My New Mouse Mat!

OK, so I've been going on about this rather a lot lately, but it's only because I'm so impressed. For those who don't know, I like to play QuakeLive with my brother on a (semi-)regular basis, and this of course means using a mouse. Now, unfortunately, my mouse doesn't track very well on shiny surfaces, and finally being rather frustrated I decided to buy a mouse mat. But of course when I tried to find one I liked, I couldn't. So the obvious solution, then, was to get one printed.

I scoured the internets for a little while and came across a picture I liked, from the always awesome anime (huh, triple-A!) Neon Genesis Evangelion. It was huge, so would hopefully contribute to a decent print quality.

Now, my fist port of call for getting it printed was VistaPrint, who advertised that mouse mats could be printed from £4.49 each! "Great!, I thought, "That's dirt cheap." I merrily clicked away, and started figuring things out. VistaPrint have a set of guidelines to getting your mousemat perfect, and this involved mucking about with the image a little in Photoshop to make sure there was some space for errors (the original image, sadly, had none). I then uploaded my image to find I would be charged an additional £1.75 one-time fee to store this image on their servers, which I was then free to use any time after that at no extra cost. Well, seems a bit cheeky, but OK. £4.49 had become £6.24, still not breaking the bank. I clicked on.

"Choose delivery option". OK. The cheapest option available (for one mouse mat) was £2.30, for 21 days. Three weeks! I decided to opt for the slightly more expensive 14 day option at £3.20. £4.49 now looked like £9.44. Getting worse, but still within the £10 mark, so OK.

Tax. They had neglected to mention that none of the prices included tax. That's 20% now, so £9.44 became £11.33. At this point I lost interest. What the hell, VistaPrint? 9 million people trust you for their printing needs? Not like this, they don't!

Enormously disappointed, I decided to search elsewhere. I found a couple of fairly crappy sites, and then stumbled upon the rather gaudy yourdesign.co.uk site. I checked the prices - £6, no extra fees, free delivery! Sounds good, lets check the upload page. Upload the image, clipping is off. Adjust my base image shape, clipping is still off. Couple of adjustments later I noticed the section for extra instructions. I decided to upload the original image and simply tell them how to clip it.

I made the order, and £6 duly left my account. Their estimate for printing was 3 days, followed by 2-3 days for postage (Royal Mail first class). I should point out that I ordered this at quarter past ten on a Wednesday night. Next day, order was flagged as printing, no surprise there. The next day came, order was flagged as dispatched. Interesting, I thought, that was quick. Lo and behold, a few hours later, my mousemat arrived!

Honestly, I was a little thrilled! Not only had they clipped the image just right, but the print quality was brilliant, and the damn thing had arrived two days after I ordered it! I am now a firm advocate of yourdesign.co.uk!

So, if you need a mousemat, tell VistaPrint to sod off, and go check these guys out. It is my fondest wish that someone planning to use VistaPrint will see this post and go to the rather more deserving yourdesign.co.uk instead. Nuff said.

C# Annoyance

I'm blogging this for my own damn good, since I never seem to remember the solution. I've frequently had an error recently when referencing projects in C# stating something along the lines of:

The type or namespace name 'namespace' does not exist in the namespace 'other_namespace' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

And you know what? It's infuriating.

Turns out, the solution is similarly infuriating: check the target platform. The class libraries are, of course, built in '.NET 4', however the application referencing them is set to '.NET 4 Client Platform'. Why? Who knows. But if you change it to plain old '.NET 4' it fixes it.

Job done.

An Experiment in Astrology

For reasons too boring to list, I have decided to conduct a little experiment with regards to daily horoscopes. My plan is to live my daily life as normal, and at the end of each day write a small diary entry (roughly the same size as a horoscope). At the end of each week, then, I shall compare each day with the horoscopical (is that a word?) predictions of a few of the premier astrologers of our time. Not a huge study, and I'm already fairly certain what the result will show, however I will try to keep an open mind in the interest of fairness.

Perhaps some intrepid reader(s) would like to do the same? Honesty is key in this endeavour - the day's horoscope must not be read until after the day is through (one of my opinions on the subject is that it's only accurate because you believe it will be).

It probably won't begin right away - I need to first decide on a list of astrologers to test, and then write some sort of program to crawl the websites on a daily basis, but I think I can get started on Monday.

So, any volunteers?