It’s recently become apparent that I need to scan a bunch of slides and 35mm negatives into digital form. My church has a bunch of very nice slides from the 60s, my parents and grandparents have quite a few as well, and I have a bunch of 35mm negatives that I’d like to get digital.

It’s also quite obvious that flatbed scanners aren’t going to do the trick for me.

Scanners that start to approach the quality I’m after seem to start at about $1000. Does anybody know of a good scanning service? Or have some other ideas? Ideally, I’d like to scan hundreds of photos, but the $1000 is a bit tough.

I found this service, which looks decent.

If you’re like me, you get credit card solicitations in the mail almost every day. I really don’t care to have a card other than the one I have. Most of these solicitations arrive because credit bureaus sell lists of customers with specific credit attributes.

I’ve known for awhile that you can call 888-5-OPT-OUT to get the credit bureaus to stop sending you these things. But it’s annoying.

There’s a new feature now: you can go to their website at www.optoutprescreen.com and opt out there. Well, maybe it’s not new, but it’s new to me anyway.

Yesterday, Amtrak’s board of directors fired Amtrak president David Gunn.

Here’s something unusual about this firing. David Gunn actually was the best thing to happen to Amtrak in years. He improved the physical condition of the railroad’s equipment, raised ridership, cut costs, and even ended this year with a net surplus despite a crippling brake problem on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela equipment that took the entire fleet out of commision for most of the summer.

The Amtrak board knew this too, and even testified to that fact before Congress a few months ago.

The board, though, is made up of Bush appointees. You might remember that Bush’s budget proposal contained a plan to bankrupt Amtrak as a way of “reforming” it. That failed to pass Congress, and David Gunn failed to be incompetant.

So you have the odd case of firing David Gunn for improving things on the railroad.

Yikes. I will be so glad when this administration is gone.

I am excited this evening. I just found a CD that I burned back in 1996 or 1997 or so.

On this CD is some data I thought I had lost. It has copies of information on some floppies that can’t be read anymore.

But it also has the PowerPoint presentation I did as an 8th grader that got me to National History Day in Washington, DC. Not only that, but also the original high-resolution scans of the photos I used in that presentation. Some of these scans are of photos that date back to the early 1900s, whose owners may not be easily reachable today. I had been hoping to find this for years. I knew it was buried somewhere.

And YES — stumbled across it tonight.

I will be posting some photos on this blog in the coming days.

But first, I have to find a way to convert this ancient PowerPoint file to a format that OpenOffice can read — so I get the correct story behind each photo.

The scans were saved back in the days when a person got 8 characters to name a file. Not very descriptive.

(And I remember how much space it took up on the hard drive I had back then, and how much I wanted to just delete those big picture files. Glad I didn’t.)

So I am on the Tabor Mennonite Church centennial committee (coming right up in 2008!).

We’ve been going through the church archives, and I’ve been scanning in interesting photos. Here’s one, taken about 1950.

This is a photo of the original 1908 Tabor Church building, as remodeled in the 1930s.

You’ll notice the front door, the many windows.

And the two well-worn paths out back.

They are leading to the two outhouses. If I understand correctly, they continued to be used up until the mid-1960s when the “new” (present) church building was constructed.

The building in the middle housed a Delco Light Plant (generator), which was used until rural electrification provided power to the church.

So yes, this church had its own on-site generator, decades before it got indoor plumbing.

There’s a joke in there somewhere but it’s late and somehow I can’t come up with a good one. Feel free to post your own ;-)

I’ve enjoyed Cliff‘s views from the porch.

I’ve decided to post some of my own: click here for a few photos.

I also threw in one of the porch itself, to prove that I really can point the camera in all those directions without leaving it :-)

Here’s that one:

Maybe soon I’ll post the views from the *back* porch. Between the two, I think I could get a 360-degree view…

to pass 8th-grade math.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

(Seen on Planet Debian)

“Dad would have really enjoyed this.”

My uncle Ron said those words last Sunday, referring to my grandfather, who passed away earlier this year.

We were having a little family gathering, the first since the events surrounding Grandpa’s death.

We met as his old farmhouse, and then headed out to his creek. My dad already had a fire going — ready for the hot dogs and brats.

That creek, though it’s muddy and smelly at times, has a lot of fond memories for lots of my relatives.

For most of my childhood, uncle Ron lived in Indonesia. Every so often, his family would come back to the US for a few weeks. And just about every time he was in Kansas, he wanted to go camping by Grandpa’s creek.

He’d usually manage to gather a few people to go with him. Just who went would vary depending on schedules, but usually included my cousins (his children), my brothers, my dad, and Grandpa. We’d often go fishing in the creek as well.

At this point, I need to explain a small detail about that creek. It runs through the middle of a pasture. The kind that cattle live in. So, you have to be careful where you step. Also, you have to remember that you might be visited in the middle of the night.

