{"id":3423,"date":"2016-03-03T21:52:27","date_gmt":"2016-03-03T20:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/?p=3423"},"modified":"2016-03-03T21:57:17","modified_gmt":"2016-03-03T20:57:17","slug":"past-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2016\/03\/03\/past-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Past lives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on part-time leave this week, and I&#8217;m doing a bunch of scanning and archiving. Mostly paper documents that have been accumulating in hanging folders for the last ten years. I&#8217;m finding the app <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pdfscannerapp.com\/\">PDFScanner<\/a> to be invaluable. It makes it super easy to scan a batch of sheets, do OCR on the text, and save them as a single searchable PDF. The process would be a lot faster if I had a proper document scanner, but I&#8217;m making do with the Epson Perfection V600 flatbed I bought a couple of years ago. Once I&#8217;ve done the initial bulk scan, I&#8217;m not going to be scanning dozens of documents a day. It&#8217;s fine.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also cut down the other bookcase in my office to give myself some more wall space for posters and pictures, and I&#8217;ve been sorting through piles of &#8220;stuff&#8221; with the following in mind: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Every day, throw something away.<\/li>\n<li>Just because you have it, doesn&#8217;t mean you have to use it, or even keep it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is all building up to one day being able to finish organizing and digitizing our boxes of 35mm photos and prints. <a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2003\/08\/25\/going-analogue\/\">Despite what I thought at the time,<\/a> the APS format has one key advantage over 35mm in the digital era: it&#8217;s easy to ship a small box of APS camera rolls to a third party for scanning. Our 35mm negatives and prints are all over the place. It&#8217;s going to take some effort to gather them all together for sending them out in the first place. I don&#8217;t have that in me yet.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, I did come across and individually scan a couple of relics from the 1990s: my first RBS security pass from when I started work there in 1996, and a souvenir business card for my character Beck from Ambercon UK back in&#8230;1995? Might have been 1996. Either way, some 20-ish years ago.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/images\/2016\/martin-rbs-1996.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/images\/2016\/martin-rbs-1996.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"632\" class=\"aligncenter\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/images\/2016\/beck.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/images\/2016\/beck.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"603\" class=\"aligncenter\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I can remember my RBS staff ID (2368390), and my CompuServe user id from back then (100272.2327) as clearly as my mobile phone number now, but I don&#8217;t remember exactly which AmberCons Abi and I attended. (I&#8217;m sure Abi will remind me.)<\/p>\n<p>I remember reading about AmberCon UK while I was working as a clerical assistant at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk\/\">HCRC<\/a> (Human Communication Research Centre) in early 1994. (Surfing <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Usenet\">usenet<\/a> in my lunch hours, in a terminal window on a pizza box Mac LC.) I <em>think<\/em> we went to the one in 94. I&#8217;m not sure if that&#8217;s when I first played Beck, though. The business card would have been a souvenir for the con after the first time I played him, and brought him back as a recurring character. So either 95 or 96.<\/p>\n<p>PS: I also found myself describing to Fiona this afternoon what a &#8220;photo negative&#8221; is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on part-time leave this week, and I&#8217;m doing a bunch of scanning and archiving. Mostly paper documents that have been accumulating in hanging folders for the last ten years. I&#8217;m finding the app PDFScanner to be invaluable. It makes it super easy to scan a batch of sheets, do OCR on the text, and &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2016\/03\/03\/past-lives\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Past lives&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3423"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3429,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3423\/revisions\/3429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}