Tonight: The new computer doesn't want to see the scanner. I've installed various pieces such as PhotoShop, the aspi32 drivers (for NT) and the scanning software to no avail and I guess that's good enough for tonight. This marks a week of no photographs (well tomorrow marks a week) so this must be my birthday vacation from photographs week ending butt head against the Ides. Caesar's day. Except I especially like to shoot photographs on my vacations. I'll download some new and improved drivers tomorrow at work and call Nikon if I must. I recommend in the normal day to day of your life that you not lose your operating system. It brings back vague memories of little gotchas I had to work around to get it to work in the first place that I have now forgotten along with every other fact and fiction of my existence. Art, Life and Technical Incompetence. Last weekend I was grousing about getting the DSL firewall up and connecting the webcam. The dream life preoccupations of indolent(s) with camera(s). I'll do webcams and firewalls again, maybe, but over the weekend.

Later yet. Must have been the drivers. One last reboot and it scans like topsy, like 600MHz topsy, although all the PhotoShop preferences are gone and all the gamma settings for the monitor have to be reset. I have vague recollections of gamma settings and the fact I'm supposed to pay attention to them, but I'm going to have to dig through the piles, find the manual and look them up. Techie talk, techie walk and when all is done, well, I stumble again onward, through the fog. (Is Oat Willie's still alive in Austin? Do they still sell bumper stickers and really expensive beam balance scales that will measure accurately to the 1/100th of a gram? Or don't people do that anymore? Measure accurately to the 1/100th of a gram?)

In other news, one should vote for the booth. I know, I know, ragged advice from someone who didn't vote in the primary, but I voted three times for the booth, each time using a different email address. I don't know if they track you down and ring your bell for stuffing their ballot box, but I'll let you know.

Not much later: Ah, yes. I read the instructions: They encourage voting as many times as you like. Actually, go and vote at least once. If you feel the urge, vote some more. We're treading pretty close to the edge of the greasy kid stuff here, but what the hell, every now and then you've got to test your limits and let loose.