My scanner started acting up today again. It's been getting worse lately. I have this fairly old scanner, a Visioneer PaperPort 6100. It's from like 1998 or something. But that's not the problem. The problem is the software. It's not made to run on Windows XP, it's for 98 and below, basically. So XP gives me that warning, which I ignore, but this program actually doesn't work when I run it, unlike every other program that warns me about incompatibility problems. There is a part of the program that does work, however, and that's the TWAIN import from Photoshop.

Now it works, but it's buggy. The main glitch it has is sometimes when I press the scan button it will start to scan and then immediately stop. Then the whole screen flashes gray and then the screen comes back and i'm left with a black image as the result. Lovely side effects of this include my Start bar going completely transparent until I mouse over every part or resize the whole thing, and Photoshop being totally unusable for scanning until I restart it.

Usually this only happens once in a while, but as of late its about 1 out of every 3 scans. That's really bad. Do you know how much it sucks to restart Photoshop and fiddle with the start bar every 15 minutes or so when I have to scan in like 10 pages? A lot. That's how much.

Anyways the point of all this is that I almost couldn't scan in the cover for next week's issue, as well as the sketch I just put up. I say almost, because after it crashed a few times in a row, and waiting an hour or two, everything just worked again, all magic-like. Things like that happen to me a lot, especially with my computer. The magical self-fixing I mean, not the horrendous crashing. I'll relate those stories to you some other time, perhaps when I can finally format my posts without actually typing any html.