From: eli
To: QOOP
Date: August 27

hugh,

thanks for the update! it’s good to hear that i actually do have options. i will definitely give that a try for my next order, but i’ll probably still keep my fingers crossed just in case.

i don’t really see how that will affect things, though. my prints were in order when i submitted the last batch (i triple checked them), so the problem had to have occurred sometime between me submitting the order and you all receiving the order. i guess we’ll just have to wing it and see.

i really do appreciate the time you have spent dealing with me on this.

eli

i was afraid that if i waited too long before printing my next batch (like when i get back from antarctica = 9 months) they might forget that i even exist. then, if the problem does repeat itself, everything would be less relevant and i probably wouldn’t get the attention that i would get now. i put in the order, making certain that the photos were chronological.

From: eli
To: QOOP
Date: August 27

Hugh,

i just submitted another order for about 650 prints, order #xxxx61482.

here is the set that i printed:

http://flickr.com/photos/elisfanclub/sets/72157601700659474/

is it possible to at least just look at the order that they arrived to you guys and see if that is the order that they are in in the set i linked to above?

thanks again for your help

eli

that was yesterday afternoon. i was expecting to get some sort of email response later that evening or early this morning. neither of those things happened and i was left waiting.

then, much to my surprise, an unfamiliar number appeared on my cell phone’s caller ID this afternoon: it was hugh from QOOP! he was calling to let me know that the exact same thing was happening with my new order that happened with the last. it hadn’t been printed yet, but hugh was able to verify that the arrangement that they received was certainly not the same as the set on flickr. i had been completely vindicated!

it was at this point that deja vu set in… hazy dissolve.

What if:

I submit a set for printing, but first you guys compare the order of the photos in your system against the order on Flickr. If they are the same, go ahead and print them. If not, refund my money.

Is something like that possible?

hazy transition

I’m sorry but we can not do the request that you asked us to do. I’m sorry about not being able to help.

wait… what? what happened? did i black out? that was weird…

anyway, hugh told me that he was going to check with the engineers and with flickr and really dig deep on this problem. he also said that when they do finally get this all sorted out that i will be getting this batch printed and shipped for FREE (that’s about $100 worth of prints)!

From: QOOP
To: eli
Date: August 28

Thanks, Eli:

As I mentioned on the phone, we’ll be checking your order for you. (Thanks for the link as a control)

I’ll get back to you with any feedback from our engineers.

Best,

Hugh

———————-

i wrote all of the above sometime on wednesday afternoon and i was waiting to see what would unfold before submitting this post. i wasn’t sure what exactly i was waiting for, but i had a feeling. boy, was i right.

at about 6pm on thursday evening i got a comment (on the first qoop post) from Bill Murray, the CEO of QOOP. say what? that’s right… this shit has gone all they way to the top. so, click that link right there and read that shit (and my response) because it’s starting to get really exciting!

anyhoo, the guy continues to keep me laughing. his most recent comic about shopping teams had me in stitches, absolute stitches!

overall the park is pretty cool. the landscaping is awesome, it’s right on the water, and it was a beautiful tuesday afternoon. the only thing that sucked about the whole thing were the actual sculptures: they were the crappiest bunch of crap that i’ve ever crapped. seriously. they were so stupid and pointless and “artsy” and i almost puked.

the worst of the worst was a piece entitled “adjacent, against, upon” which feature giant cement blocks and huge chunks of limestone. i’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

after seeing that crappy art and hardly being able to believe my own eyes, i asked google for help. here’s what this seattle times article had to say about it:

It looks so simple, you’d never imagine the hostile debate it set off. Three rough stones and three smooth geometric forms, paired up one-on-one in an elemental dance. Stretched along 130 feet of shoreline at [Olympic Sculpture] Park, Heizer’s sculpture “Adjacent, Against, Upon” first seems like nothing more than a harmonious arrangement of forms against a shimmering backdrop of sky and water.

But as you enter into the piece and explore the artist’s design, it keeps growing. You feel the force of the relationship between raw stone and sculpted cement and can start to reflect on the way civilization butts against nature, instinct against reason. Heizer’s massive haiku of a sculpture encapsulates the basic conflicts of being human.

a harmonious arrangement of forms? the basic conflicts of being human? are you fucking kidding me? can you believe that crap? i know that it was created back in the 1970s and at the time it may have been pretty cool, but those words are just about as crappy as the art they are trying to describe. i just forced myself to puked a little bit and then swallow it to get the taste of crap out of my mouth.

we just finished watching the final episode of season 3 of LOST. it was amazing and wonderful and will leave me with plenty to think about for the next 7 months. until then, i’m going to give you my thoughts: there are spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen the finale yet you might want to hold off. enjoy!

jack and his “flashback”

jack’s flashback seemed to be more of a “flashforward.” i predict that for the remaining 3 seasons each episode will feature a specific character’s flashfoward instead of flashback.

