Friday, June 08, 2007
Swinnerton Visits his Home Turf, 1906
Okay, I admit it, I'm a lazy so-and-so. Ya see, I have this way cool article on Jimmy Swinnerton that ran in the LA Examiner on August 5, 1906. I was all set to OCR the text, scan the images, and generally reshape it into a delightfully pleasant blog post for you folks. But then my OCR software decided that the text of the article was written in Cyrillic or something. Admittedly the microfilm photocopy is not the crispest, cleanest image every, but gee whiz Wally. So, with the OCR doing its Mr. Magoo impression I had two choices. I could either laboriously re-type the article or just make you read the copy as it originally appeared. Guess which option this lazy lout took.
By the way, this might be an opportune moment to discuss scan quality. I go to some considerable trouble to make sure that my scans, which start out on my computer as beautifully crisp 300-600 dpi images, reach you as crystal clear as I can make them on our crappy 72 dpi monitors. Unfortunately, the guys who run this whole blogosphere, Blogger/Google, see fit to occasionally monkey around with the images that I upload. The exact rules for when and what they will do are unknown to me so I don't know any tricks to get around them. And when Blogger decides to reduce the size or quality of the lovely images that I upload, they end up coming to you in *ahem* less than optimum condition. Just the other day, for instance, I uploaded those Once Upon A Time strips and they were in pretty nice shape. But when I look at them on the blog they're blurry and hard to read. As Dylan might put it, "it ain't me, babe".
I bring this up today because the images for the article are on the large side, and my spidey-sense says that Blogger is going to have their way with them. So I apologize in advance for any squinting you have to do to get through the article. It's a dandy, though, and worth the trouble.
By the way, this might be an opportune moment to discuss scan quality. I go to some considerable trouble to make sure that my scans, which start out on my computer as beautifully crisp 300-600 dpi images, reach you as crystal clear as I can make them on our crappy 72 dpi monitors. Unfortunately, the guys who run this whole blogosphere, Blogger/Google, see fit to occasionally monkey around with the images that I upload. The exact rules for when and what they will do are unknown to me so I don't know any tricks to get around them. And when Blogger decides to reduce the size or quality of the lovely images that I upload, they end up coming to you in *ahem* less than optimum condition. Just the other day, for instance, I uploaded those Once Upon A Time strips and they were in pretty nice shape. But when I look at them on the blog they're blurry and hard to read. As Dylan might put it, "it ain't me, babe".
I bring this up today because the images for the article are on the large side, and my spidey-sense says that Blogger is going to have their way with them. So I apologize in advance for any squinting you have to do to get through the article. It's a dandy, though, and worth the trouble.
Comments:
Okay fine. Blogger must have heard me carping. The article images haven't been touched. The blame for any trouble you have reading the articles lands squarely on me this time.
--Allan
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--Allan
