A Great Leap Forward?

Well, I done did it. I switched to the NEW blogger. In doing so I read all of their privacy stuff. I wonder how many people do that. Interesting:

--Google has the right to suppy your personal information to any government that asks, without telling you.

--The only legal venue is in Santa Clara County, CA.

I really would be more comfortable if we had a national law that said information about US persons could only be sent to a foreign government after (1) permission was received from the US Department of Justice, and (2) the person was notified that the information was being sent. Since I doubt that this will occur, the best policy is to not place any personal information that you wish to keep private in the hands of Google.

Now on to other things. The slide scanning project is still going forward. I'm trying to scan several boxes of slides each evening. There are thousands of those things! Lots of pictures of roads and flowers and museum exhibits (can you spell GEEK if the activity precedes the creation of the word?). But there are also lots of pictures of my cute little kids, and places they visited... and places I visited long before they were little kids. Once it's done, we will have to sit down and make a slide presentation with narrative and burn it using iDVD.

The 8mm movie project is a bit of a problem. I can't seem to locate a super-8 projector (without buying one on eBay for an obscene price) to run those films and record them digitally. Scanning is out of the question at this point; they run approximately 6 frames to the inch on 50 foot segments. I have about a dozen of those, plus several 400 foot reels. They do need to be preserved digitally, though, if they are to be kept at all. The color on some of the slides is fading a bit (30-40 years will do that for a chemical emulsion), and any 8mm clips will probably need some color correction, just as I'm doing with the 35mm stuff.

Time to go shovel snow again. It's well over a foot deep in the drive, and I shovelled 3-4 inches out of there twice yesterday. Reminds me of the good old days...