Alive again

I am happy to announce that reports of my death were (somewhat) extreme. I am, finally, beginning to claw and crawl my way back into a functional working schedule again, after way too many days of being incapacitated with really miserable stomach flu and high fever. One visit to our village doctor later (He even telephoned us over the weekend to check up on me at home - the Americans will have all fallen out of their seats at this...), and I am more or less back to normal (such as that is). We are kicking off the New Year with some of the new Ligne Bretagne "A" series pipes on the site, just posted today. This post isn't about these new pipes, however, as much as it is about our new digital camera.

Our old camera, which we've been using for all our site photography since the creation of Talbert Pipes, was something of roughly Jurassic era in technology terms, so I must ask forgiveness while I marvel at the new features that have become common in tiny handheld digital cameras since 1996. The story of why we have a new one, and what happened to the old, is told over in today's "Adventures in Brittany" blog entry. Our new one does something different - it takes videos as well. I wasn't looking for this feature, it just came with the camera that I wanted. These aren't "serious" videos like our digital video camera makes, but rather short 5-30 second Quicktime affairs. Enough to catch some interesting stuff, though, and it is considerably handier to transfer a ready-made MOV file from the cam to the blog than it is to copy digital videotape to the computer, then encode it, and then get 100 emails from people who don't like the file format I've chosen :) Since the camera videos are Quicktime-only, no alternatives, there's nothing I can (easily) do to offer varying sizes, but they will all be small anyway. The first little test of this feature can be had HERE - It isn't anything special or very interesting, just me playing with the newly-posted Ligne Bretagnes. But, I do expect it to be the start of more small, quick, "casual" video clips, which will probably become the bulk of the video on the site, leaving the digital videocamera for the longer and more serious stuff like David Field and me drinking Guinness on camera for an hour.