A Conversation with Mike

I spoke on the phone tonight with Mike and I promised I would add an entry tonight.

I don't what it is about the past few days that's causing me to neglect my blog.  I definitely feel a little worn down.  Between my job (once the school year started, my workload literally doubled as there are twice as many people to talk to), my Project work, and tv... well, I suppose that last one isn't a valid excuse.

I've decided that I want to put a webcam in my workshop.  The process of my exploration of the Project may even be more exciting than the results.  I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

If nothing else, putting a webcam in the workshop will give me incentive to work.  In college, I took part in a psychology experiment where I was given a task (a very scary task involving large currents of electricity, yellow, kitchen gloves, and a loud bell) to complete while both being observed and not observed.

I don't actually remember what his results were, but I think knowing that someone could be watching my workshop to see if I'm putting in the hours might turn out to be very motivating...

It's not that I'm not motivated... quite the opposite... I'm just impatient.  I'll look for whatever tricks I can to improve the speed at which I produce.

As an artist friend told me: At the beginning of your art career, it's more important to generate large quantities of creations and worry about quality later on.  It's all about learning by doing, right now...

I would love to have a webcam that is controllable by the remote viewer.  That way, the person could pan, tilt, and zoom the camera to look at very specific things I'm working on (ex. move the camera so you can see what I'm painting).

Now what would REALLY be interesting is a blimp-web-cam (that HAS to exist somewhere, right) that will let you float a camera about the room in 3d space.

I think it would be an interesting experiment to build a website that has webcams of every place I do work on one screen... My office... My car.... My workshop... My home office...  Then, at any given time, you could see where I was working.  If I don't appear in any of the views, you could safely assume I'm not working at that time.  If you built in motion detectors (which is standard in most web-cam software), you could measure how much time I work in a given 24 hours...

Car cam... hmmm... I would embed a computer with a wireless hookup (to do wardriving-style network discovery) for the sole purpose of uploading cached images whenever I was near a wireless network.  I would ensure (by installing them myself) that my major "docking stations" like the driveway and work parking lot would have wireless access.  I could use the cell phone to upload an image, but that would require bizarre access and costly airtime.  Or, a less-expensive, more-reliable, but not real time solution: I could use some sort of removable ram card (a USB keyring?) that stored a series of images that could be uploaded to the cam page. Then I could build some sort of time-lapse system that showed, rapidly where i was throughout the day. (i.e. crunch the previous 24 hours into a 10 second video).