applied - though I can't imagine that will help much. Also - even if it does arrive without streaking - what am I to make of that - some will be streaked and some won't?

I also have one book arriving. That may be better. I don't know. All in all - pretty dismal so far.

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I'm pretty sure this is going to be a waste of money, but I'm going to take one more stab at it, this time doing the "premium" calendar (larger and more of a card stock paper is used, i.e. thicker). And I'm going to take - I think it was Jeff's suggestion and stick the images on my own white template so I can have more control over the layout, put some rule lines around the image and place the caption where I want. This is surely asking for trouble because even if the damned thing does work - the production cost is like $20 for each calendar. Gods above, be kind to me as I am a stubborn guy.

Kick Me

I'm just printing all day. Printing, printing, printing. About 20 prints to get out. And everything was going well until - you guessed it - I couldn't find a negative. What is wrong with me? I could picture the strip it was on. It was for a 5 x 7 print ($25). And after spending two hours looking for it - I remembered that I had been in the middle of filing negs. the other day - and hadn't finished and sure enough it was in that pile. So kick me.

It's bad because it ain't the first time and I know it won't be the last that some neg. disappears. The problem is that there's always a different reason. A few weeks ago it was because I had pulled a negative from the file system (at least I have one) because so-and-so wanted a high-rez scan. Did I re-file it afterwards? No. I just left it in a pile with some other stuff.

Most probably some of these negs. end up where my socks end up. I can buy a million pair of socks at the beginning of the year but by the end of the year only two are left (I'm wearing them now).

Oh and on top of that - my healing brush cursor which used to be a nice circle just turned into the healing brush icon and I'm too proud to ask someone who knows why that happened. I changed all the cursor preferences but no luck. When you select the source with the ALT KEY you get a nice circle - and then when you go to zap something you get this stupid healing icon which doesn't show me exactly what it is healing. What did I do to deserve this fate? Must be bad karma for doing too much marketing and getting too many orders.