Well today has been a day of setbacks. I’m pretty grouchy. I ordered the camera on November 8 from www.adorama.com. They shipped it on November 10. It hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve got a tracking number for it, but the tracking number doesn’t work. I’ve contacted Adorama and they said it was a UPS screwup. None of the shipments that went out on November 10 or 11 have functional tracking numbers. They said UPS promises that the shipments are going to arrive, but will be a bit late. Everything is in UPS’s hands now, and they have proven to be somewhat useless in the past at resolving customer satisfaction issues. The guaranteed delivery time just means that if it doesn’t arrive by the time it was supposed to, they guarantee it will arrive a bit later. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about this right now short of calling Visa and claiming that there was a fraud. Needless to say I’m not happy about this. I don’t need it to arrive until December 2, but I’m feeling a bit nervous. There’s no time to manouever now. I thought ordering on November 8 would give me plenty of time to get this camera on time. It’s going to be a lot closer than I thought.

I also got my photo book from Future Photo. While it’s not awful, it’s definitely not great. The quality is similar to magazine photo printing. You can see the lines of dots making up the images, like you would in a magazine. It’s not even close to being photographic quality. The photos are also very contrasty. There are no dark greys. The dark, contrasty images in my portfolio go directly from black to white instead of showing a smooth gradient. Dark blues appear to be black. It would really help if Future Photo would take the time to provide an ICC profile so that users could do a soft proof in Photoshop. I know it’s a bit of a “pro” feature, but it’s not a big deal to produce one. They also screwed up the order of the pages. Some of the pages have been reversed, a result of sloppy assembly. I called Future Photo and they are reprinting it, no questions asked. The service is pretty good. I wish the quality could stack up.

Hmm what else was fun today. Oh yeah… I paid property taxes. They went up about 15% since last year. 😐

Anyway, hopefully tomorrow is a bit less frustrating.