So It’s Official Then

When the prices in the photo lab were increased back at the beginning of summer I, along with several other people, wondered whether this was the sign of a bigger impending change for the company’s photo labs. We wondered whether the company would eventually look to stop offering film processing at its photo labs and concentrate on the digital and gift market.

Over the past few years as digital cameras have become both more affordable and more popular the number of films we process has dropped. Whereas three years ago we were looking at an almost 50/50 split between film and digital we’re now looking at about 20% film if that, with the remainder coming from both digital and gifts. We’re presently mainly processing disposable cameras and we don’t often see a film which would have come out of a proper film camera unless it’s one that someone has found at the back of a drawer or something.

When the prices were revised earlier in the year it seemed like the film prices saw a much bigger increase than anything else, going up by around 20%. Compare that to an increase of maybe a few pence to nothing on the per print digital prices. With the cheapest service we’re allowed to offer now being £5 or £6 depending on the size of the film (there is a cheaper 2 day service on the books but we’re not allowed to offer it for some reason) it made us wonder whether they were trying to price themselves out of the market to give an excuse to end the film service. Okay, so while £5 or £6 might not be too bad for the 1 hour service, it’s a lot to pay for someone who might not be back for a week or so. If people start to see it as too expensive, demand will fall and they can then use this as a reason for getting rid rather than just removing it.

With an ever increasing range of gifts being offered both online and in stores, and an increasing number of produced in store gifts too (there have been a further 6 additions to our in-store gift range recently) it looks like they’re preparing to cover any potential losses from film in this way. Not to mention the fact that photo shop stores, where certain gifts can be ordered and produced on site rather than in seven days, routinely sell more gifts than standard ones and they eventually want all Extra stores with photo processing to be photo shops rather than photo labs. It doesn’t look good for the future of film processing.

It was confirmed by our group manager this week that Tesco are now trialling a dry lab system from Hewlett Packard in one of the stores in our group. This is a lab without any form of chemicals whatsoever and, crucially, no film processing since you can’t develop film without chemicals. Apparently it’s the first of its kind in Europe and it will be interesting to see how the trial goes. I believe it’s being trialled in a photo shop store so it will also be interesting to see if there’s any drop in takings as a result of there being no film processing.

I would imagine that should the trial be a success then these dry labs will be rolled out to all Extra stores at the very least and they will no doubt take the downtime as an opportunity to upgrade any standard labs to photo shops at the same time. If the dry lab can be proved to be workable then it would probably save them money in the long term as the number of consumables required should drop and thus the running costs should be lower. I have no idea how these dry labs work so I don’t know if they would save any money from consumables there but there would be no film related consumables to worry about. Then there’s the added benefit of giving the stores new equipment, which should result in less downtime overall and therefore an overall increase in profit.

Of course it’s going to take some time for the trial results to be collated and analysed so even if it is going to be rolled out it will be some time before that happens so film processing should be safe in the short term at least. If it is rolled out it will depend on how it’s allocated as to when I will see any of it. If they do the highest performing stores first we, as a consistently top of or second in group, should be fairly high on the list. If, however, they do it based on how old the existing kit is then we’ll probably be one of the last since ours was replaced a couple of years ago, not that you’d know it with all the problems we have!

Windows 7

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that Microsoft has recently released their latest version of Windows, Windows 7. Widely touted to be everything that Vista should have been and a much quicker and more pleasant user experience I decided to upgrade my main PC to the new operating system (OS). Now I’m going to tell you what I think about it (click on any picture to view it full size).

First of all it should be noted that the computer involved is quite new and of a reasonable to good specification (2.34GHz Quad core CPU with 4GB RAM and 1GB graphics card for those interested) so it handled Vista without too much of a problem. There were odd pauses here and there, particularly when trying to access folders containing a lot of data, but in general it was fine. Start-up and shutdown times were good and in general there was little cause for complaint. However, it was always my intention to get rid of Vista on this machine as soon as I could since it is a notoriously power hungry OS and I felt that in some situations I wasn’t getting the best out of the hardware as a result.

Normally I try to wait at least a few months after the release of an OS or major piece of software before purchasing or upgrading to allow it some time in the real world with real people in its final form. This generally allows any major issues to come to light and be solved before I acquire it. However, an excellent pre-order price plus staff discount from Tesco and generally favourable impressions meant that I had a copy in my hands on the release day, so I took the plunge and installed it there and then.

Ugrading was a painless process for me.

