Status-Q

I was going to post a picture or two from a boat trip yesterday in Cape Town, but I emailed some snaps to John and he beat me to it.

I’ve taken to carrying a little IXUS 750 with me almost everywhere I go, and one of the things I’m appreciating more and more is its ability to record video clips. I’ve never been one of those people who likes to spend much of their holiday looking through a camcorder viewfinder. I have a very nice camcorder, but I normally only use it for making corporate demo videos; I don’t carry it around with me.

Occasionally, however, there are scenes which require something more than a still image, and it’s great to have something on my belt which can record them. Here are a couple of little Quicktime clips from yesterday:

• The Cape Town Waterfront (10MB)
• A life on the Ocean Wave (9MB)

(You might want to right-click and download them. They won’t stream very well unless you have quite a fast connection.)

I borrowed a digital-8 camcorder from a friend – thanks, William! – because I wanted to salvage some footage from a few old Hi-8 tapes, which will soon be completely obsolete and unreadable.

The main thing I wanted to save was a little 2-minute clip about BrightBoard, the project which formed the bulk of my PhD work. This ‘video figure’ was done at the end of 1995 to accompany a paper I presented at the CHI96 conference. Click the picture to see a much younger and thinner Quentin… [12MB Quicktime H.264]