watch the birdy!

i can hear you all cry "what's this? two posts in one day? joker's paws must be on fire!" actually, dear readers, herself is on holiday so is playing on her computer rather a lot.

this picture is rather difficult to fathom. but i will tell you what this is. it is a birdfeeder webcam. herself built this yesterday after reading an article in lifehacker. lifehacker is a sort of blog with lots of ideas as to how you can save time and be more efficient. the only trouble is that if you spend too much time reading about time management the two lots of time cancel each other out.

we have a lot of birds in our garden. modesty prevents me from taking too much credit but suffice to say that the smell of lurcher wee around the place keeps those pesky cats off. no cats equals more birds. the birdfeeder webcam looked fairly straightforward. herself had purchased some very cheap webcams for christmas presents for people and had somehow overestimated how many people she could fob them off on. so this project would use up another one.

it took about an hour for her to get the software onto her laptop. "if this was a mac you would just plug the bloody thing in and it would work!" she wailed. finally the recalcitrant laptop deigned to accept the drivers. she clicked on the thing that was supposed to make the camera work. "agh!" she shrieked. my boy and himself went running in thinking she had got an electric shock or something. but no. the laptop has a built in webcam so you can chat to your friends. somehow the laptop did not understand the point of the birdcam and instead was showing herself her own image. and she really does not look like a sparrow.

after another half an hour of swearing the laptop was persuaded to pick up the signal from the birdcam. herself settled down to wait for birds. needless to say the birds were a little wary of the technology and gave it a bit of a wide berth. himself came into the kitchen. "haven't you noticed that you can actually see more clearly looking out of the window than looking on the webcam?" he said. not one of his most tactful observations, i feel.

herself decided on a new plan. she would set up a lurchercam. the whole caboodle was dismantled and erected pointing at my bed. now, i am used to a bit of fame, and it has been said by some that i am probably the most famous lurcher in the world. but a chap should be able to put his paws up without the whole world peering at his rear end. i decided that the best plan was to keep perfectly still so that if she ever did manage to get it to upload the footage on the web it would look no different to a photograph. that way any viewers would get bored and go away to nose into someone else's bed.

i'm not sure if she has worked out how to beam it into cyberspace yet, thank heavens...