Maybe blogging is something that you do when you're bored

It's one theory.

I've been completely preoccupied recently by the need to prepare a Powerpoint presentation (Executive summary; if you've got a room full of bosses, why use bullet points when real bullets would be so much more efficient?) for what a younger man would still be able to call his career. It's not that it's consuming my every waking hour, more that when I found myself in front of a computer I felt I should be honing my presentation. That has now been honed to the point that it's invisible from edge-on and I have tasked the computer to scanning in old negatives.

Which is, my word, tedious. Set up the neg, check in preview that it's worth the trouble, hit scan. Scanning at optimum resolution takes about three minutes. So you can't really get up and go and do something else, and you can't really get it done very quickly either. Worthwhile, like all of these exercises, but boring and time consuming. It will probably take the rest of today. And then I will have a fairly complete set of my baby pictures scanned in, because from the look of it what I have is the negatives from my parents' old camera. Which are old black and white 6 by 6s, ridiculously rich in data. In principle, because the huge negatives of the 1950s and 1960s were behind unsophisticated fixed focus lenses and the pictures aren't as sharp as you'd expect with that big an image. Still fascinating to watch them spring into life on my computer screen.