Monthly Archives: September 2005

Last weekend Sue came up to visit us and, as is becoming a habit of hers, brought with her a weekend of brilliant weather. On the Saturday we decided to make the most of it by dragging the seldom (once) used barbeque out from the shed and putting it to good use.

I had cut the grass at the front and rear of the house, done all the borders, and basically earned a darn good feed from my hard work in the sunshine. So, when Fliss and Sue returned from their mini-expedition to a nearby lighthouse with stacks of barbeque ingredients in tow, the scene was set for a welcome feast.

Considering it was only our second attempt at a barbeque, it all went rather well. Everything tasted great – from the sausages and meatsicles especially so, although the steak maybe went on a bit late. Stuffed from our food, we ended up sitting outside in the warm evening until after nine, chatting about almost everything under the sun.

We ended up in a discussion about the evils of videogames, as Sue had read articles about the “horrors” of Grand Theft Auto. I defended the game by pointing out to her that the game actually contained a very strong anti-drugs theme, yet the industry never mentioned that. Unconvinced, Sue had decided that all games were a waste of time. Staunchly defending one of my favourite pastimes, I pulled out the big guns – EyeToy and SingStar.

With the efforts of both myself and Fliss, it didn’t take long to convince her that those titles were a whole lot of fun. The end result being that we bundled the garden furniture away, went indoors and spent the next few hours either flapping around in front of the telly, or enjoying the comedic value of our respective performances on the microphones.

After all the fun, we woke on Sunday sounding a little hoarse and feeling a little bit rough. What better way to recover than by having a barbeque, we thought!

I’ve been messing around with a Powertoy from MicroSoft that lets you take timed images with a webcam. I’d been wanting to try time lapse stuff for ages, so when I found out about the Powertoy a few weeks back I kept it in mind to have a go.

My first attempt was during the daytime, pointing the camera out of our upstairs front window from about 11am until late afternoon, with the delay initially set at five minutes, although I reduced it to two minutes after an hour or so.

The results weren’t great, to be honest, mostly due to the original delay setting being too long, but it did improve over the stretch with the lower delay. It was interesting to see the shadows creep across the ground, and you could follow the movement of the clouds on the two minute delay. Even so, I thought a night time one would be cooler, so last night I gave that a try.

Turns out not a lot happens at night, so although I set it to take pictures from around midnight onwards, I ended up not using the stretch from midnight to 3am when I created the movie, as virtually nothing happened early on. Here’s a movie showing 3am until just after 8am this morning.

I could probably have chopped out 3am to 5am with very little difference, but I’ve left it in there for now. I hadn’t noticed before that the streetlamp opposite the house has some kind of disco effect going on, or that it gets light so quickly around here. Still, night time turns out to be less cool than first thought.

Next I want to try another daytime one, and something a little less intrusive to other peoples’ privacy than shooting out of the front window, like my back garden, for example. I have read that taking images in a southerly direction isn’t good for the camera due to the bright sunlight, so I’ll need to come up with some kind of shade for it if I do attempt that.