I took a few rolls of film for processing this week, and instead of getting the standard “you are a cheap bastard” regular service, I opted for the premium service which includes (I am not making this up) a premium cardboard picture case, negative sleeves, and hosting for your photos on-line.
Yesterday, I get my pictures back, and not surprisingly the only noticeable difference was the word “premium” stamped across the photo paper on the back (though the negatives were indeed sleeved). Fair enough. In addition, there is a card with instructions on how to view my on-line pictures. Standard goto wwwdot stuff, but it also included a number that looks much like the following:
roll id: ddiek33930fjkelldpexolkdjd9303830fifo909303039
pick up code: 438494005958859505059
Only the actual numbers were much longer. (I trimmed it down here to keep us within our bandwidth quota). Remember this is for a single roll. I think that somehow the roll id and pick up code are hashed together and converted to binary forming 24 640 x 480 jpegs, making it so the images do not actually have to be stored on the server. Or something. Naturally the first thing that pops into my head when I see this is “Please lord don’t make me type that.” Now, I am a horrible typist, and lazy on top of that. My rule is if it can written once, it can be cut & pasted twice. I somehow think that this roll id has something to do with pi but I can’t exactly prove it (mostly since I do not have any idea what pi actually is).
I finally get the roll id and pick up code entered, and given my “I am willing to do a small amount of work for reward” personality, I felt OK enduring a little heartache to get to my goal. Well, I guess I didn’t quite realize how bad it has gotten.
It seems that our parents, grandparents, in-laws, and exs, as well as the in-bred dipshits these companies hire, have forced us to take the term “user friendly” to exorbitant and outlandishly extreme levels in order to accommodate the less competent among us. To demonstrate, here is a “tip” I extracted from this site:
Since I wasn’t quite to the “I am ready to smash the usability design committee over the skull with a crowbar” stage yet, this made me chuckle.
On to finding my pictures and download them.
I click on the first roll, and 20 seconds later thumbnails for the first 6 images show up. I click one, and 20 seconds later, a 50% size single image shows up (about 400 x 400). Now, It seems simple enough to think “20 seconds” and be done with it, but in this day and age 20 seconds of waiting is a veritable lifetime. I haven’t felt loading pain like this since my days of searching for porn on my 486 windows 95 machine over a 14k modem (type yahoo.com into address bar and search for “pussy”—interlaced, motherfucker, do you speak it?). Those days also provide me the notoriety of being one of the few suckers in the world who has actually paid for an Internet browser, but that is another story that should never, ever be told (Netscape 3.0 gold off the shelf).
Anyway, I am ready to download this roll, so I click download. Apparently downloading multiple images is way too difficult for the average user, but I don’t think even the goatse man himself could have prepared me for the shock I received trying to download using this 2-step process:
*loads gun*
*shoots self*
The whole process to download a single image takes roughly 3 minutes, door-to-door, from my T3. Elementary math (windows calculator, cause I suck at math): 3 rolls at 24 exposures each, 3 minutes each exposure. About 3 and a half hours to download all three rolls, not including the time it takes to run 72 self-extracting executables.
Even since I tapped into the sickening power of the Internet, I have vaguely realized its potential which has somewhat prepared me for many things I have experienced, including (recently, since I have shit for memory) beej, TBA (both of whom I have learned to love and appreciate), furies, LARPs, and many other things I don’t even feel comfortable talking about over the anonymity the Internet provides.
But I never imagined I would be offered an executable to download a single 400k image.
It brings a whole new meaning to the term “lowest common denominator.” Welcome to the Internet, 2002.