Well, the Macintosh PowerBook arrived yesterday, and the Panoscan system and separate lens arrived today, courtesy UPS. And late this afternoon, Shelley made an epic salmon-like journey through and against early holiday-weekend traffic out to Westlake Village to obtain a special FireWire / SCSI converter to hook 'em all together.

And then I promptly spent about five hours not getting everything to work.

Sigh.

And another SIGH.


The trouble seems to lie in the FireWire / SCSI adapter although I'm by no means certain of this. Mostly certain, but not entirely, because testing with a SCSI scanner doesn't work either -- I trust it's not the Panoscan camera itself. The new Mac could have a bad FireWire port, but that seems rather unlikely. Assuming it's not a bad port, I have no more ideas what to try to make this set-up work.

I've written to the guy who sold me the Panoscan for advice, and to the people who make Panoscans. It turns out they have a new kit for turning the system from SCSI into FireWire for a direct connection, but their solution costs $400, which is $300 more than this little third-party adapter, and probably not obtainable for this weekend, which would be nice since we have Monday off and all day to play with the system -- if it can be made to work.

Well, we'll see what they all have to say on the morrow. It's late and I must to bed now.

Of course it couldn't be easy could it?



(OTOH, I simply unplugged the Ethernet cable from my Windows machine and plugged it into the Mac, which jumped on the Internet instantly, without me touching so much as a single control panel! That's despite having a router and firewall and going through another Windows machine to get to the cable modem. Go Macintosh!)