Category: default || By jt3y

An intro, a correction, and some material form the basis of today's Almanac. (What, you were expecting maybe Proust?)

I recently got a new (to me) computer, and moving the old peripherals and files over has been a trip. My old computer was pushing 10 years old, and I'm surprised that anything works with the new one. All praise the Mac gods for making so many things "backward compatible." The one case where it looks like I'm going to be, to use the technical term, "S.O.L." is the printer.

Switching the scanner (an image scanner, not this kind) over has, however, been a "P.I.T.A." (that's another technical term). I'll call the scanner a Kreptronic X11 --- it wasn't a cheap one, and it's still in production --- but nevertheless, it has basically the worst user interfaces I've ever seen.

As it turns out, the software that Kreptronic supplied to run the scanner on the old computer won't run on the new computer, which is OK, because it was crummy software anyway --- It would perpetually crash the computer any time you tried to do two scans in a row, which meant you had to reboot every time you wanted to do a new scan. Needless to say, this slowed the process down to a crawl, and it explains why there are relatively few images at Tube City Online.

(Sidenote: The Kreptronic replaced a 1989-vintage black-and-white scanner which wasn't very high-resolution, but was at least reliable. So was the software, which would fit on a single floppy.)

I went to the Kreptronic website to download the most recent version of the scanner software. It was 70 MB, but the estimated download time (even over a high-speed connection) was more than an hour. That has to be a mistake, I thought. I was wrong. The Kreptronic server must be powered by constipated gerbils. Then, it took three attempts to get the software to install. And when it finally did, it didn't crash the computer if you tried to scan two things in a row --- it crashed the computer as soon as you started it.

Thanks a lot, Kreptronic.

Luckily, I found some third-party software that will run the Kreptronic. The bad news is that it set me back $49.95, but the good news it's very quick, and has a lot of features.

So that's the introduction, as a way of explaining that I was a scan, scan, scan, scan, scannin' machine (watch me get down, watch me get down) on Sunday night.

Now, the correction --- two weeks ago I mentioned that I had purchased a bag containing three 1938 copies of the Homestead Daily Messenger. It turns out I was off by two weeks, and also misquoted the headline slightly. Mea culpa.

Finally, here's the material --- this is the front page of the Messenger from Sept. 19, 1938. (Click to enlarge.)




Here's the "masthead" of the Messenger:




Dig the school board "credo" --- I'm not sure if they printed that every day, or if this related to some crusade that the Messenger was on at the time for school district reform.

I say that because the Messenger was also on a street-lighting crusade at the time --- the "ear" at the top left of the front page says "WANTED: More and better street lighting for Eighth avenue."

You know, Eighth Avenue finally got new street lights a few years back. Who says the news media doesn't get results?

And finally, for those of you who read "Nancy" every day and think, "Gee, this has really gone downhill," here's proof positive that "Nancy" (then called "Fritzi Ritz") was, in fact, never funny: