During the last week though I for some other reason thought to ask the Snappy Snaps near me and sure enough they did do 120 black and white.  Problem is they wanted £18/roll developed and scanned and want 3 days to do it in.

So I asked around and found out that the Snappy Snaps in Wardour Street London does it for £10/roll scanned on a standard 1 hour wait, that’s very good.

Below a scan direct from their scanner, I didn’t touch it in any way (click for full size):

You can see some more from this roll here it was taken on Ilford FP4 with my Bronica SQA, this is also the first time in over a year that I touched this camera so was fumbling around a bit, will get back into it now I think especially with a quick development place just 5 minutes from my office.

I got my first exposure to the Wired while in school in South Africa, I think the ones we got were months behind the time and stupidly expensive, but hey we had no internet so it all seemed awesomely futuristic and ahead of its time.

The thing though that always stuck in my mind about the US edition Wired were the ads, I can clearly remember ads for Harleys, or weird american Fugly cars, even from the editions I read back in school, the ads were of products we never saw in South Africa, they were kewl, done in a style unlike anything we saw there and all just seemed so, idylic.

Fast forward a few decades, I still buy the US Wired now and then, and I still only remember the ads?  Few months ago I bought one, I can clearly remember the ads for Dexter and Californication, but can’t really say much about the magazine content otherwise, eventhough I read it end to end and felt interested, even drawn to it at the time.  I recall something about malware peddlers? who knows.

Why is that from a magazine that costs 6 pounds I don’t remember anything of substance other than the ads? It’s because they were different from what I see on the tube, in the cinema, on the tv, on the billboards, they were off far-off kewlness.

Enter Wired UK.  The editorial content is still pretty shoddy, the signal to noise ratio is still shockingly poor for a £3.90 magazine literally filled to the brim with ads, except, now they’re the same shitty ads I see on the Tube, Train, Cinema and TV.

I read the whole thing, a day on I remember some vague predictions – one prediction sticks to mind, male birth control only around 2021? I dont think so – but mostly I remember how the ads pissed me off as instead of interesting, they’re just dominating and a reminder that I paid too much for something whose main purpose clearly is to sell ads.

I’d pay £12/month for a Wired UK without the ads, someone need to develop Tivo for paper.

The hotel was one of the best in London in Victorian times complete with many unique features like a revolving door and hydrolic lift. The hotel opened in 1873 and was revolutionary for it’s day, unfortunately it was built before en suite bathrooms and central heating and eventually it closed down because it was not profitable anymore to operate a 300 room hotel that relied on chamber maids to carry pans of coals into all the rooms for heat.
Renovating the building is very difficult due to the construction methods used and because there are almost no plumbing anywhere, there were shared bathrooms but most people had a bath wheeled into their room and taken out again when they were done.
The exterior of the building was restored in the nineties at a cost of £10 million, there are still some exterior work going on today. There are plans to incorporate it into the new Marriott hotel that is being built to compliment the new Eurostar rail link that is coming into St Pancras stations.
Today tours are being run over weekends of small parts of the hotel, I would suggest anyone who can go on the tour as it may soon close due to the work on the new hotel and so forth.
I took some photos while I was there, you can see a few here.
More about the building and the general site can be read at LCR Properties who manages the site, or some more in depth history can be found here.

Currently it has 627 Blogs listed, since listing is done by actually adding your own blog to the list is not as comprehensive as doing a search on GeoURL but it is much more location specific and useful.
You can see blogs by station, line or just by clicking on things on the map.

Let people out first
Not “charge through the doors first thing”!
Die, you bastards, die.

I took the bus home via Piccadilli and picked up a copy of Content Syndication using RSS instead of doing that again.

• New To London
• Bookshops
• Markets
• Tube
• Computer Fairs

They also provide all their pages in RDF and RSS formats.