punished, tarnished, bitter & mean

I began this evening with a surge of productivity. Perhaps even a little excitement.

I reassembled the crumbling ancient system that works with my ancient slide scanner.

I scanned till I filled up the quaint little 750mb HD in there. I then rebooted with the zip drive on the scsi connector, and filled up my zip disks with the scanned pics.

Connecting the usb zip drive I have to my mac mini did nothing. So I grabbed a really old ibook and dumped the pics on there.

Of course this seemed to be the tipping point. Laid out like a trap, the ibook let me connect the usb zip and dump a whole bunch of tiffs on it.

Trying to get them back off it, via any other means but the zips that put them there, remains the challenge these several hours later.

I appreciated the warm soulful voice of Paul Mooney as I sat here before the fire and scanned pics of my grandparents vacationing in my new home state.

Now I sit here in the dark, shaking my angry monkey fist at the inane pathetic ridiculousness of technology.

Every time I try to copy the files off the ibook, it gets 2 mb into a copy and then blammo - beachball of spinning rainbow doom. Nothing recovers from that.

I can't copy off to a usb stick, I can't copy off to the firewire ipods, I can't hook up the firewire burner and burn a damn CDR...

...and all this despite having run disk utility twice and getting a clean green bill of health.

Now I write these words of ire as my crappy old second-hand monitor keeps winking and wiggling at the edges...blinking and shooting occasional paranoia-inducing lines of static.

I'd post this to FML but I didn't even come here to wallow or share...just bitch.

I could've been posting corrected pics of slides my family hasn't seen in 7-10 years.

Instead I'm wishing I could sell a kidney or a testicle so I could buy a decent monitor
and a damn slide scanner that can do more than 3 every 10 minutes,
which uses a connectivity standard designed since 1986.

I'm gonna go smoke a cigarette and try to keep from smashing my head in the door.