Web feed« Pre-Christmas plumbing. | Main | Knighthoods and football. An obvious combination (?) »
Wednesday, 29 December 2004
Christmas and webcams...
It's been a busy Christmas - fun, but tiring. I'm in the gulf between Christmas and New Year, with a few days of work to bring 2004 to a close.
I don't think we've managed to see the whole family in one Christmas for, well, years! From pre-Christmas drinks at Dad's to a struggle round the M25 to see Pete, the children were inundated with gifts, and we all shared laughs and treats, so I would rate it as a success.
Hopefully my 2005 resolution - which is to see more of the family - will be sustained, especially now I'm going to be doing shifts, which means a few more "days off".
Back to Christmas, though - my present from Beth was an extra-swiffy new mobile phone (a Nokia 5140), which - if I'm honest - she gave me shortly before Christmas so I could get the fiddling out of the way before the celebrations began. As ever, she underestimated my abilities to muck about with the radio, torch, camera, voice recorder, infra-red, games and compass (!) Still, it means that I captured some lovely moments - see below.
I received all sorts of other wonderful gifts - thank you to everyone for making this probably my favourite Christmas in living memory.
And so to work... I have one more 12-hour shift until 2005 starts - it's something I'll need to get used to, now I'm doing my Supervisor job. There's not really been much going on at work, thank goodness, so I've had the opportunity to close down some old jobs and - more importantly - move the contents of my desk to the 'supervisor' area, so that people know I've stopped doing what I used to do!
Something that has distracted me somewhat, however, has been the cult of the controllable webcam. I first saw a discussion on them (and how to find them) on the Something Awful forums - essentially, all you need is a search engine and a handy list of default titles and links to search for (www.xs4all.nl/~rufussan/wonder/camshoe.htm, for example). Here are some of my favourites so far:
- http://66.149.60.199:8000/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion : The studio webcam of Dave Graveline.
- http://woofdah.viewnetcam.com:1025/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=2 : A view of the playroom of a dog's home(?)
- http://www.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/site/1/Donkey_Watch.html : On a similarly creature-based theme - a donkey sanctuary (thanks, Elin!)
See how many you can find!
Links of the day
- www.davidc.net/google/bob_nudd_maggots_in_ya_catapult.html : Evidence (if more than the "Anfield Rap" or "Diamond Lights" is required to persuade) that sportsmen should not record songs - it's Bob Nudd, the champion angler.
- news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4134329.stm : As we leave 2004 behind, the BBC come up trumps, as ever, with 100 facts we didn't know a year ago. (Thanks, Elin, for the link!)
Posted by james at December 29, 2004 7:05 PM