The upgrade process was painless and required nothing more than some information at the beginning and being left to it. About three quarters of an hour later Windows 7 was ready to use. I was pleasantly surprised by the way in which everything just worked. There none of the driver or software compatibility issues which caused much frustration when completing an upgrade to Vista from XP on an older machine. The only thing that didn’t work 100% as it should was the software for my monitor which would run but wouldn’t allow any of the settings to be changed. It was the latest version too, but running it in compatibility mode for Vista did the trick and all was well.

So, first impressions then were favourable. I wasn’t sure about the new taskbar arrangement at first whereby programs are represented by icons rather than the more traditional bar with tiny icon and text. It makes the taskbar much taller than I was used to and at first made it appear too tall. I did fiddle with the setting to make the icons smaller which reduced the taskbar to a size I was more used to but eventually reverted back to the default. Now that I’m used to the size I don’t notice it any more but it may be something of note for those who tend to have their display set at a lower resolution, since the taskbar on the default settings will take a fair amount of space. It’s easily changed though.

The Windows 7 desktop. Wallpaper by Digital Blasphemy.

The general interface also seems to be much cleaner than Vista. There aren’t any annoying lists of tasks on the side of Windows Explorer windows like there were previously. Instead you get a list of locations which is far more useful in my opinion and it’s all presented in a much cleaner way. Of course you can add and remove bits and pieces as you please to suit what you want. Having said that though, in what I assume is an attempt to make things accessible with fewer clicks, some of the basic applications included with Windows now appear more complex at first. Essentially Microsoft has implemented their “ribbon” system used with Office 2007 applications for things like Wordpad and Paint. While it undoubtedly means that more features are accessible straight away it can initially be a bit overwhelming. If you’re familiar with the Paint application from either XP or Vista compare it to the screenshot on the left from Windows 7 and you’ll see what I mean.

Paint in Windows 7

Documents are also now arranged in libraries rather than the more traditional My Pictures, My Music and so forth. These folders do exist still and can be accessed by clicking the user name in the Start Menu but if you click on Pictures in the start menu you’ll be taken to the pictures library. This is useful because it allows you display folders from many different locations with one click, handy if you keep things like music and pictures in a number of different places or, like me, on a separate drive or partition. It can all be displayed with just one click. My only small gripe being that you can’t remove system folders from the view, merely collapse them. So, for instance, I don’t use the My Music folder or the Public Music folder but I can’t remove them from the music library. It’s not a major issue by any means, but it would be tidier if you could.

Other small things I like include the new feature allowing you to rotate desktop wallpapers without having to download a separate application and the show desktop button which reveals the desktop by merely hovering over it. I truly can’t think of anything that stands out as being negative at all. If I wanted to be really picky there’s the small issue mentioned in the previous paragraph and also a tiny issue for me with saving themes. Even if you make the most minor change possible to your current saved theme, say removing a wallpaper from a rotation, it won’t give you the option of saving the changes the existing theme. Instead it creates an unsaved theme which you can then save with the same name as the one you altered which then gives you the opportunity to overwrite it with the new one. It’s a very small issue and perhaps a sign of how problem free the OS has been that I’ve mentioned it at all, but it seems a little at odds with the new “fewer clicks” philosophy.

In terms of speed I haven’t found any massive difference over Vista and in fact I think that Windows 7 actually takes slightly longer to start on this machine than Vista did. Perhaps this is more to do with the fact that it was an upgrade installation rather than a clean install (I had initially planned the latter and may well do so at some point). I haven’t encountered any of the pauses I did with Vista though so that’s an improvement for me and I have noticed that it is consistently using less RAM than Vista did.

Overall I have to say I am impressed. I may have been using Windows 7 for just over a week but it has been stable and entirely trouble free in that time (just watch, I’ll post this and it’ll all go wrong!). If you have a PC that runs Vista it will run Windows 7 without a problem, if your PC is at the lower end of Vista’s minimum specifications you’ll probably find that performance improves. If you have a good machine running XP then you’ll probably find that Windows 7 will be fine for you too, although it’s worth noting that upgrading from XP to 7 doesn’t seem quite as straight forward. You can download the upgrade advisor from Microsoft to be sure though.

I’d certainly recommend it over Vista any day of the week.

And It’s Done…

Although it took a little longer than expected all of the decorating I was doing last week has now been done. It was only one room yet it still required almost a week and a half to do, which is testament to both the speed at which I undertake these things and how it’s never good to try and cram too much into one week! Luckily for me Tesco were happy to allow me to extend my week holiday to a week and two days, which coupled with the two days I would have off anyway meant I didn’t go back to work until Friday. It does mean that I now only have a long weekend in February rather than a week but what can you do?

