Sometimes Technology Works!

I went to visit my sister in PA a week or so ago, went to show her my new site on her snazzy new computer and was extremely dismayed to discover that my site, which looks terrific in IE 6 and IE 7 broke in IE 8. None of the SimpleViewer Galleries appeared the way they should and several articles had text and pictures appearing in odd places. I knew the issue wasn't with the SimpleViewer Galleries because when they weren't displayed within a "wrapper" they looked fine in IE 8. I suspected it was the "liquid" template I had chosen in Joomla.

I did a search when I got home to see if anyone else was having trouble with my JA Joomla template in IE 8 and found a bunch of posts on the subject. The good news is that they’d already put out an update that fixed it. It still requires the user to click on compatibility mode in IE8 but that’s OK. This cheered me up enormously since I’m quite fond of my very simple interface. The problem wasn’t with SimpleViewer which handles itself very well in IE 8, it was in the html that the template uses to display articles. It’s all in the “liquid” sizing. I really want to use “liquid” sizing because it makes the site so much more inviting. The only thing I might do is start using a sized template for articles that have a lot of text to keep the lines of text from getting too wide because that makes them hard to read on very large screens. Of course, people on large screens can always size their browser down and have the text narrower. I do this all the time with forums on my 22 inch screen. If for some reason I close the favorites navigation and maximize the browser window, the posts get really wide, too wide to comfortably read.

The other good news, I can put under the heading of :

"Sometimes Technology Makes
Our Lives Easier Instead of More Complicated"

I bought a new film scanner the other day. I was prepared to be disappointed. I have an older 35mm scanner that I’ve nursed along and it has been quite a chore because it is an old SCSI peripheral and every time my hardware or my OS software gets updated I have to search around for an ASPI driver that will work. The company that made the scanner was Polaroid, so you can imagine they aren’t any help since they went into BK years ago. I have kept up with the chore simply because every single time I’ve tried to replace the scanner the replacement has never worked as well for color negative film, which was all I shot for many years.

The problem always with color neg film is that orange mask, which shows up not at all on color photographic paper (color paper has an offsetting cyan mask) but presents enormous problems for the CCD cells and CMOS chips in scanners. Most scanners are created for reading the high dynamic range in slides, not the low contrast of a color negative. The orange mask is never evenly distributed over the frame and trying to extract it from the other colors frequently ends up either killing the other colors (they become murky looking) or you get terrible streaks in smooth texture free areas like clear blue skies. At any rate, I’ve tried film scanners that range from a few hundred dollars to the $25,000 high end pre-press scanners and none delivered as good a quality as that stupid little Polaroid scanner I paid $800 for 15 years ago! I still have it set up on an old XP workstation at the studio but I really didn’t want to face trying to get it to work on the 64 bit Vista workstation.

At any rate, I bought yet another new film scanner that showed up yesterday and my first tests were awful (very large chunky grain) until I tried a particular tool included in the software (Silverfast) designed to minimize grain that creates four scan passes and then merges them all together. It takes longer to scan each image that way, but the results are finally better than my little Polaroid scanner. The previews are better, more accurate, than any other scanning software I’ve ever used and it works on current software and hardware. Finally, I can retire the old Polaroid!