progress and awe

So I just did something I've noticed my mac is good for.

As I'll do from time to time with longer political, scientific, and research articles, I copy/pasted the text to a doc in my word processor. Then I had the computer voice read it to me.

I've already set the voice to read at the speed I prefer to keep up with. I think I could twiddle the Services menu to read it directly from the browser, but haven't bothered search-or-researching that just yet.

I re-absorbed the content of my latest blog entries here and elsewhere in the span of about 8 minutes. 1700 words here, 800 there...etc and I'm refreshed and ready to reflect on the last few days.

The process for scanning old slides has been repaired and functions onward.

I am on a mission to preserve the historical visual record of the family whut I come. Attempting to get their help identifying all these faces and places in these images. Before any more of the elders who'd remember these details pass through the veil where it's far harder to hear their answers.

I envision, goofily like a teenager drunk in the world of too much futuristic tech, mapping my Grandparents house with the images I'm finding of it, making it into a quake map or a qtvr file.

Normally I placate myself with strong coffee and some mental filler like teevee or cartoons while I scan images. It usually involves the monkey-like persistence to a pattern of:

insert slide
press preview
wait
crop to image
press scan
wait
press save
type filename
hit enter
wait
close file

and repeat till hard drive is full.

I usually keep myself aware of the tech available for these projects. I'm just not aware of anything in even remotely the same ballpark of monetary investment that can do the same thing.

I believe there are bulk slide scanners out there in excess of five hundred bucks, and steadily upward from there.

If I found a deal for the target photo lab or someone else to do the whole mess - several hundred and perhaps more than 2000 slides, for anything approaching what I'd drop on one of these devices...I'd seriously consider it.

But the fact remains that I'm using a monitor whose housing is crumbling, a $14.99 powermac that I got at the goodwill on half price day. I scored a film scanner better than the one I got trained on at work 7 years ago for a Jackson from a guy on craigslist just over a year ago. Add to that a couple of spare zip drives, a handful of disks I've been using since college, and a 512mb usb stick.

Flickr and facebook to share with the family, amuse my friends. The offline photo-organizing app Picasa pwns iphoto; but I narrowly prefer Flickr's website over G's picasa-web.

All it took was reformatting the laptop, thanking Goddess that I have a firewire dvd drive that it'll boot from, and putting 10.4 on it like all the tuts and howtos said would work. (Tip of the hat to lowendmac!)

Now the grind comes down to the 90 minute chunk of time it takes to scan up a full hard-drive of tiffs that are 1.x inch wide and 2700 dpi. Then editing them, backing them up, etc. Then 20+ minutes of hustling files from powermac to ibook to usb stick. Comes down to 10 minutes per scan, roughly.

Normally I'd watch Rachel Maddow or Amy Goodman process the day's affairs. Even Jon Stewart is always amusing. But the carnage in Haiti swells to take up all the news, sucks all the air out of the room. My heart goes out to those who suffer as it always should.

I'm just left swatted away like an overly intelligent fly, an unwitting sheep, when all the pathos of the zombie media converges. And the eye of that great storm causes a reporter, some dimwitted human-shaped robot that runs on money, interviews someone still being rescued from the rubble. Still being pinned under concrete, still writhing in pain.

Lest anyone ask what's wrong with this world...it's always waiting right there on the news. For some idiot reporter to do something just like this, and cause everyone with two brain cells to rub together to collectively facepalm for all of humanity and the dim prospects of her future.