08:45 – On her way out the door this morning, Barbara asked if one of our Pentax DSLRs had any images on the memory card. She works in the IP division, where they frequently need to shoot images of clients’ products for patent and trademark documents. They’ve been using a point-and-shoot digital camera, but Barbara says they’ve been having problems with getting usable product images. She wanted to try shooting images with a better camera, so I pulled all the images files off the memory card so she could take a clean camera to work.
I assumed that she’d just bring the camera home and I’d transfer the images as usual and burn them to a disc or write them to a USB flash drive. I should have realized that was a non-starter. The stuff they do is confidential, and the images aren’t allowed to leave the law firm’s premises. So I gave her a USB cable that she could use to transfer the images and then delete them from the card. Fortunately, I remembered that the camera was set to record images in RAW format, which they’d have no way to handle, so I reconfigured it to save as JPG files.
Since they apparently need to shoot product images frequently, it seems to me that Barbara’s law firm needs to purchase a decent DSLR, a copy stand, tent, lights or slave flashes, and so on, and set themselves up an imaging station. Of course, they’re not really concerned with artistic merit. All they need is images to document the products for legal reasons, so they probably don’t care much about stuff like even lighting or controlling reflections.
Orders continue to arrive for the chemistry kits, which are currently back-ordered. We’ll complete one batch of 28 kits this weekend, which will lack only the one item that’s still back-ordered from our vendor, and start on the next batch of 28 kits. When the back-ordered item arrives here, it’ll take only a few minutes to drop it into each of the 56 pre-built kits and have 56 more kits ready to ship.
11:43 – I’m playing around a bit with the right-column layout. Given the presence of the monthly calender and the fact that I’m now naming each daily post only with the day and date, the “recent posts” section seemed superfluous. So I got rid of it and expanded the “recent comments” section from 15 to 25 comments, which should make it easier to find new comments on older posts. I’m seriously thinking about switching to a three-column theme and dedicating one of the side columns to my links.