Saturday, February 24, 2018
Digital trap
I like to think of myself as an unreconstructed analog critter, solidly planted in the world of mechanisms and paper, unaffected by the digital demons. Nope. Wrong.
The latest module in courseware involves some complicated and rather vague images of the brainstem in cross-section. I'm trying to liven them up and label the various regions and nuclei in ways that stand out. It's fairly hard; I have to collate and study lots of online pics to find the named landmarks and transpose them to the existing images. Every text has its own way of schematizing this material.
When I'm in this stage of work, I like to print off the best of the sources, so I can see the image on paper while I'm forming up the labels and pointers digitally. It's easier than trying to click back and forth between several different graphics programs.
One of the online images was just right except that it was upside down, with the dorsal side down instead of up. So I flipped it in Irfan, then printed it off. When I pulled the paper out of the printer .... Hey! What's wrong? It's right-side-up after all. But I specifically turned it upside down ....
Oh. The printer always spits out the top of the image first, so the upside-down JPG came out of the printer looking right-side up.
Oh again. IT DOESN'T MATTER. I didn't need to flip it in the first fucking place. You can turn a piece of paper any way you want without hitting any keystrokes. So I did.
Labels: blonde moment
¶ 5:11 PM