Everything was finally finished on Tuesday and I think I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday recovering! It was my bedroom that I was decorating and I was doing everything including painting,  new carpet and new furniture, well except for the bed.  What didn’t help time wise was that a lot of the furniture wasn’t able to be delivered until the Friday of the first week so while I had packed up what I could and got rid of what I could there was still furniture that had to be worked around and/or taken out and put back at the beginning and the end of the day. I didn’t bother putting the bed back together again each night and just slept on the mattress on the floor.

It would have undoubtedly have been far quicker  to have been able to take everything out of the room, lift the carpet and then do the decorating but that wasn’t possible. Aside from anything else there isn’t sufficient space in the rest of the house to put everything. As it was I had to do one half of the room properly, wait for that to dry and then do the other half, moving everything over in between, which resulted in a fair amount of wasted time. I reached the conclusion that I have too much stuff!

Even though all of the furniture was delivered on Friday as planned (and proceeded to clutter up both the front room and the hallway) I couldn’t do anything with it because the carpet wasn’t being fitted until Monday. I had originally hoped to have that done on either the Thursday or the Friday so that it could all be finished by Sunday and I could go back to work the following Monday. However I underestimated the demand and they weren’t able to fit it until Monday, which meant that there was little point in putting the new furniture in there until afterwards.

I did manage to treat myself to a nice new computer monitor though as the one I was using was a standard aspect 19” model which wasn’t exactly top quality in the first place and had a few dead pixels too. I replaced it with a 22” widescreen model from LG which, to show how much the prices have dropped, was actually cheaper than that fairly crappy 19” one was 4 years ago.

Should anybody be interested there will be a few pictures of the final result appearing on Flickr in the next few days or so. I would include them in this post but I haven’t taken them yet and it’s been long enough between posts already!

Just So You Know…

I’m on holiday from work for the next seven days so posting here may be even more sparse than normal. I know I say this every time I’m on holiday and normally end up posting more than usual but I’ve decided to do some much needed decorating this time round. Consequently I won’t have much time to post anything.

However, even if I were to have the time the chances are the posts would be about as interesting as watching paint dry.

See what I did there?

Accidents

I’ve never been in a serious car accident. I’ve been in a car when minor bumps have occurred and I have witnessed one or two more serious accidents, but I have never been involved in any, either as a driver or a passenger. Despite this, I have written off one car. Allow me to explain.

It was what I call my first proper car that I managed to write off. It wasn’t technically my first car, as my first ever car was an old 1989 Ford Escort and was given to me for the price of a tank of fuel so in effect it was free. I didn’t drive it very much though, primarily because I acquired it when I still learning to drive and purchased the “proper” car shortly after passing my test. Apart from anything else, driving the Escort after learning in a much more modern car with power steering and things like this was a bit like driving a tank, so I didn’t keep it very long.

I managed to sell it for £150 to a guy who lived around the corner, a nice little profit there, and went on to buy a Seat Cordoba (pictured right). In retrospect it probably wasn’t the best first car choice but it was cheap at £600 and I liked it so I bought it. I spent a little bit of money on it too, put in a CD player to replace the cassette player, bought some floor mats and some leather effect seat covers. I know, I know, but the actual seat fabric was absolutely disgusting and the fake leather was the most tasteful alternative I could find. I drove it around for about 6 months before I killed it.

It was entirely my fault, something I readily admit. I was leaving work one day when I took the wrong turning in the car park and ended up down the one road that ends in a dead end. That obviously meant I had to turn it around and that’s where it all went wrong. I decided that to get out I would just back it round into an empty space and go back out the way I had just come in. A sound idea in theory but let down by my poor execution. Poor observation and too much speed led to me backing into the then bakery manager’s BMW. There wasn’t a mark on his car but my car didn’t fair nearly as well, as you can see.

While it was too fast for the manoeuvre I was trying to make it was only an impact at no more than 10 mph. While it doesn’t look all that bad from the outside it had also bent the boot floor as well. It’s scary to think that a relatively low speed impact like that, albeit one with a solid car, could cause that much damage. I dread to think what would have happened if someone had driven into the back of it at say 30 mph.

While I wasn’t best pleased at the time as you can probably imagine I am glad now that it happened. It taught me not to be such a cocky little sod and to be more careful, a lesson I think that every driver has to learn at some point. I’m glad that it happened in a relatively safe way like it did rather in a more serious way in a higher speed collision or similar. It was definitely something I learned from and probably well worth both the short and long term financial penalties.