Wish I had taken more pics during Blogathon. Alas, I found myself getting panicked about keeping up with the schedule, and barely got some entries written at all, and thus didn't have time to do much with the digital camera, but still I could have gotten a shot or two at Applebees and the Red Lion if I'd thought of it. I also hate that I didn't get a shot of the actual wardriving either. And it would have been good to get a sequential series of webcam pics. Coffee Cup can do that, I think, but if there's a way to do that with Where's James, I haven't figured it out yet. I would love to have some of those images captured for posting.
Just prior to Blogathon, I took a look at what the webcam was showing, and was unhappy with the sliding pile of paperwork crap on the table behind me, but had no time to deal with it. I wound up putting up a quick backdrop. Here you also see the webcam lit up, and a lamp brought in from the other room to try and balance out the backlight coming from behind the backdrop. The only lighting in here comes from that floorlamp behind me, and my camera is sadly deficient in dealing with backlighting, regardless what the settings say.
However, my efforts with lighting didn't improve matters much. The best I could do was turn off the floor lamp entirely, and try to reflect some light off the wall via an aluminum reflector, but that didn't work so well either. The alternative was to shine that light right in my face. I was ready to sacrifice sleep for Blogathon, but not go blind for it.
I found that the webcam software did have a screen capture function so that viewers could see what I was looking at, and figured this would be a good time to launch a fun new feature.
After that were several hours of traipsing through the art world. One good link led to another, and it went pretty well, until I accidentally closed a browser window that had all my "on deck" artists in various tabs, along with all my link sources. I had to start all over, and this time around, the really good stuff was much harder to find.
If you are going to do something techy, of course you have to assemble the gear. We readied two laptops - one Win2k and one RedHat 7 - as well as one webcam and the software to run it. The W2k machine already had the software for the cellphone, as well as Net Stumbler. The Red Hat laptop had different detection software, with which neither of us was familiar, so we held it in reserve for emergencies. No, the robotic dog and the tripod did not go, and the GPS device shown was a loaner being returned to Corsair.
Here we are in the oh so picturesque parking lot next to our new dumpster (I liked the curbside pickup much better) and Corsair is getting things configured. See? Some Windows weenies know what a command prompt is, and even how to use one!
Featured is the dashboard GPS unit we'd be using to mark the network locations. Sadly, there were not enough USB ports in the laptop to allow us to link the GPS directly to it, so we wound up having to store locations on the unit itself. The feathery reassuring female voice was muted for this occasion.
Here we are, finally underway. I felt such the technophile! Dig not only the webcam, GPS, and laptop, but onboard mp3 player as well. This was where all the rocking out came from. Corsair was digging it too. It was making the bumper-to-bumper traffic a bit more tolerable.
This is a closer look at what blogging and webcamming on the road was like. This was before the wardriving part, during which I didn't capture any images because the dual job of keeping the Internet connection going and trying to find networks was keeping me way too busy. Similarly, Corsair was pretty busy operating the vehicle and keeping an eye out for anything dangerous, as well as doing complex mental triangulation to get the best signal from any detected networks.
And here is the ever so frustrating alert that the webcam image didn't get uploaded due to a loss of Internet. That got pretty annoying, but more annoying was the redialer continually popping up and stealing focus. Too bad there was no setting to redial in the background.
Again, I wish I had gotten images of the rest of the trip out. Those who were watching the webcam saw us driving around as it got progressively darker, and the laptop lit us up far better than any of the other light had been. Then they say us eating at Applebees, and then continually fiddling with the system at the Red Lion pub in order to keep it working. At the pub, the cam was on a mantelpiece over my shoulder, so the primary area in the image was my right ear, but still you could see the laptop and the workings thereon, although the auto lighting adjustment made the laptop screen look like something that was going to kill me in one radioactive second. Cam viewers also got to see some hamming it up on the part of yours truly and some of the Red Lion regulars.
Back at mi casa was more art voyaging, until the wee hours. Now what I need to do is go back and change the thumbnails. Right now I'm stealing bandwidth from the artists' sites, and the larger images might be violating copyright. I didn't exactly get permission to use these. So I'd like to get at least a little bit better, and use locally stored thumbnails of sufficient smallness to make everyone content. I stole the thumbnails originally due to time constraint.
Happy fun! I got kudos not once but twice on the front page of the Blogathon site. We raised $138.00 for ASACP. Not a huge amount, but respectable for a first try by an unknown blogger - and every little bit does help. Next year should be better. Thanks so much, sponsors!
