It has finally happened. I have started to digitize my high school yearbook photographs. It is very exciting. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. The value of digitization probably never occurred to me before I started working at CDI. I’m scanning the photos at 300 dpi. Nothing compared to the 600 dpi that images were scanned at for CDI, but still more than the 200 dpi that my scanning program recommended for photographs. I’m learning some good habits. Recording metadata. The rolls are organized in folders numbered chronologically, the file names are based on captions. In Flickr I am recording additional text that I originally wrote next to the photograph, or anything extra that occurs to me as I sift through them. I have only finished four rolls worth of photos so far which comes out to 57 photos (only about half of each roll ever made the cut for the yearbook). A long way to go for senior year, and even longer if I decide to also digitize junior and sophomore years. I am hoping that now the people who would look at my yearbook during class in high school can find the photos and look at them any time they want, anywhere.

I suppose I am also hoping that this inspires me to take more pictures next year at Brown. At GWU I took a miserable single roll of film. The first half was from the very beginning of the year before I had given up on the place and when I was still optimistic that I would be happy and have lots of friends and know enough people that I felt comfortable around to actually make a real yearbook. Didn’t happen. I took some at Brown but nothing compared to my high school yearbooks, probably because they are all digital to begin with and I don’t have the satisfaction of sorting picking up the photos from CVS like they are a present and sorting through them and cutting them and arranging them and sticking them in a black sketchbook.

I forgot to mention this yesterday but I started reading The Da Vinci Code again. I still can’t get over how badly it is written, but this time I read far enough in one sitting to get hooked. I like being in the middle of a book. It always gives me something else I could be doing, something to do, a purpose. The trouble with this book is that it is going way too fast. I did find some of Mummy’s old college books which will be dry and academic but perhaps interesting and should last a lot longer than junk-food-esqueDa Vinci.

Mummy has started to call Charlie “Zack” by mistake sometimes.