blinkit

Cat plays piano, cat does record pee

Today's bLINKit: I was supposed to be working tonight. Instead, I found a whole new art film subgenre. And apologies to everyone:

And:

Correction: 15 viewers

The number of viewers for the test Caspercam was 15 at last count, with a total of five at any one moment. Not bad for watching a sleeping cat.

Wow! It's a hit!

Within five minutes, the test Caspercam had FIVE viewers. OK, one was me. But that was five people, at any one moment, who were wasting their time watching Casper nap, chase a string, nap, yawn, nap, look at things off camera, nap, wrestle with the blankets, and nap. You can't beat that for entertainment value. Thanks for watching. I'll try this again soon, hopefully with new and improved content.

Return of the Caspercam -- test broadcast

WMD: You've missed him, and he's back. Casper the Cat is hosting his own webcam show now on Ustream. You can see the live show, in all its excitement, here. As an alternate, you can click on the video picture in this post (hopefully it will work).

The cam will be operating for an hour or two today as I test this new service out, kind of a YouTube for live video streaming. If it works, I'l do it again. I stopped doing daily live webcams months ago for security reasons, but I may do planned broadcasts if this system works OK and people like it.

Today's bLINKit: Speaking of YouTube, here's a seven-minute wrap-up of the first six and half seasons of The Sopranos ...

Cats that look like Hitler; SL neighbourhood update

Today's bLINKit: This site has been making the rounds, but if you haven't seen it yet, see Cats that Look Like Hitler, a sight that's exactly what it sounds like. And prepare to be amazed, for example, by cats like this guy. Scary. On a vaguely related note, the TinCam software seems to have passed the test for a new webcam software, so I'll probably go with it.

WMD: While I haven't had time to indulge much in Second Life, a recent visit shows the neighbourhood I have property in has increasingly developed, which for me is a small but interesting virtual study in land use economics. My long row of properties remains steadfastly residential, with several of the original homeowners who bought land at the same I did still homesteading. I'm not sure what to make of the property on one side of me. Sometimes it's on sale, sometimes it's not. One day it features a mini-airstrip with a prop plane, the next day the pavement and plane are gone to be replaced a few days after that with a billboard selling soft-core furry posters. Fortunately, the two large properties in front of me, while for sale, remain unsold, creating a kind of park. Beyond it, lining the coastline of a nearby bay, a commercial strip has developed: casinos, apartments, hotels, businesses and stuff I can't quite decipher. Also, someone has built a castle not too far from me, and another has built while what looks like a volcano. All in all, a tame place by the standards of some SL regions: no vampires or goths. As for me, I deleted my first house, and now looking for a new one. I'll probably go with a skybox, which you can elevate hundreds of metres in the air, if you want, both for privacy and to get a better view. Plus you can jump off it and skydive.

Also attended a wedding in SL, but more about that later ...

Return of the Caspercam: temporarily

After a six-month absence, the Caspercam (2.0) is back, at least for now. I've finallly had time to fiddle with the old webcam and happily discovered I don't need to replace the old Intel one, even though none of the software from the original purchase will work with XP. Fortunately, XP has the drivers to make the webcam go on its own. For the next few weeks, I'll be experimenting with various apps designed to transfer the pic to a webpage, which for now will be pretty plain. I tried a few app called Yawcam, which seemed cool, but couldn't get it to upload a web page to my admittedly retarded Shaw webspace (their online web help pages are atrociously outdated). I'm now trying out Tincam, which while stripped down, seems to work OK. I'm trying the cheapest stuff first from my Google search of available software.

The cam will be on sporadically over the weekend, but should be on most of next week during the day, PST. Comments on any difficulty with the new but temporary setup are welcome.

Late note: Exiting Tincam was less than smooth ... I may move up the ladder of available programs faster than I thought.

My so-called Second Life; TV catchup

WMD: Thanks for the comments on the cats. Nothing gets Blinkit readers more excited than cat stuff. I put the various theories about feline communication to Casper. He's mulling over them now, although he's not talking much these days. He's trying to figure out Stephen Harper. Admires him, he says, but also hates what he's doing.

Blinkit's been watching TV lately, since it's all he can afford. Caught two season enders and one series finale:

The West Wing: Ended this season's fine revival in the series' sagging fortune with a lot of mush and an attempt to pair various characters off for happy endings. But it was nice to see the show that made intelligent banter and political discourse both a virtue and a source of entertainment ended on a high note, instead of fizzing out like Al Gore in 2004. Hopefully the goofier moments of this show's seven seasons (ie kidnapping of the president's daughter) will be forgotten and its devotion to both characters and language will be remembered.

24: OK, we get it. Jack is a borderline sociopath who works for the good guys. But the best moments of this season came from the nasty piece of work in the form of the president: 1/3 Nixon, 1/3 Bush Sr., 1/3 total prick. Also, saw the ending a mile away. It was the elephant in the room.

Lost: Not bad for a second-season finish. Some development in the continuing mystery of the island, some nice tension between characters, and the end of that stupid computer in the bunker business. But the real mystery is why most of the 30 or 40 or so passengers who survived the plane crash stand around like sheep and let the half dozen or so pretty people get all the fun.

Today's bLINKit: A week of links about Second Life, a current fascination of mine. (Brief explanation: online virtual world, with several hundred thousand residents who make and sell stuff, including themselves. Has own economy and in-game currency that's traded for U.S. dollars.) We begin with two introductions, first this dry but thorough Wikipedia entry, and this succinct and hilarious video, which hits the highs and lows of virtual worlds dead on.

