Wednesday November 26th, 2003

First Day care Portraits

The day care photographs arrived yesterday. Neither pose was very good. Hailey was crying in both of them. We had to buy the pictures anyway because they are Hailey’s first photographs. There could be a bit of a scam going on at the day care. The photographers don’t have to be good because they know you will buy them anyway. They also don’t have a fixed package. You buy by the sheet, $15 for the first, $10 for additional, and they already have printed out the sheets for you once you get there. You can buy all the sheets they have for $70. I decided to only get the larger prints, four sheets total. So they were left with some already printed sheets, I think they were also about to try the up-sale of overpriced frames, but I would have none of that.

When I went to scan the photographs, I found this picture sitting on the scanner, I think I was going to scan it a while back. I must have gotten distracted. That happens a lot these days. Anyway, here is Dr. Brinkman and Hailey D. Jones (The D is for Dr. Brinkman, really it is for Diane but that is still Dr. Brinkman, so there). Hailey is wearing her authentic Hawaiian dress from Meredith and Lisa’s trip to Hawaii.

More Pictures

We found an old roll of film the other day and had it developed. We didn’t get a photo CD with the development, so I have been meaning to scan them. The scanner doesn’t work in Linux so I have to reboot into Windows to do the scanning and I have been putting it off, but today seemed like a good day to get it done.

I didn’t want to spend all day in Windows so I installed the scanner software on my laptop, then I hooked the laptop to the scanner and used rdesktop to remotely connect and control the laptop from Linux.

Scanners are made to scan photographs but they don’t do a good job. If you are not very careful when placing the picture and closing the lid, your scans will be crooked. I had a lot of pictures to scan and didn’t have a lot of time to be careful. I needed something else.

First I tried holding the pictures up against the edge while I scanned but my fingers showed on some of the scans. So I tried to copy the pictures with my digital camera but I couldn’t find a good light source. Finally, I made a picture scanning jig out of some masking tape, a clear ruler, and a square. It worked out pretty good.

This roll of film had pictures from everywhere. I think the roll started while Hailey was in Houston for her EEG monitoring. Here we see that Hailey can look pretty even when she has many electrodes attached to her head.

There are a lot more pictures in the album. This is one of my favorites, it looks like Hailey has a mission.