Scaring the Danes -Wednesday, March 03, 2004 -5:15 am-
I fenced tonight for the first time in quite a while. That was seven hours ago and I've almost got the feeling in my thumb back. Obviously, all the equipment I was using was borrowed. The jacket wouldn't zip, the glove wouldn't go most of the way on, and the grip was several sizes too small. The end result was the grip pressing on a nerve bundle in my hand somewhere and my thumb going numb. Only the tip of it is tingly now, but the space bar is still interesting. It was kind of odd to be playing at combat in the Lane Lounge in the Ohio Union. We drew lots of odd looks. I saw sabre for the first time tonight. God damn, that's a weird thing to do. It amounts to two people rushing at each other, swinging their swords, creating a thunking sound, and a Director claiming only on of them really hit the other. Definitely not for me. I think epee is the only form I'll ever bother with, because the rest of them have rules about where you can hit, and when you can hit, and other random, insufferably French ideas. Considering it's origin, I'm surprised there isn't a procedure for surrendering in fencing.
When I got home, I started scanning negatives, as I do almost every night. Tonight, I started to scan my first large format negative. Oi. 4x5 inches of film is a lot to scan! The file starts at 568MB. Think about that for a second. That means I can write one file per CD! For the black and white ones, the mode can be changed to grayscale, resulting in a filesize of 158MB. The scanner takes about 35 minutes to get the data off the film and put it into the computer. The computer then takes another 5 minutes to assimilate the data and display it to the screen. Writing out the file to disk takes about 3 minutes. Setting levels takes however long it takes, and then about 2 minutes to preform the calculations on the data. Then another 3 minutes to write out the modified file. Then comes the removal of dust and scratches. The time taken for that obviously varies greatly depending on how clean the negative is. I scanned a negative tonight that was in excellent minus or excellent condition. I worked for 90 minutes on it before my eyes gave up. I'm about half way done with it. I'm thinking I'm going to get one of these (if that) done a day. I have more than twenty of them to do.
Stay tuned tomorrow. If I remember to get my ass out the door before sunset, I'm going to take picture of something that will hurt all your heads or make you laugh or maybe both.