It is a good thing that I continue to be so determined to concur each new technological problem that confronts me, because the past few months have been full of technological challenges.
So the iMac hard drive died, which meant restoring everything on a new internal drive from an assortment of backups. In the end, I recovered almost everything except my outgoing email from the months of June and most of July. The silver lining of the experience might be that I now have a 1TB internal drive. I am also letting Apple’s Time Machine back up that drive regularly on to my 2TB external drive. Photos processed with Lightroom have always lived on a separate external drive, with the original raw files on yet another external drive. I can’t say that I am completely satisfied with my system of redundancy, and I continue to think of it as a work in progress. As good as I think I am at keeping track of serial numbers and passwords, I discovered that I need to work on the system too. It took a while to hunt up all the necessary elements for reinstalling software and getting re-bookmarked.
Then just about the time I was thinking I had all that behind me, the hard drive on my macbook laptop died. Poof, no warning. It was gone too. Luckily Apple replaced it, again. It had been replaced once already about a year ago. Fortunately, I don’t keep much of anything on that drive which is not duplicated on the iMac, so in that case it was just a matter of reinstalling software and since I had just done that on the iMac, all the info was handy. I am now the poster child for backup!
Oh and I learned that having things backup on the iPhone, isn’t much help when the computer hard drive crashes because it is not so easy to restore what is on the iPhone to the computer. Apple has this thing about what computer the iPhone is backed up to originally. It wants you to de-authorize that computer before you sync to another one, in this case same computer but another hard drive. In the end, I gave up.
Then I decided to reacquaint myself with my film scanner and finally set my mind to scanning the 27 rolls of color film I shot in 1979 during a trip to China. I went with a group of journalists as the guests of the U.S. – China People’s Friendship Association and Xinua, the China news agency. We were some of the first westerners to visit China after “normacy.” the fall of the gang of five. I had shot both color and black and white photos during the trip and had developed and printed the black and white photos myself at the time. But, the color I just had slides made and very few prints. I have the slides and film because that is what I shot back in those days. The scanner processes rolls of color film, but I have found that it is more practical to scan from the slides, since it is to easier to look at them and decide which ones to scan. In fact, the best of them were still in slide carousels, so those are the ones I have been scanning. It is very time consuming. Each image has to be manually put in the scanner, pre-scanned and then after the proper settings scanned with the original number. The scanner does a fairly good job of restoring the color, but no matter how much I have tried to remove dust marks before scanning each image has be to worked on in Photoshop to remove dust and they all seem to have the same color fringe, a cyan or a red color on the edges where white meets color. I have been removing as much of that as possible. The project is taking weeks and will be months before I am done. I am hoping that I might be able to interest a photo agency in licensing some of them as historical images. It has been interesting to look at these images again, but for the memories and also to evaluate my photo techniques from back then. Some of them a darn good. By-the-way, there is a link to some of the China photos on my links page. I had scanned those years ago, but stopped the project before I got too far.
In the midst of this, a friend died all to early of cancer. Health technology was not far enough along to save her. I am finding that working on these photo projects is helping me process the sadness. She is the sister of a good friend, who I met quite coincidentally years ago while working on an environmental story in San Diego. The upshot is that I have an NBC News story in which she appears. So I have had to deal with the technology of retrieving the video from a DVD that the NBC editors did for me when I left NBC. They use Avid, which is PC based and doesn’t convert all that well for use with Apple software. But, I found some software which is able to convert it to mp4 format. That can then be converted for editing in Final Cut Express. The importing, exporting, rendering, converting processes all take a long time, since I have hours of news stories on the DVD. I wanted to get all of the stories into an editing format I could deal with and I am now half way there, but I did finally today finish processing the Gnatcatcher story so that I could give the video to Janet’s son. He is working on a video tribute to his mom and will want to use it.
Which brings me to why I am writing this today. I’ve been reminded that if I don’t keep working with all these new technologies regularly, I forget what I learned very quickly. After today’s project I am refreshed on Final Cut Express and WordPress. I wanted to put the story on my website so that my friend Joan can look her sister in the story. That meant remembering how I created a page with embedded video the last time I tackled the problem, which was back when I created this blog site. What should have been a quick and easy task, was complicated by how much I had forgotten.
So now I am determined to keep up the blog, so that I further my technical expertise in the blogisphere.
