pumpkinstrokemarrow

The attendant, using the common or garden public access scanners, did one of each. He claimed that the scanners might be common or garden but that they did do lots of psi's and he did not think one was going to better anywhere else. The results did not look too hot on the screen that came with the scanner, but I took them away anyway for the entirely reasonable sum of £3.49 or so.

The one illustrated is that on the very thin paper, on which the scanner has picked up the crumples, faint though they were. While a lot better than the image I got from my entry level scanner, still not perfect. I think the trouble might be that the scanner is not forgiving enough; what comes across as sharp & clear, black & white on a printing press is blurred by the scanner. Or perhaps the interaction of the scanner and the screen is doing something. Possibly moving from one number of pixels to another, a move which can do funny things to images. One line of enquiry will be to investigate whether by pushing the image through some image enhancer, I can recapture the spirit of the original. I know people in Tooting that are good at that sort of thing.

Another line of enquiry would be a high street photographer who might be able to do better with his fancy camera than Jessops with their fancy scanner. The only catch with this being that high street photographers seem to be an extinct breed, at least in this part of Surrey. I suppose that cheap digital cameras awash with image enhancing widgets have taken the bottom out of the market.

In the way that my water book tells me that a machine invented by public money at the University of California has displaced the 20,000 lower paid workers who picked the tomatoes for big corporate tomato growers there who grow their tomatoes on water paid for by that same public money. Which also picks up the social security tab for the now unpaid lower paid workers. Complicated world.

I believe that the bit of the music on the book plate is from a piece which was important to my father. But I could not pick it out from the Beethoven and Bach candidates I could think of - and had the score for. Which cuts things down a bit. I tried putting 'ECBEEABAA' into Google, this being my translation of the notes into letters, but that does not seem to be a language that Google works with. But it must be possible if I remember correctly that iTunes can identify a piece from the odd bar, in which case it must have something to bite on. A further line of enquiry.