How much time can you afford to spend on keeping your life up-to-date in a digital world? I’ve got a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III slide/negative scanner and am working slowly (and painfully) through 30 years of photos plus to get them into my photo archive.
That’s the past, but in the present there’s still all the work that needs to be done in using Photoshop Elements Organiser (v6) and making sure that the stuff is transferred from the camera (Sony Alpha 700) correctly, then organised into catalogues and more importantly stored on the new external Buffalo Drive (with its USB-linked auxilliary), connected to the BT Home Hub. [Backed-up of course using Acronis True Image s/w to another directly connected USB drive on Pegasus – the aging Dell workhorse in the den.]
Then of course you need/want to share it with family so there’s the uploads to be dealt with – that’ll be Picassa, or might it be Facebook? Or should I really look into using Flickr which I dumped when Yahoo Photos was transferred upon acquisition – suppose I ought to sort that one out too! I could mount them on my own web-server of course, but … don’t go there! Managing the Internet Connection and configuring it to allow video-conferencing through to Australia is enough for the moment.
So that’s another set of technologies to cope with – good job I know something about IT, or is that actually a disadvantage – you begin to wonder. The time it takes to work exactly how-to-do all of this, is then wasted unless you carefully document what it was you actually did, because when you’ve worked out what to do you then collapse back in exhaustion at the thought of the mountain you then have to climb to actually do the task!
Which leads me to the current task in hand. A couple of years ago I purchased a Creative Soundblaster Audigy-2 NX external-USB connected sound card to transfer vinyl and tape cassette to digital. The actual transfer task takes long enough – but is pleasant because you can listen to long-forgotten favourites – but the actual effort expended, in understanding the new language you need to understand to work out what to do, is mind-blowing.
Suffice to say, that now that I’ve worked out how-to-do it, I’ll slump back and realise that I can’t put off doing REAL work any longer, and get on with that!
🙂