Kodachrome: Last Brick Update

I found a guy online who can sell me a brick of 36-exposure rolls whose sell-by date is Oct 2007, a fairly good gamble, for a little more than $5/roll. If I can't find a fresh brick locally, I'll take the chance. I figure it's about a $150 gamble, including shipping and processing costs for one roll to see how good/bad it isn't.

Driven to distraction

My little Pacific Imaging slide scanner wasn't working -- it was leaving a thin magenta line down the scans, about 2/3 of the way to the right. I thought I might try slapping it a couple of times before giving up on it. So I did.

Then the computer wouldn't recognize it. Could be a driver problem, says I. So I downloaded the driver from the mfr's website. First it wanted to uninstall the old one -- makes sense to me, if the driver is corrupt. But it apparently took something down on its way out the uninstaller door. I couldn't get my computer to boot unless it was in safe mode. Yikes said I, so I backed up all my data files (many many many gigs) on the external hard drive, just to be on the safe side. Matter of three hours. Maybe safe mode is slower, I dunno. It's USB, not FireWire or any of those other newfangled things the kidz are using.

Eventually I was able to reboot in reality mode, complete the installation of the driver. I was very happy to see that the scanner now works perfectly. No nasty magenta stripe. Not that I need to scan a bunch of 35 mm transparencies at the moment, although Roy spent the afternoon looking through the highlights of half a century of Kodachrome moments. And it's not a production machine, nor are the scans by any stretch of professional quality. But I'd like to be able to scan a slide if I needed to.

I also reinstalled the driver for my old external hard drive, the one that stopped behaving back in Jan. 2007, on my ancient Win98 laptop, and now it recognizes it. I don't have a WinXP driver for it, though, and I shouldn't really need one, should I? But one never knows. Perhaps I'll see if I can figure out the model number and try downloading something. It would be hellacious hard to get things off the ancient laptop. I'd have to reinstall the drivers for the Iomega Zip CD burner -- it didn't come with one.

On the other hand, that might be easier in the long run...