The arcane language of cats

WMD: I came home today to find Casper had put his favourite toy, an old stuffed mouse, into his water bowl. He's done this a bunch of times before, so it's no random event. What I want to know is: why? What does it mean to him? He frequently uses the mouse as a means to communicate with me. Sometimes, if I'm away at work longer than usual, I'll come home and find the mouse in the hallway near the door, as if to say, "I looked for you. You were not here. I cry like butterflies flapping wings." Other times when I've been ignoring him at home he's brought it to me and placed it at my feet. I can understand that as a request for attention, especially when he combines it with biting my feet. But placing the mouse in water? Is he playing at washing his prey? Do cats actually wash their prey (I haven't heard that they do)? Is there some kind of feline symbolism at work here? Does the water mean something? Should I be scared, impressed, baffled or just plain annoyed that I have to refill his water dish? I'd like to know.

Today's bLINKit: Last week, Canada's once-every-five-years census got underway. Contrary to what some paranoids believe, it's not a way for the NSA to spy on Canadians, or so I argue in my latest Courier column. And if it was, what kind of information would they get anyway? Speaking of the Courier, a feature story (by recently departed intern Jennifer Moreau) on the first graduate of the city's prescription heroin trial. It's a good look at an issue that otherwise has been under the radar, unlike, say the feature story by a competing paper on the burning public policy issue of cocktails. Drugs of a different kind.

WMD2: A nod to FdC's continual comments on my posts. He noted the other day that my post about Shelley was some kind of weird schtick about how I hooked up with Shelley Winters. For those not in the know, she was one of the leads in the original The Poseidon Aventure, a film in which Winters goes to the beach and is capsized by a tidal wave. To answer FdC, nope, no Shelley for me. I did try to call, but alas she wasn't available, having sadly died in January. (But to give her her due, she was a widely respected actress and pulled off the theatrical performance of dying only hours after marrying her fourth husband. Interesting note: her ex-husband, Tony Franciosa, whom I remember from the 70s in The Name of the Game and a high-tech spy series called Search, died five days later after her.)

Wednesday media roundup: Bloggers drop ball, say UBC students

Today's bLINKit: According to an ongoing evaluation by UBC journalism program students of media and blogger coverage of the civic elections, bloggers have been a no-show leading up to the Nov. 19 vote. But conventional media is not doing too badly, at least in print. The Tyee writes:

"Vancouver's blogosphere is just not being charged up by this election," said UBC Journalism Professor Mark Schneider.
In contrast, both Schneider and Richard Warnica, the student who is leading the project, singled out CanWest publications the Vancouver Courier and the Vancouver Sun for their excellent coverage.

Schneider puts the lack of blogosphere interest in the election to Canadian reserve. (But here on the Wet Coast?) He also notes the absence of meaningful coverage about the election in local TV news broadcasts.

The UBC journalism program project is a fairly comprehensive roundup of media and blogger coverage of the election. The project is providing a good service, since Vancouver media is studied and examined so rarely.

That said, I was amazed to discover that the UBC Media Map project, the meat and guts of the UBC election coverage study, includes Blinkit on a list of (admittedly and thankfully) dozens of blogs students scan daily for election-related posts. Aside from a few posts linking to stories about the election, they won't find much else here. In my day job, I'm neck deep in election coverage and enjoy it and consider it important, but after hours, I'm done. Blinkit is not a political blog and in fact suffers occasional identity crises as to what its mission should be, aside from erratic personal commentary. (Case in point, Stan Persky once looked at Blinkit and then emailed to me, not in so many words, "WTF?" Except that he was far more erudite and polite about it.) In past weeks, I've also posted rarely. I've been busy buying a home, and the only real political poster involved with Blinkit has been laid up at the vet's this week with a plugged up poop chute. Update on that: he's improving.

Meanwhile, the good news is that voter turnout in the recent provincial election rose from 55 to 58 per cent, reversing a long slide.

But the bad news is that the Normandy, one of the last real diners around, and one of the last holdouts of the old days of South Granville, appears shut down by fire. Next up in its place: yet another crappy tapas place.

Medical Tuesday: Ailing webcam star

WMD: Casper the cat, star of webcam and blog post, is sick this week. What began as vomiting and then loss of appetite and thirst could signal an intestinal blockage, says the vet. He (the vet) suspects it's a compacted hairball, as opposed to a foreign object (coin, button, tennis ball) that a kitten or dog would routinely eat, and that ideally it will eventually pass through. But in the meantime, his worsening condition meant a stay at the clinic today where Casper enjoyed a physical exam, X-rays, blood work, a urine test, IV fluid intake, several doses of laxatives and a couple of enemas. When I got the bill, I felt like I'd had multiple enemas, too. But at least I still have my cat, and he's otherwise in a pretty good mood. (The clinic staff also talked about what a trooper he was, and tied a kerchief around his neck to make him look nice.) He's an outpatient tonight and tomorrow, during which time I have to give him medicine and attempt to feed him by hand. So far, it's proved to be loads of fun cleaning the wet medicinal food off the carpet. He goes back to the vet Wednesday to see what's up and if something more invasive is called for to alleviate his problem. Casper appreciates the well-wishers who've already emailed in, and expects a quick recovery.