19 October 1999: I Haven't Got Time For The Blues

I didn't understand anything.

I wasn't sure what good digitized slides of admittedly beautiful architecture would do in preparing an indoor laser show. I wasn't sure why my dad's friend thought my dad could help him digitize the slides. I wasn't sure why my dad came to me with the problem.

But I do, in fact, have an attachment for my scanner (the technical term is, I believe, a "doo-hickey") which shines light through slides and negatives in order to allow you to scan those things in. So I agreed to help my dad. I'd only played with the doo-hickey once before - trying to scan in some negatives - and not had much luck; the pictures turned out quite dark. But slides are a little thinner than negatives, and aside from paying fifty bucks to a professional studio, I was probably this guy's best hope.

So last night after work, my dad came over to our house. Before he'd arrived, I had attached the doo-hickey (to make sure it worked) and scanned in some negatives, playing with the brightness levels. When Dad came in, I had just managed to scan in an old picture of Matt gleefully clutching a Christmas present under the tree, and it only looked a little fuzzy around the edges. I was feeling confident - it had only taken me about ten scans of the same negative to get the adjustments correct.

I pulled a slide out of the box Dad handed me and slid it under the doo-hickey. After a bit of fidgeting and fussing, it became clear that, in my messing around earlier, I had dramatically increased the levels of blue. Or decreased red and green, but it amounts to the same thing. Everything looked blue. Just to be sure, I unplugged the doohickey and scanned in a CD that was sitting by the desk.

Yup. Blue.

Well, I put it there, of course I can put it back. I fidget some more. And some more. And some more. Tried re-installing the scanner software. By the time an hour had passed, I was getting frustrated and impatient (I hate waiting) and my dad sitting there, patiently waiting and apologizing for making me screw things up, wasn't helping. (I get tense when I'm being watched.) So I called Matt to come and play with it, and went downstairs to be irritable.

Around seven, my dad gave up and went home, though he left the slides with me.

At about seven-fifteen, Matt had fixed the problem. I'm always a little relieved when the problem turns out to be something huge and ugly, because then I don't feel like an idiot for having not seen it right away. This time it turned out to be that the TWAIN drivers had gotten corrupted. Or something - we're not sure, exactly. But it's back and working again, and I spent about an hour scanning in these six slides last night.