I hinted at the tale of my nerdy obsession with microfilm, so I shall try update interested readers on that particular endeavor.
First, you need to know that my church is about twenty minutes from my house on a good day. Second, you need to know that I kept finding construction workers turning a short street into a one way road. This also blocked my view of people turning the corner. So the real excitement involved getting there.
Third, a lot of people are afraid or disinterested in microfilm. Some of them seem to think they will instantly age or be attacked by spies if they think about this form of data storage for very long. Some people still want to access information this way. Not everything has made its way to the internet yet. And this nerd would argue that this is the ultimate backup.
Anyway, since the scanner connects to a computer, I sought help from the church’s tech support team. I explained the scanner works but to get better quality images, it needs to be able to communicate with an ancient computer which was fabricated around 2016. We quickly discovered that it wasn’t connecting to the computer. She suggested an adapter cord. I placed an order on Amazon, and it arrived the next day.
I rushed down to connect with the new cord. This led me to two realizations. First, whoever got my beloved scanner working before hadn’t seated the card correctly in the tower. Probably because it came from an even older computer. When I disconnected the scanner, the card tried to come with it. I have trouble wearing watches because even a good one stops working after two weeks of contact with my magnetic personality, so I make it a general rule not to muck around with hardware. But we had a work around involving converting it to USB, so the computer was safe from my tinkering.
Then my second realization hit. It had the wrong port to connect to the machine. So I took some pictures to guarantee success and started terrifying local nerds, geeks, and wannabes with my SCSI (usually pronounced scussy) needs. I feel nerdy hearts jumping with joy out there.
In two stores and one tech shop, however, I saw eyes widen with fear and confusion cloud friendly faces. I can just imagine the thoughts filling their minds.
“This woman wants what?”
“Does she know what she is asking?”
“Microfilm? No!”
Of course, that didn’t deter me. I rambled to a few friends, scoured the internet, and checked in with my geek guru. The common consensus came back as “what you want does not exist” and “no one uses microfilm anymore.”
But a friend of mine relayed my quest to her geeky husband and he volunteered to come reseat the SCSI card for me. So back we journeyed to the nice peaceful church. He attached the card more securely. I kept my magnetism out of the way. Then I waited for my tech support call, only to find out that our wires got crossed and she wasn’t available that day.
Back in the holding pattern, I began obsessing over the kind of party most people can get into: one involving cake. I will tell that story in my next post as I am hoping to post this one today. It is already four days late, and I need to stop slacking.
When tech support and I reconnected, we realized that getting drivers for my dear microfilm scanner required jumping through more hoops than us old souls had energy for. The scanner works to read microfilm, but our dear patrons will have to take a picture of its lovely screen to document their findings. So it was a wild journey, but it didn’t have quite the conclusion I wanted.
Still a good excuse to have a piece of pie in celebration though, right?
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