Today, I stopped half way up the Mt. Si haystack. After walking all the way up the better Mt. Si trail – from Little Si.

And, it was not agony to turn around!

Why?

Sure, I’ve been to that top before.

Sure, there’s really nothing to see there that can’t be seen from below.

Sure, the sun was going down and I knew that there was a 100% chance I’d be crawling down the thing in the dark if I went the last 100+ feet.

Sure, I gotta remember to take not 1, but 2 extra shirts on hikes now.

Sure, I didn’t have a coin to put there.

But none of that counts.

I felt freedom.

I asked whether the dentist’s x-ray machine could provide digital images.

“No. Such machines are very expensive.”

So I kicked the camera in to macro mode and shot images of the images. Here’s one.

Now, when I’m in a plane crash, my body can be identified.

I like to get images from medical places – images of the retina from the optical guys, for instance.

The dentist tracks these x-rays in pairs over time. The same thing can be done with other images. I want to do so, myself.

Digitizing health information is a hot subject now. Oddly enough, the restrictions medical machines live under discourage such actions. It’s a whole ‘nother level of engineering to hook a medical machine to the net.

That’s frustrating.

If you are building a medical machine, why not make it able to spin out its data in real time so that a remote expert can help with evaluations? Or so that someone who cares about the patient can keep track of what’s happening in real time from a distance? Or so that a database of real experience can be automatically built from all uses of a machine?

Images like this raise other questions. Why should every dental office in the country have x-ray machines? Why can’t you buzz in to an x-ray office and simply get the images? Specialized x-ray offices would shoot higher quality images. And cheaper. Heck, in the case of teeth, it would make a lot of sense for software to evaluate the shots and annotate them for the dentist and patient. That wouldn’t stop the dentist from doing his own evaluation. But, we sure know how such a facility would play out in the political world. If most people paid their own dental bills, as I do, such businesses would have been around a long time ago.

But, for now, I side with the idea that digitizing and collecting health information should be done by the owner/patient. Let the systems to enable such collections be built from the bottom, up – need and interest driven – rather than from the top, down.

Mom, Grandma and Mom’s Grandfather Coates. I did not get to scanning various letters and such in the box. Sometime, maybe.

Click to see the pictures.

When I play morning volleyball with the fogies at Mercer Island the other half of the gym is used by tiny tots, 2-5 years, with their nannies watching and with play directed by young, athletic guys. Rubber balls and cones fill the floor. The kids are shepherded from one thing to the next, learning to follow orders. The toys and tubes look like a whale of fun. And the little boys do spend as much time as they can sliding to the floor. Good for them.

But it gives me the creeps.

With that in mind, I scanned the rest of the “rb” box of old pictures.

Since the page is arranged alphabetically, the new scans are interspersed among the previous scans.

Here’s an example:

Click to see pictures.

The pictures include a shot of the really cold winter of ’57 in Astoria – the winter the river froze – back before global warming.

And this one illustrates perfectly the hopefulness of youth:

Scanned the rest of the slides from the 120 slide show I did back in the early 70’s. The best ones were scanned for the photo CD years ago and are already on line.

Click here for slides.

An evening that included seeing some of Mom’s old slides got me in the scanning mood. It took a long time to get successful scans of slides and I ended up with only a couple of test cases.

Gosh, I never thought the Topcon was that bad. But slides don’t lie. It is truly amazing how much improved photographic equipment is from the past.

As if to prove that point, I found a box of old pictures that Mom had said years ago, “I’m going to throw these away.” “No! Wait!”, I said. “I’ll keep them.” She was in a house-cleaning mode and perhaps they were dupes or dregs.

Ok. Well, they are almost certainly dupes and rejects. But, they are what I have, so I scanned about half the box.

Click for “rb” Pictures

Here are lessons learned.

1. Figure on scanning 30 to 40 pictures an hour, tops.
2. You can save them as 24-bit, 2400dpi, lossless TIF files, taking about a nickel a piece to redundantly store at todays prices. (2.75×2.75 inch pictures)
3. Or you can store them at a 10th of that price or less in JPEG form.
4. On the monitor, you won’t be able to see the difference.
5. So, any way you count it, the “cost” of digitizing old pictures is in the labor. And it’s high.

You won’t be able to do anything but brainless, clerical work while you’re scanning. I ripped an audio book. The python rip script automates all but feeding CDs every few minutes. I played Sudoku, but goofed up 3 or 4 times on the same puzzle – so apparently, an easy Sudoku required too much care.

If the pictures mean anything to you, you’ll spend all your time and thought daydreaming – perhaps remembering things long out of mind.

We take pictures for memories. But what do you want to remember?

