Camfoolery

Been geeking around on a PC again. Borrowed a Dell for an upcoming documentation project and been bidding on Thinkpad’s on ebay for another project. (Found out I’m going to be working with my old friend Molly on the project I can’t talk about yet, which is cool! Maybe I’ll even get onto her Famous People List some day.)

So after I wondered about using my new camera part-time as a webcam, I remembered that I own a Logitech cam that was gathering dust because of nonexistent OS X support. But since I have this Dell machine just sitting here, I plugged it in, got the driver, downloaded some freeware, and started streaming an image called x-cam.jpg to my xianlandia.com server. Then, since I recently copied the golden boy image over on the x-ism experimental textpattern blog, I figured maybe my personal blog could use that real-time ‘ere I am J.H., warts and all, circa-1997 cam content, maybe with a clever caption once I think of one.

So for the moment, the cam appears over at X-POLLEN. For readers of RFB who don’t follow my personal blog (at least not directly, since I port most of the posts over here anyway), I stuck in the copy of the cam image to the left of this paragraph. Then I thought about using the old refresh trick to make a cam page update itself. That would be annoying on a blog page (and over here it would cause a distortion in my hit count), so I whipped up a basic little refreshing cam page and stuck it up over at xianlandia.

As soon as I turn off the PC of course the image will stop updating, which will render the self-refreshing page so much the more annoying to all concerned. Plus, if I walk away without shutting off the cam, people get to gaze at the scintillating view of light streaming in through my curtains and solarizing everything in sight. I guess I could aim the camera at a painted nude. That should drive up traffic.

The whole webcam thing feels very home page-y and not very bloggy because it’s just streaming out there like old time live TV with no backup or archiving.