Letter to Jean (30-Sep-93)

This is the first letter to my 2nd ex-wife after a five year hiatus.

Day Books: September 30, 1993 (Freeman Lake)

Dear Jean,

I don't remember if I've sent you much more than my annual news letters, or if you've even bothered to read them. Suffice to say that I'm planning on publishing my 20+ years of journals and photographs on a multi-media CD ROM. Here are some excerpts of recent entries.

Wedding Day - Dennette & Jean … Ann Arbor, MI - January 1, 1983

Up to now, I have been getting prints scanned in B&W at 300 d.p.i. resolution, which is fine for my laser printer's output. Kodak Photo CDs and their 1,000 d.p.i. color scanner let me put 100 images on a disk for $1.49 per image, and I can brain-damage them into VGA resolution and 256 colors for fast access and display.

When I moved out, I didn't ask for any of the photographs. I can still remember the mountainous pile of slides and prints on the table in the corner of the TV room. Pictures of the Maya ruins in Mexico, the brass strip at the Greenwich observatory. There are no journal entries for those trips, even though they had been dreams of mine for many years before I even met you. For most of my life, in fact.

I imagine that when you moved, the top of the table was simply scraped into a box, but you know exactly where that box is located, even though you may not have opened it for several years. I'd like to borrow it for a while.

Here's the deal ... I take all of the negatives, prints, and slides, and organize them chronologically. For the color negatives, I have jumbo (4x6) reprints made of each roll for which the prints cannot be located. I will digitize the shots I want, either from the prints or directly from the negative to Photo CD. You get the negatives and prints back in an indexed, archival storage box. For the slides, I'll have my favorites copied directly to CD ROM. When I return them, they will be on archival 3-ring pages of 20, in order and indexed.

Morris the Cat Like-a-looks - Washington, DC - Summer, 1984 (Mensa Annual Gathering)

I will send you copies of the Photo CD(s) even though I don't think you can view them now. You need either the Kodak Photo/Music CD Player, or a multisession Photo CD compatible CD drive on your PC (Macintosh or Windows) and Kodak's access software. These will be 2,048 x 3,072 x 16M (24 bit) color images. You'll be able to view them someday, even if only on someone else's machine. Taking a CD along for after supper entertainment will be as common as taking a VCR tape, which is to say, a lot easier than lugging slides and a projector and screen. (Remember those days?)

I'm making this offer because I'm buying in bulk. My mother has over 50 rolls of slides that she shot during her year in the Pillipines. My father has pictures from World War II. Then there are the hundreds of rolls of Kodachromes and Ekatachromes of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter gatherings, not to mention the summers in Stockbridge.

Because I intend to archive all of this for them, as well as my own professional portfolio from back in Rochester, I am ordering with the volume discount schedules. I don't need to keep them after I've made my digital copies.

Speaking of lugging slide projectors and screens, I remember visiting your friend (whose name I've forgotten) so you could show me a bunch of your old slides as well as seeing some of her collection. I seem to remember having a tray of slides of my portfolio as well ... I know I did one of the local Mensa meetings with one.

Wood Nymph: Edge of the Forest … Rochester, NY (1974)

I'm only interested in the rolls that I shot, particularly of the trips to Mexico and the U.K. I can send extra materials, but you'll have to catalog your other stuff. I have several Kodak instant prints (almost said "Polaroids", but I didn't buy one until after I moved out ... Kodak was still litigating in those days, and I could still buy the film) and some prints of FurFace and Pugwumpus that you sent me.

For some reason, I kept the snapshots of Boyfoot Bear - they're going on the Photo CD as well, along with snapshots from hotel rooms in Toronto, Chicago, and other rendezvous from before the marriage.

There's a saying in the Product Data Exchange industry ... "Make it happen, watch it happen, or ask what happened." I've got an embroidered credo from before I met you ... "Conceive it, Believe it, Achieve it." This is why I got into computers when I gave up photography as my sole means of support ... I knew that I would return to it, within my lifetime, using laser scanners.

My current machine is named BRUCILLA THE MUSCLE, after a character from a graphic novel that was serialized in Heavy Metal. It's a 33MHz 486 with 16Mb of RAM and 580Mb of disk. I have an HP LaserJet IIIP printer, and the CD drive is on order. I'm ready for multi media desktop publishing.

Those fancy false-color images I made from B&W negatives? I'll do them with image processing software. I have 19 rolls of 36 exposure B&W of the Wood Nymph, and 40 Kodachromes of her, plus four rolls of B&W from a studio session. They'll make a file 100 image folio edition on Photo CD ROM, along with the diary entries for that year.

[rescan!!]

Dr. Alexandra Kilgore & FurFace
Littleton, MA - 1991 (annual physical)

I'm going to upload a recent entry from my palm-top PC, because FurFace had a medical emergency this weekend - she had a shock reaction like that time we put the wrong flea collar on her. The portion of the journals from the time of the layoff is what I'm sending to publishers to talk about distribution ... I have nearly 25 years of this stuff.

Did I ever tell to you that I have over 10 hours of audio cassette recordings of my journal? They cover about two years of my life, ending about three years before I met you. I guess they run from just when I decided to give up photography to just after I went back to RIT to major in computers, perhaps the entirety of my relationship with Chic. (BTW, she and her companion of the last 12 years have bought a farm about 20 miles outside of Rochester ... Remember when she dropped us off at the Doll Museum?) Anywho, the CD will have sound bites to go along with some of the photographs.

I'm going to do this, and I'd like your cooperation. I tried to get you to read some of this material before we were married, but you were not interested. I used to have a type written version of the first hand written volume, but I haven't been able to find it. Did I leave it with you? [Found it, scanned it, used OCR, converted to HTML, and put it on my Day Books page. -=DAH=- (06-Nov-95)]

Right now I'm into Volume 4: The Digital Diary. The first two volumes are hand written, and the third volume is the material on the audio cassettes. One of my projects, now that I'm back on the dole, is to listen to the tapes and catalog the entries by date and duration. I think that I would rather employ a stenographer to transcribe them rather than try to enter them myself.

I'm really bummed out about that type written copy of Volume 1: Face down in a tray of Dektol. I've recently had my first experience with OCR. Pop delivered a speech at a conference on Blacks in WWII at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, PA about two years ago. He'd had it prepared on a neighbor's computer, but she lost the diskette. All he had was 25 pages of double spaced Courier font hardcopy, with hand-written page numbers.

This is a no-brainer. My friendly neighborhood graphic artist (the woman who designed my WiZ WORX logo) only charged me a buck a page, including spell-check. I put it into this nicely kerned Times font and printed it on tinted, watermarked paper, with page numbers and a header on the top of each page sayin' what it's all about and who wrote it and everthin'. I gave it to him for his birthday this year.

The next step is for him to try to locate photographs of all the people that he mentioned by name, as well as renderings of any insignia for the 366th and the other units he mentioned. Another project for me is to research the German side of the battle he describes, and find out about any posthumous or living medal winners from that campaign.

So, this is my current Vision Quest ... the Way of Remembering and Preserving. Don't ask my why, because I'll only answer that it is my karma to do so. Please help me do this thing.

-=DAH=- 30-Sep-93