I wish there were a couple of better pictures of Socko. I wish there were more landscape pictures of the Tillamook house and “yard”. For instance, put the sand box (which I hadn’t thought of in at least 50 years) in context. There’s a picture of Eric with a hammer. Where’s the white handled hatchet whose wielding is a key part of the folks’ memories? I sure remember the hatchet. And to me, and me alone, probably, the title of this post says a lot, though I’d not know what without the picture.

These pictures mostly come from Tillamook. A couple pre-date Eric and me. One is probably the earliest picture of me, if you don’t count that to actually see me, you’d need to be a bat or dolphin. Most have me in them, with a lot of Eric thrown in. (This box appeared filtered, as it contains some specific, Alex, stuff that is not scanned yet. Air Force stuff, for instance.) To me, anyway, the pictures are very evocative of the life we had at the time. The house was out in the woods and Eric and I had an idyllic life, running around in our coats and boots in the woods and the dirt. The folks were very young.

I’ve only one idea of what antique thing was going through my head at 9 years, xmas time. Some Davie Crockett thing? Fur!?! Beats me.

Speaking of oral tradition, there may be no written record of a couple of answering machine greetings I thought up on a long commute or two from San Dimas back to Compton.

Ring, ring.

Hello.

How many times have you said to yourself, “I wish I could talk to the Robinsons.“, but have not had the chance?

Well, now, for a limited time only, in this special telephone offer, you, yes, that’s right, you, can leave your message after the tone.

Act now. You can’t afford to pass up this amazing opportunity!

And, remember, this offer is not available in stores.

Beep…

Ring, ring.

Hello.

How many times have you said to yourself, “Why did I dial this number? What made me do this sinful thang?”

Well, God has the answer for each and every one of us. Let me quote to you from the scriptures, Geronimo two, verse five.

“And, behold, when he called, the Lord did answer unto him, ‘Leave your message after the tone.‘”

Beep…

They need a good reader. Who, in the van roaring south on 605 through the sleepy, 2AM darkness, was me.

Summer called. “Dad, have you run the van?” Her van has been sitting in the driveway van-spot for some time now, waiting for better days.

“Uh. Do I have the keys?”

“Yeah! On the hook.”

“OK,” I lied, “I’ll try to start it later. Busy now.”, I lied.

Later came. The danged key was on the ring. So I trudged out to a mild, winter day and played find-a-way-in-to-the-van.

First try:

Well, the door looked locked. The key fit. The key did not turn.

OK. Other side. Not locked. Doh. … But, remember that, reader. It will come up later.

Sit in the driver’s seat. Look down:

Blast from the past!

A floor button to kick on the hi-beams. Cool.

Then I looked around. All of the controls were out of a time warp. Sure, this van is from the, what? 70’s, early 80’s? But it could have been from the 50’s, by the look of the controls.

It screamed, “Road trip.” Of the lowest budget kind.

It was time to fire this baby up.

Battery? Check. Starter motor? Check. Ignition? Uh.

Wrrrr. Wrrrr. Wrrrr.

Well, the beast had been sitting for some months. What can you expect?

I popped the hood. Yep. Another blast from the past. Black cavern. Oil? OK. (Worried, I was, that the gas had water in it, and now the engine did. Rust city, going forward.)

Thinking, “Well, that’s about all I can do. I am not going to go mechanic on this thing.”

“Hmmm. This big thing ‘tween the front seats looks like an old-van engine cover. … Wait! This is an old van!”

Struggle. Jimmy. Struggle. Jimmy.

Air cleaner? Hmmmm. Not exactly pristine. But there’s a carburetor. The little pushy, buttony, cably, add-on thingee appears to ineffectually attempt to be a choke as I had guessed and tried. Let’s apply some real manual choking action, here.

Mess with the butterfly.

‘Nother crank: Cough.

‘Nother crank: Cough.

Diddle with butterfly.

‘Nother crank: Fooom. Rumble, bumble, rumble, bumble. Yep. That’s the sound of good, old, missing-1-spark, Deeetroit iron, my friend.

Let it smoke for a while. Wait for the roughness to mellow out.

Look around.

They don’t make sound systems like this any more!

Put the cover back on the engine. Make the engine stuttering less dramatic.

Drive it in and out of the driveway a couple of times to wind the gears and wheels.

What a boat.

You’d wanna hold this barge under about 15 MPH on curvy mountain roads. Jeez, it’s so easy to forget how bad power steering was in those days.

OK. Shut ‘er down. Time to go back inside the house.

Ooops. Memo to self: Don’t drive this thing in to a lake. The other front door – the one you can open from the outside – doesn’t open from the inside.

Yep. Now this is your vehicle, baby.