My cousins, brothers, and I set up our sleeping bags on the bed of Grandpa’s pickup. I don’t remember where my uncle and my dad slept. Grandpa was the smartest one, though. He’d drive his car out to the creek, through the pasture, and spend the evening with us. Once it got dark and people were turning in, he’d drive back home for the night. And he’d be right back out there in the morning.

There was also an incident one time where I was fishing with my dad and my brothers, and I fell into the creek. But that’s a story for another day.

This week, my uncle was visiting, and the family got together out by the creek. Most of us hadn’t been there in a few years. It was a great time. We were probably there for four hours, despite the wind.

During a lull in the conversation, towards the end of the evening, my uncle remarked:

“Dad would have really enjoyed this.

But then, he probably is.”

Today I got inspired: to do something about these boxes of 360K and 1.44MB floppies scattered about the house. There are boxes dedicated to floppies, and floppies in boxes for other things, and floppies stacked on shelves. Some of them have moved with me through three states and thousands of miles without ever being read. Some are nearly 20 years old.

There’s a lot of stuff on those disks. Memories of grandparents, elementary and high school projects, and some code I wrote years ago in Pascal or C.

I decided to read in as many as I can and burn them all out to a CD-R or DVD-R.

Easy enough, right?

Well, not so much.

First, there’s the problem of reading the data itself. Some of the floppies have developed bad sectors in the years since they were last used. Most were formatted under DOS or Windows, and Linux has plenty of tools for reading FAT filesystems. But a few used OS/2’s HPFS. Not so easy to read these days.

1.44MB drives are still not too hard to find, but when’s the last time you saw a new PC sporting a 5.25″ drive? Bet it’s been a long time.

Then, there’s the problem of proprietary data formats. Back in the days of DOS, WordPerfect ruled the day for word processors. WordPerfect had pretty much the sort of stranglehold on the market then that Microsoft Word has today. I wrote lots of material in WordPerfect.

It’s all pretty difficult to get at these days. The very best thing I can do is install WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS and a PostScript printer driver. That will get *close* to the original document formatting, though not exact. (WordPerfect documents were tied to the fonts available in a particular printer, and an Apple Laserwriter doesn’t have much in common with a Panasonic KX-P1180 dot-matrix.) Once I have a PostScript file, I can pull it onto a Linux box and convert it to PDF. Lots of hassle.

Massachusetts made a wise move recently. If you really care about being able to read your documents decades down the road, you can’t be using a proprietary file format. Nobody would have expected WordPerfect’s spectacular fall (primarily due to being late to market with a Windows port). Nobody today expects a Word fall (perhaps due to being late to market with a Linux port?). But it probably will happen.

Then there’s the problem of proprietary software. WordPerfect is proprietary, and so is DOS. Neither are really prepared to run from a hard disk measuring in the hundreds of gigabytes on a modern PC sporting USB and other technologies never heard of in the 80s. But these are some of the easier apps. (Yes, I know there’s a Linux version of WordPerfect, but again, it’s proprietary, and can be difficult to make run on modern systems.)

Try an app like Lotus 1-2-3 that had copy protection. Or one that assumed that it can do whatever it wants with hardware. Not quite so easy now. VMWare can help sometimes, but sometimes it hinders. I had a lot of data backed up with Central Point Backup, part of the PC Tools suite. It formatted floppy disks in a special way (if I remember correctly, somehow getting one extra sector in each track.) Can’t even read them in Linux, and VMWare is clueless about what to do with them.

So I am converting everything I can to a standard, open format. Documents go to text and PDF. The CD/DVD is burned with RockRidge and Joliet, so just about any OS can access it. Documents I write now are mostly done in just ASCII or in LyX, both of which are readable as plain text. Linux can read many open formats that existed in the Unix world before Linux even did. I feel much better about things now.

But then there’s this blog. It’s stored in a MySQL database.

Sigh.

At least I have the source.

So I’ve been listening to some back episodes of The Linux Link Tech Show lately, and they’ve had a lot of insightful guests (the interview with Aaron Seigo of KDE was particularly excellent.)

They also talked to Eric S. Raymond in episode 95.

So here are some ESR quotes:

“A program that requires documentation is a design failure. . . If you need documentation, you have failed.” He said that in some cases, it may not be possible, but people should never give up on that goal.

I’d like to see him write something as easy and powerful as grep without documentation. How about a non-linear video editor, where there are some complex concepts at work?

He went on to describe how one might write a spreadsheet app without documentation. “The way to design a documentation-free spreadsheet is: the initial state of the spreadsheet is that every gesture that the user might make pops up a balloon prompt saying ‘This is what will happen if you confirm this.’ As they demonstrate knowledge of the interface, the balloons stop popping up, and are replaced by other baloons that say what they can do with other gestures.”

I have one word for that: AIEEEEEEEE.

This is worse than Microsoft Word with the paperclip. And ESR wants us to develop it.

Please, give people a simple quick reference card or something instead of annoying popups. Anything but the annoying popups! If I want to learn how to write a letter in word, I can go to the help system and learn how to write a letter there.

Argh.