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We mouth this sort of platitude all the time and then happily go back to assuming everyone sees the world the same way we do. Every once in a while, some innocuous event comes along that allows us to see this more clearly. I had one of those moments last week and it's struck some kind of chord.
My moment occurred last weekend when I had to borrow the Civic to run an errand involving jumper cables (I don't have jumpers yet in the new car, I was also going to a muddy shipping yard and so on). What an amazing difference eight weeks made. I'd driven the Honda for several years and had established a certain view of the car based entirely on perception. The drivers space had seemed relatively comfy and even somewhat close, given the dimensions of the car.
All that went out the window last week. After spending so much time in the still spacious Mustang cockpit, going back felt drastically different. The headroom (always a problem) was really annoying and there was a sense of the drivers space being too large and open. There was also a slight problem with the clutch. My left foot just sort of automatically settled on a peddle and it didn't feel right. I had to look down to remind myself that there were only two peddles in the car. My view of the drivers experience in a Civic has been altered forever and even though my mind was fighting to reconstitute what was, I was left with what is (as perceived by my low quality perception engine).
All of this only makes it easier to understand the feelings of the canyon crawlers who worship the Miata (rightfully so, given their world view). As a result, they think the 'Stang cockpit is a lot like being tossed into a badly fitting washtub. My new project vehicle would have them breaking out in hives.
Before the playoff's get rolling today I thought I'd pass along the disclaimer recommended by Bill Simmons in the wake of last weeks interesting officiating:
"We'd like to apologize in advance for the horrible officiating. We swear, these games aren't fixed, it just looks that way. We're just too cheap to make officiating a real priority or hire anyone who's under 40 years old and might still have his reflexes and eyesight. Even instant replay isn't helping -- it just makes these guys look three times more incompetent when they're overruling calls that never should have been made in the first place. These guys are boobs. We're sorry. Anyway, enjoy the game!"
-- Sincerely, the NFL
Enjoy!
It's possible that I'm the last clod in the US to learn of the Costco photo printing services, but on the off chance that I'm not, I'll pass this along. If you have a local Costco and a digital camera, this could come in handy. At this point, I'm a satisfied customer.
Since moving to a digital camera a few years ago I've been doing a pretty good impression of an ostridge when it comes to prints. I found the idea of local digital images and web based based pages a better way of sharing. Not everyone feels that way of course. People like my wife and other members of the family want pictures they could stick in wallets or frames. Sometimes even I wanted to blow up something I'd managed to capture. But I kept my head pretty firmly embedded in the sand.
A recent request by my aunts for a specific picture finally spurred me into some sort of action. But I wanted an 8x10, which was a bit tricky. I was still searching for something that worked for me when I talked to Stu on New Years Eve (we had our usual two hour conversation that happened to include a bit about photo printing services). His first recommendation was Costco. I had to explain that I haven't been in there in years and didn't even know they had photo processing.
Silly me, I should have known about this a while ago. C'est la vie. In the last few days I've obtained an updated membership card (my hair is no longer anywhere near my shoulders), setup a photo account, done a number of web uploads, ordered a few different prints of varying types and sizes and brought them home so we could check them out.
The web upload plug-in for Safari is much better than I expected and works quite well. My only disappointment was the lack of support for TIFF files; I had to convert one image I'd done some tweaking on to JPEG in order to upload. I haven't tested in FireFox yet, something to get around to I suppose.
With everything turning out so well (I'd printed a mixture of 4x6's, 5x7's and 8x10's in my first couple trips), I figured I'd take a shot and see what a 12x18 on lustre paper looked like. I wound up trying this picture of the tree out front (taken in the odd lighting provided by the September fires) and it looks good enough to mount. Cost? $2.99 plus tax and I picked it up this afternoon after submitting last night.
I still need to check out Mpix, also recommended by Stu for more professional level imaging services (canvas prints? sounds interesting) but I'm quite happy with the quality and efficient delivery offered by Costco.
