Re: Tables and Styles
Thanks, Richard and Derry.
It's good to be back despite this flaw in GoLive, and good to see you
here.
This reminds me of the time I designed a photo lab at the Texas
Highway Department. They gave me a space large enough for it, and
said I could design it as I wanted.
So I made it two rooms, one dark and wet and one light and dry.
I put a switch inside the darkroom so the fellow working in there
could switch off the light in the outside room if he needed to get
something out there, and didn't want to have to put all the paper and
film back in lightproof boxes and stow them away.
I had fiberglass coated wooden sinks with alternate drains in them so
I could develop photo-murals and save the chemicals afterward. Wood
because it is an excellent thermal insulator and the temperature
would stay close enough to optimum for an hour or more.
I enclosed all the pipes inside a hollow wooden shelf, seamlessly
joined with the wooden sink so chemicals could be cleaned off the
surface easily and it could not get on the pipes.
The faucets were ordinary garden variety so we could screw plain old
garden hoses on them to take the water where we wanted it. Under the
shelf was a 12 inch deep lip on the wooden tanks ... which were also
all seamlessly joined with each other so there was no crack for
chemicals to get into.
We could set bottles of chemicals on the shelf, and it stuck out over
the 40 inches of sink 12 inches so you could reach bottle of
chemicals standing on it without getting a ladder to do so.
The walls were all white, so they would reflect and fill in the
shadows in the darkroom. That way, the safelights were plenty of
illumination to see into drawers and cabinets, and read written
instructions on the order forms.
It had a water cooler tied into a liquid temperature regulator, to
mix chilled water with tap water and maintain a constant 68 Degrees F
(20 degrees C ... I still think in Fahrenheit).
-------------------
But the architect had an amateur photographer on staff who knew better.
What I got was a light switch out in the hall so that anybody walking
down the hall could switch the lights on in the darkroom.
The sinks were stainless steel, and would not hold the optimum
temperature more than thirty seconds.
The pipes were completely uncovered. (The explanation I heard later
was that it was so they could be gotten to easily for cleaning.)
The shelf was not above the sink, it was part of it, BEHIND the 40
inches of sink. So it was 52 inches from the front edge of the sink
and the wall. You had to get on a little ladder and put your hand in
the bottom of the sink for balance in order to reach a bottle of
chemicals sitting on it.
The faucets were some kind of needle valve spigots with a tapered
shape to slip on latex surgical tubing. The force of the water
coming out of the needle valve blew off the tubing the moment you
turned on a faucet, and sent out a jet of water so strong that it
showered the entire darkroom when it hit the flat bottom of the sink.
The walls were black. (Everybody knows a darkroom is supposed to be
DARK.) You could not see anything at all that was not directly under
a safelight fixture.
The industrial water cooler I had ordered was not there. Instead,
this amateur had tied the cold water line into a little bitty
drinking fountain with a cooler in it to multi-purpose it. It had a
recovery time of hours. Our chilled water line did not tie into the
regular water line as I had designed it. It tied into the industrial
strength hot water line for the whole development of several
buildings that put out a constant water temperature of 180 degrees
F. ... close enough to boiling that you could cook an egg with it. We
didn't know this. So the first time I came back from a trip to West
Texas with a load of what I hoped were fantastic cactus and
wildflower blooming desert, the system literally boiled the gelatin
emulsion off the color film. I mean it dripped off the film in globs.
We could not operate in that facility at all. The management finally
figured it out and authorized my re-build, but I had to live with the
steel sinks .
GoLive 9 isn't quite that bad. But I wonder if they hired the same
amateur.
Probably never know. I guess I'll just have to use GL 8 as long as
the contemporary Mac OS supports it.
Nevertheless, it's good to be back in communication with some of the
old gang.
Doug