the resulting contact with the boat “80 miles off-shore” will not result in rescue, which won’t happen until the end of the 6th season. therefore, over the next 3 seasons, the flashforwards will be working backwards toward the point of rescue in much the same way that during the first 3 seasons the flashbacks worked forward to the point of crash.

the two times that jack mentioned his father were just ways of trying to trick the audience: he could have easily found prescription forms of his father’s and filled them out for himself; when he told the new doctor to go find his (jack’s) father he was actually saying, “my father, on many occasions, was much worse off than i am right now, and he was never reprimanded.” he was also pretty cracked out and could have just been insane at the time.

questions

• with almost all of the “others” now dead, where are the remaining survivors of the tail section (the flight attendant, the kids, etc)?
• why/how was locke so certain that jack should not talk on the radio? what else did walt say to him?
• is Naomi genuine? or is she just a really good liar? who is she really working for?
• why did charlie think he had to die? why couldn’t he have left the control room and locked the door from the other side?

You’ve been sent a Flickr Mail from apwbdsgirl:

Hello-

Our company, BannerCaswell Productions, likes your photo “ty and emily arguing” and would like to use it as a still in our upcoming television show, “What Happens Next“. It’s a health show that explains how our bodies react to different stimulants.

Your photo will be used in an episode regarding emotion. We will credit you at the end of the show and include your username, elisfanclub, your photo’s name, “ty and emily arguing”, and the photo’s URL. If you would like either you or your photos to be credited under a different name, please email me at xxx.

We are based in Los Angeles, CA.

Thank you.

Cheers,

Allison

and now for the award winning photo… enjoy!

he’s been selling a few of them around the office, and i picked up one just a few days ago. it is wonderful. it’s indie and black ‘n white, but don’t let that fool you: the characters and story are awesome and lovable and amazing. i’m very proud him.

the really exciting part is that just the other day he found out from his publisher that he has been nominated for an Eisner Award! for those of you that don’t know, that’s a fucking really big deal. it’s like getting nominated for an academy award after only being in one movie. he’s going to comic-con in july, and i’ve got my fingers crossed for him.

so do yourself a favor and let your local shop know that you want to buy a copy of The Mourning Star by Kazimir Strzepek, you won’t regret it.

beginning in may 2002 i started taking digital pictures. since then, i’ve had 4 different cameras and taken about 12,000 photos. i used to use iPhoto, but the earlier versions couldn’t really handle more than a few thousand photos at a time, so i started making my own dvd backups. that was great and all, but those backup photos were buried and no one ever saw them. i wanted to do something with them, but i wasn’t quite sure what.

last fall, peter was blogging (complaining?) about having to “pay for everything” these days. in that particular instance, he was talking about the $25/year charge for the pro flickr account. i talked him straight, he ended up going pro with the whole thing, and in the process i convinced myself that it was time.

at that exact moment (2pm on October 29th, 2006) i pulled out my credit card, paid for a pro account, and started uploading my photos. i had so many in front of me but i knew that a journey of uploading 12,000 photos begins with uploading one.

seven months later, after skimming a few thousand off the top, the grand total is just a shade under 10 grand (9,531). i’m totally current and this feeling is wonderful. enjoy!

flickr.com/photos/elisfanclub

i was thinking about other languages and that got me thinking about all the different verbs and forms of verbs that we have completely memorized. it takes us fractions of a second to retrieve a single form of a single verb to fit in exactly with what we want to say at that exact moment. amazing.

and for some reason, the verb “to do” was the one i was focusing on: did, does, doing. that about cuts it, right? he did something in the past, he does something in the present, and he’s doing something in the future. or something like that.

anyhoo, i imagined it would be very braff (which is a new descriptor [kind a like, "funny"] that i’ve invented), but directed at a larger audience. the basic plot line is this: a child grows into a young man who then grows into an old man, but, in reality, doesn’t change: instead he just does the same things in different ways.

the movie would show him making similar mistakes, achieving similar successes, but being so damn human in the process that you can’t help but wish him the best.

this weekend i got within about 600 photos, with the total right now at just over 7,400. that would put the total (when i’m current) at about 8,000!! isn’t that amazing?

anyhoo, one of the reasons why i was really excited to get all these photos finally uploaded is that it would further decrease the need for my OWN personal computer. see, once i get current on the photos, i will only need a computer for a few basic things: email, blogging, uploading my current photos, and general interneting; all of which i can do from just about any computer. not that i would sell my computer or anything, just that it wouldn’t matter if i had to go without it for some reason. i’m so close to realizing that goal.

well, tonight, the machines struck back. i don’t think they liked the idea of me leaving them. maybe they’re jealous and think i’ve found someone else. maybe they’re just spiteful creations. i don’t know. either way, it has become quite obvious that they were NOT ready to break up with me yet, and they were NOT going out without a fight. what am i trying to say here?

in a nut shell… BOTH of the hard drives that i use on a daily basis (the one in my laptop AND my external) simultaneously failed tonight. can you fucking believe that?