Slide maker 1, Erica 0.

Apparently the equipment became obsolete in the year since the last batch of slides was made on it.

Here's a recap: three days out of my life (because I wasn't good for doing anything else those days). Five long-distance calls to the software company. Four desperate calls to Computer Services. Six Computer Services guys laboring over the thing. One roll of slide film destroyed when I ripped it out of the slide maker in disgust.

(the rest snipped; too whiny even for me).

Well, what I will say is this:

I appreciate all the hard work and willing-to-drop-everything-else-ness of the campus computer guys. They did their damnedest.

I appreciate Steve at Graphx who took the time to explain things to me and work up a new code when the one he emailed me didn't work.

I appreciate my department chair's willingness to order stuff we didn't have (and probably couldn't afford) just so I could make the slides.

I do NOT appreciate the slidemaker company's "oh, we don't support that technology any more" attitude. Yeah, well, if you knew that when you sold it to us like a year ago, you defrauded us.

So, tomorrow, I scan my photographic slides (which I finally DID find) and then hope I can fit it all onto a zip disk or a cd rom and then I make overheads of the important bits as a backup. I'm not happy, but I'm less unhappy than I was a couple hours ago.