Scanning Negatives

I had some other crazily awesome blog entry planned for today, I think. Although I've completely forgotten what it was, and although the draft for it is probably in my other computer, that's not where I am right now, and I'm feeling like I'm in a pretty good writing mood, so here I am, working on a post in Blogger's web mode.

Today I'm just hanging out here in the School of Communication open lab, preparing for my PHO382 midterm, and we're finally scanning files for Megan. I'm not sure exactly how much quality we need, so I've gone ahead and tried to give us as much extra quality as I possibly can. This way, even if we end up outputting 640px jpegs for the web, we'd have as much latitude and data to work with as posible, which is awesome. Only real problem is that it seems like the process of scanning these 300 megabyte TIFF files is very.. umm... well, intense. The computer hates me ow, basically. The protip of the day is that 300 megabyte TIFF files make computers very angry.

The open lab here at the school of communication consists of all Macintosh computers of various ages. I suspect some of the machines in this room, set up and able to be logged into on titan are nearly a decade old, such as the old PowerMac G4 systems with their 15" ADC displays. The very ones I remember Apple unveiling in 1999 or 2000. What workhorses. On the other hand, we've got a lot of pretty modern systems in here too, a bunch of the latest 20" iMacs, and G5s of various types (iMacs and PowerMacs.)

This iMac performed very well at first, and I bet that as a standalone machine, or a machine in an environment with a much faster network, this thing would rock so hard, it wouldn't be funny. Similar to those 2.0GHz/2GB Dell OptiPlex 755 systems in the College of Business Administration, except the iMacs here have bigger displays and webcams. Oh, and there's the whole thing about how the School of Comm only has one file server, but that's actually a post for another day.

The only thing I can really purport to not love about this iMac is the keyboard, at first Apple's newest keyboard is a little bit off-putting. It's so low on the desk, and it's somewhat difficult to get used to the idea of a laptop keyboard like this on the desk. It was also difficult for me to find an appropriate position for the keyboard, where I felt like I could start typing on it at full speed and not have it fly out from under my hands, or have my fingers start feeling weird as a result of the odd positioning and shape of the keyboard. After a few hours of typing this blog entry and chatting in Meebo and Mibbit however, I'm feeling much more confident with this keyboard. While I'm not going to run home and buy one tonight, I would feel confident in ordering and using one if both of my previous-generation Apple Keyboards died, or it came to be that I ordered a newer Mac and didn't have a different keyboard to use with it.