Moving right along
Things are starting to get back to normal around here, for whatever that's worth. Normal is a relative term, after all.
A huge step forward on the ongoing kitchen project. All the upper cabinets are now installed on the walls, and they're ready for shelving, handles, and a few final touches. It's beginning to look like a kitchen again. At the very least, it's beginning to look like a room again instead of a construction zone. To enhance the effect, I put one of the lower cabinets in place temporarily and slapped a huge piece of cardboard on top of it to make a workable, though somewhat flimsy, countertop. It's just enough to put some of the familiar things back in the kitchen where they belong — like the phone and the bill storage area — and give it a kitchen flow again. That's a huge help, and it's nice to walk into the kitchen and actually see some progress.
And, I've been playing with one of my Christmas presents: a time-lapse camera. It is, as expected, loads of fun. So far, I've done one test video and one "clouds" video, which is one of the classic subjects of time-lapse photography. The camera takes pictures at regular intervals (which can be anything from 30 seconds all the way up to once per day), and it will even stitch the pictures together into an .avi file for you. My preference is to grab all the pictures and put them together myself with ffmpeg so it can be in any format I choose — .mp4, for example, which in this case is about a twentieth the size of the .avi files the camera makes, and is good enough for experimentation purposes, which is all I'm doing at this point anyway.
The clouds video is neat. The pictures were taken a minute apart and I ran them together at 30 frames per second. With 274 individual pictures, I've squeezed four and a half hours into a nine second video. It's a view of the sky from our porch, facing roughly south, and the clouds are blowing through from west to east. Some snow has moved in this evening, and in the video you can see the clouds getting larger and thicker throughout the day despite sunny skies earlier in the day. So... it's interesting to see how the weather disturbance developed.
I'm trying to decide the best way to embed some of these videos here. At some point, I think I'll have to violate my principles of "No JavaScript or Flash, dammit" and "Everything must be XHTML 1.1 compliant, dammit." There's just too much interactive stuff I'm preventing myself from doing, and if that's being done simply to adhere to principles, then I'm not sure it's worth it. What a changed world we live in... issues like these didn't exist when I was doing this all on paper.
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On Goodbye, Blossom, Martha said: We can still dress up and go to Laury's. Or Aubrey's. Or even Soho's, if/when I get over being mad.