Another lazy Sunday. I helped Jamie make a pretend book for a fancy dress night at Brownies tomorrow. Finished the book I was reading. Started another one I’ve read before. My ankle’s been playing up again. Steve, Kim, and Megan came round. Steve told us all about his night at the WWE wrestling last night. That’s about it really…

OK. Blogger is back. It’s been back a couple of hours. I would have expected some kind of notice on the title page, explaining what had happened. But you have to check the status to see this message.

Blogger has suffered a security intrusion by a “haX0r.” We have all the data that was changed backed up within a couple hours of the attack, so we can have things pretty much back to normal soon. Of course, we’re assessing the situation as thoroughly as possible to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Also, if you store your FTP login information in Blogger, it wouldn’t hurt to change that on your server

It turns out that my ankle is still not healed properly. I managed to twist it on Wednesday night, which hurt quite a lot. By Thurday morning it seemed to be ok again. But by the end of Thursday it was swollen and very uncomfortable. I’ve decided not to go in the office today, as the walking distance involved would be too much.
I’ve sat with my leg raised all this morning, but I’m bored already.
I think I should probably get it x-rayed but I don’t fancy spending three hours or so hanging around in the hospital. Besides I’ll have to wait for Jan to get back.

Stan Finley has written a little piece about why we blog.

For an artist a blog can become a gallery, for a journalist, a periodical, for a writer, a daily chapter-in-the-life. The blogger knows that he is exhibiting a part of himself, and in doing so is expanding his sphere of possible social interaction. Blogging is a way of creating community. Humans are social and communicative creatures. It’s what we do.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’ve played about a little with my new camera a Vivitar Vivicam 20. For it’s price (sub £40), it’s not too bad.

The image quality seems to be very light dependent. It has four different exposure settings: Outdoor dull (the default), outdoor sunny, indoor bright, and indoor dark. I could find very little difference between them in my initial experiments. It also has a built in automatic flash. The flash is extremely bright over the distance it covers; 0.8 to 1.5 metres with 1.0 – 1.2 metres described as ‘best’. The flash doesn’t function in macro mode.

Macro mode didn’t seem to make any difference in my simple tests. The manual claims it only works over 25 to 30 cm, thats a very small range!. I’ll have to do some more formal tests, most of the pictures I took in macro mode were out of focus. However my judgement of distances is quite poor so I’ll have to try some with a tape measure 🙂

The controls are a little strange; you press the mode button which then cycles through, VGA, CIF, outdoor dull, outdoor sunny, indoor bright, indoor dark, flash on, flash off, continous capture, delete all pictures, delete last picture, self timer. Each press is accompanied by a loud beep. When you get to the mode you want, you press the select button for a short while, this beeps twice and the mode is selected. If you don’t press select for long enough it cancels the mode selection and you have to start again.

Annoyingly, when it switches itself off (after 60 seconds of inactivity) it forgets your settings 🙁

The 8MB of internal memory seems to be plenty. I’ve managed to get 71 VGA pictures before it filled. At which point the camera beeps about once per second until it switches itself off.

I’ve also tried the webcam mode which worked OK, but again suffers from low light conditions. I’ve not tried the self timer or the continuous mode. When I’ve had a play with these two functions, I’ll report some more.

I’ve uploaded an album of test images (nothing special) to the gallery. Click on the image to go there.

I’ve not used the supplied software other than very briefly. It uses a non-standard interface, that I couldn’t really figure out. I’ve only used it to download pictures from the camera. I’ve not tried any of the image editing functions. I’m quite happy using Paintshop Pro to download the images. As I mentioned before, I think I’m getting them uncompressed that way.

Wow, just had another tremor! Or was it an aftershock?
I was in the office for this one and it’s really quite disconcerting to have the building vibrate under you.

Steve thinks we had one in the early hours of this morning too.

They are getting a little too frequent now! 🙁

I can’t bring myself to comment on this… 🙂 O.J. No Longer ‘100 Percent Sure’ He is Innocent

Link from Davezilla

It’s starting to look like an epidemic! Another blog related portal site has closed: GBlogs.

In light of my rapidly changing life and increasing commitments over the next few months, I’ve decided to close GBlogs.
I hope you’ve enjoyed using the portal over the past couple of years, and best wishes for the future.
~jen, 21 October 2002

That’s the second one in the last couple of weeks. Adam Walker’s excellent B2 Dev site was the other.

Ok everyone, im considering a closure of the b2 dev site, nothing definite yet tho…

Although strictly speaking Adam hasn’t finally closed the B2 Dev site. If he does, I’ll misss it. It was a pretty good resource.