2011 — 26 March: Saturday

Waking up towards the end of the first hour of the "Sounds of the 60s" is a sure sign of a good night's sleep.1 My entertainment choice for yesterday evening was the first half of the Mike Nichols' TV film "Angels in America". With Al Pacino revelling in the rôle of the monstrous Roy Cohn — Nicholas von Hoffman's 1988 biography painted a compelling picture:

Book

Powerful stuff. Right. Time (09:20) for a bite to eat and another cuppa. The sun is shining. This is good.

Somewhat impelled...

... by a pending visit from my chum John (who wishes to take 40 of my self-storage cartons off my hands, bless him) I've started tinkering with the slide-scanning capabilities of my new Canon flatbed scanner. Here, for example, is a cropped, resized, scan from a slide I took in June 1982. We were on the point of setting off for a picnic in the grounds of Netley on one of our earliest visits:

Picnic in 1982

I can just about convince myself that our little front garden's wall used to be that colour. And the garage door. It's worth noting that my Photoshop Elements comes into its own for resampling, as the earlier Fireworks has a pixel width limit of 5,000 and claims not to have enough memory to manipulate a 90MB image file2 despite the 6GB or so of free RAM that should be available to it.

OK, the Canon isn't optimised for slide scanning in the way the Nikon Coolscan is, but at 4,800 dpi it hasn't done a bad job. I'm pleased. During the book relocating exercise (hence all those storage cartons, last year) I unearthed quite a few slides that I've yet to process. This was just one of them.

If there's a more...

... congenial exercise on a post-lunch reasonably sunny Saturday afternoon than listening to Pink Floyd while re-discovering some thirty year old slides of me and Christa, I'm not sure what it would be. Furthermore, as Liz Kershaw recently admitted on BBC 6Music, she (like me) will have a car dashboard clock that is more or less correct after tonight and for the next six months. (The Toyota chaps offered to reset mine for me at the last service; they admit that the clock fitted to my vehicle has adjustment instructions that don't actually match those printed in my owner's manual, so what chance do I have?)

  

Footnotes

1  A Good Thing.
2  I could have saved the image directly as a JPEG but I've got into the habit of going through a bitmap stage during which I can do any necessary re-touching and what have you.