Yet Another Frustration!

When I got home last night, I discovered that the webcams that Pam and I had ordered for our computers had arrived. Initially, I was really excited. Pam was already a little frustrated. She couldn’t find the Mac drivers on the disk that came with the webcam. I reminded her that the eBay listing had mentioned the fact that you had to download Mac drivers for the camera.

I poked around and found the seller’s web site and found the links for the Mac drivers for our computers. There was one version for Mac 0S 10.3 and another version for Mac OS 10.4. Since we both have older Macs, we have never upgraded to 10.4. I tried installing the 10.3 drivers repeatedly on both our machines. It always failed near the end of the installation. I installed the Windows version of the drivers on a PC laptop that I have and the camera worked fine. This convinced me that the problem was with the Mac driver software.
Finally, I got Pam to write the seller and ask for the drivers. They replied with an email that had both drivers attached. They were identical to the ones I had downloaded from the web. She wrote back telling them the problems we were having and we haven’t heard back from them yet.

Needless to say, we were both very disappointed. I hope the vendor comes through with fixed drivers soon. I’m going to see if I can find any other source for drivers for the camera. The camera is a Frisby model 106 webcam. The image quality is really very good.

First post of a new year

So I thought I had disabled comments on all my posts but I’m still getting email to moderate spam comments. There is obviously something about WordPress that I don’t understand. Oh, well.

I am so excited! I’m anticipating getting my new video camera. It is going to be so much fun. I am going to get Pam a webcam too. She has really taken to YouTube. She wants to be able to leave video responses. I understand. I do too.

Dave Winer says that the distinguishing characteristic of a blog is the unedited voice of a person. He goes on to explain that he means that a single individual expresses their opinions without undue influence from an editorial figure. I like this definition. I see the same kind of content in the video blogs on YouTube.

To kind of tie these ideas together, the reason I’m so excited is that film/video has always been my media of choice. I look forward to creating video blogs, having video conversations with other YouTubers, creating short fictional videos, creating how-to videos, and things I haven’t even figured out yet. Here’s a quick list of projects that I have in the wings:

  • Javajini intro for The Skinny
  • building my BOEbot
  • making some experimental proof-of-concept sketches for The Gentry
  • start a video podcast on hobby robotics

Anyway, the year is off to a good start. I’m also planning to blog here more than once a month this year. Ah, the best laid plans…