Computers and Glass Negatives

Yes I know, I'm a bad blogger, if one were as irregular in real life one would go and see the doctor. Still here I am and here's some stuff not being easy. Computers. I was having a crack at tracing the olde family tree back a bit yesterday. Couldn't get very far on the side I wanted to because I don't know my great grandfather's name but on the 'other' side I managed to trace back one relative's ancestry to about 1812! But I don't doubt I'd have done it a whole lot quicker if the family computer (pun intended!) wasn't playing silly f**kers! SO f**king slow! The only conclusion I can reach with that one is the network USB stick gets very hot and this is affecting performance. But even so how can it take quite so f**king long to load a simple webpage?! Even on my computer Firefox seems to take several years to load, it clicks and whirrs away, WHAT THE F**K IS IT DOING??!

So I get a message the other day at the archive, a lady has called and wants her collection of glass negatives digitised. With some trepidation I arranged to meet her today. The trepidation arises because the scanner we have at the archive that can handle glass materials can't handle anything larger than about 6"x4" ('standard' size). So I've been hoping and preying they're all 'standard' size. Now what do you suppose happened? That's right, there was a right mish-mash. About a third are standard, the other two thirds are larger and will have to be scanned in sections and stitched together. Now try as I might I cannot make the process work completely seamlessly, it is impossible to get the quadrants to line up pixel-for-pixel because it is impossible to line the negs up precisely straight every time by hand (which is what I have to do). Scanners capable of handling larger glass materials begin at around £500 so we can forget that! On the plus side. even though I have made it clear that the results will not be 100% on the larger negs, I am getting paid to digitise them. But this just means I have to work 110% to get them just as good as I possibly can, I guess that's the downside to having a sense of professional pride.

Once again the solutions are so simple, a better computer/USB stick and a better scanner, these would make my life SO much easier (and I'd get paid the same without having to do 4x the work). Better still couldn't the glass negs have all been 'standard' size? No, of course they couldn't, because that would be easy and, as we know,

Nothing's ever f**king easy!