I can't believe Christmas is less than two weeks away. I wonder if the world wouldn't mind postponing it for a couple of weeks until I get caught up.

Cara Scissoria Greeting Cards

A couple of weeks ago I got swept up in a datathon. A couple of months ago my desktop hard drive died for the third time. At that point it became easier to let dead drives lie and switch over to only my laptop finally becoming desk top computerless for the first time. As I loaded my backup files onto my laptop (You do back up for hard drive regularly, don't you?) I noticed that most of the photos taken with my digital Olympus starting in 1998 were missing. I was bummed until I was cleaning up my basement and remembered I had two totes full of Zip disks (Remember those?) and CDs of archived files. I was worried I wouldn't be able to read the Zip disks but I bought a USB Zip drive on eBay for $20 and it read all but one. And there were all my old digital photos from 1998 on. I have a Maxtor external hard drive for regular backup but I bought another external hard drive for archive purposes.

A 1 terrabyte, as in 1,000 gigabytes, Western Digital Elements 1 USB external hard drive available on Amazon for $99. The Zip disks were from the late 1990s when I had a 4 gigabyte hard drive and no CD burner. The Zip disks held 100 megabytes and we thought that was big. How times have changed. Those photos and music files take a lot of room. So now I'm going through 13 years of data moved over 4 computers and about 8 hard drives and cleaning it up so that I can free up space on my laptop's 500 gigabyte hard drive. The amount of data you have expands to fill the space there is to store it. (Another corollary of Parkinson's Law) The plus side is that I miraculously seem to have most of my old data.

The Toyo View D45M is almost ready to shoot. I took it over to my friend Vern's for him to look at. He has a recent Horseman and is familiar with the newer 4x5 monorail cameras from the photography school he has been going to. My Toyo was made in the early 1970s and is a design that first went into production in 1958 so we are talking 1950s technology. I was sure the new 4x5 view cameras were much better. They sure are bigger. But that's not the case. It turns out that my Toyo is a much more solid and precise instrument then the new ones. It's a case of experienced technicians being replaced by cheap robots. The new cameras are much cheaper to make and are not as solid or smooth. They have easier to read scales but Vern thought that a camera like my Toyo, if it were made today, would be in the $3,000 to $4,000 range. Not bad for $150. I have a changing tent on the way and film is already here. As soon as I get my film holders loaded I can shoot but I only have a 90mm (25mm equiv.) lens right now. I need to get my 254mm Elgeet (72mm equiv.) (my portrait lens) to my machinist to get mounted. My main lenses will be barrel mounted 150mm (42mm equiv.) and 210mm (59mm equiv.) lenses but I still can't find my Packard shutter.

Then last week I was involved in an International trade dispute. One of my gordy strap customers let me know that someone in Singapore was copying my straps. Not only did he copy my straps but even much about my website. He calls his Andy's camera straps. My reseller in Singapore assures my that Andy's straps are not the same quality and not to worry. This did finally get me to put up my reseller's page so that people in Singapore know there are now two places they can go to see my straps. I know have authorized resellers. This is an aspect of my strap business I will me promoting more.

Merry Christmas to all!