Deliriously happy in Houston...

Tonight, I decided to indulge in something I'd been wanting to do for a while. I set up my cam in the simul booth, and set my laptop to run Webcam32 to capture images of myself at work.

So there I am, doing what I do when suddenly, I notice my laptop - which had been working without a glitch - is in Safe Mode.

Uh-oh.

I shut it down and start it up. I get the Windows ME splash screen and then... n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

While I'm thinking of what to do, the machine spontaneously reboots. I get the splash screen again, then the screen that asks me what I want to do. I head off to Safe Mode again and repeat the process. As the machine shuts down again and I press the power button, I wonder what I'm going to do if this process repeats.

No for long, though, as this time, Windows comes back. <relief>

Call me superstitious, but I think I shall refrain from running Webcam32, at least until after I print out my tax forms tomorrow.

BTW, I hit Surveyor's web site earlier and learned that all employees have been laid off as of a week ago, and the company is for sale. Their discussion boards also indicate a significant number of less-than-deliriously-happy users. Ye gods.

* * *The Stout (as in Rex, not Guinness) was excellent. Triple Jeopardy is a set of three novelettes set sometime in the early 50s, and even though I've not read much of the Nero Wolfe canon, the atmosphere wasn't hard to pick up. It was refreshing, too, to have a detective's sidekick - Archie Goodwin - portrayed as something more than someone with whom The Detective could have a conversation.

Work calls.

Cheers...

Six-and-a-half hours to go...

This morning's end time apparently got misrouted inside my brain when I spoke to the office the other day. It turns out that instead of finishing at 10:15 this morning, we actually finish at 10:45, so that cuts another half hour off my projected sleep time before coming back in to work again starting at 6:15 tonight.

Back to work.

Cheers...

Support is as support does...

Noodling around the Surveyor web site, I ran across the following, excerpted from a thread on their support forum:

I think I've solved the problem of why Webcam32 wasn't running on Win2k properly. I found out I was backing the 'loser' - Webcam32 - and I've now moved to Inetcam ivista and it all works on all the platforms and with the nastiest machines that I've the displeasure of owning.

It seems there are a lot of sad faces attached to forum messages, and a number of messages that accuse Surveyor of shifting the blame for software problems away from themselves and onto users.

Downloading iVISTA onto my laptop right now.

Cheers...

Interesting CNN item...

I've had a TV monitor beaming CNN at me for most of the night, with sound muted. Every so often, a group of clips has been shown with a tantalizing title along the lines of "what we've missed." When it came on a few minutes ago, I punched in the appropriate loop, at a low volume, and listened in.

The segment touched upon news stories that we may have missed in the massive media storm surrounding the events of September 11. I scored 100% in my knowledge of these current events.

I hadn't known about any of them.

Among the events of the day that flew by my ears:

a. The first operation done completely by remote. A surgeon in New York, manipulating special waldoes, performed a gall bladder operation on a patient in France.

b. The Pentagon's top intelligence analyst on Cuba turned out to be a top Cuban spy.

c. China's soccer team qualified for the World Cup competition.

d. The Postal Service wants to raise the first-class rate to 37 cents.

Of these items, only the last two surprise me. I'd heard a lot about the promise of remote surgery before this, and as far as the second item is concerned, well... I hope the Feds do a better job vetting prospective airport security employees than they have checking out the backgrounds of people working in sensitive intelligence positions.

As I'm not much of a soccer fan, item three doesn't excite me that much.

Item four is of interest, especially as all these rate increases (two so far this year) have made our life at the store harder (e.g., having lots of people come in to buy odd quantities - for example, four or thirteen - of 1-cent stamps). Not to mention having people ticked off at us (as in, personally) for raising the rate.

Cheers...

Back on the job...

Been here, actually, for almost two hours.

Sleep was fitful... I think I got a total of two good hours. Then I tossed and turned for about three more, got up, washed, got dressed, and cranked back into work. Mark L. and I are here until 5:30 tomorrow morning. We'll be covering the day's activities until just after today's EVA starts, then we'll be relieved by the next shift.

As far as the rest of the day is concerned, my primary goal will be to print out my tax return and get it in the mail. After that, the only thing I need to do is get enough sleep to be functional for another "day" of work starting at midnight tonight.

* * *I tried out the iVISTA software last night. It seems to work okay, but I'm leery of buying yet another program for camming. One thing that was interesting about the software: When you run it, it goes out to the inetcam website and creates a server name for you (e.g., alexpgp.inetcam.com) and dynamically modifies the inetcam website's DNS to redirect any requests for this machine to your machine, so that your computer actually behaves like a web server in this capacity.

If I had a high-speed connection, this might actually be a usable capability, but in Pagosa - where 19.2 kbps is considered "high speed" if you're out at the end of the copper the way I am - it's not really feasible. First of all, it'd be slow. Second, if you're not online all the time (and at 19.2, who is?) the link goes nowhere when you're not connected.

OTOH, I have two more days to play with the software until it stops working, so I may - between comm passes - set up my cam again and put the program through its paces. Unlike yesterday, though, I'll try to get the program to load images onto a hastily cobbled-together cam page on my website, which should always show some image of me hard at work in the simul booth (even if it's not current).

Cheers...