A mixed grill of a weekend. Here are the highlights.

The Gods Must Be Luddites

The gods are apparently displeased with me, in that the frequency of technological problems increased dramatically. After a good three hours of nursing the iBook back to health, the next evening I was greeted with a befuddled wife with a non-functional, foul-smelling PC. A quick test revealed the power supply had joined the choir angelic. She’s now using my PC until I can get parts to repair. A minor problem, perhaps, but I spent the rest of the week waiting for the next tech disaster. Beyond a small invasion of zombie processes on OS X, I was fortunately unscathed.

Next to Godliness

Saturday was a cleaning day. With the threat of houseguests imminent, I set to cleaning the remaining strongholds of unpleasantness with the strength of ten. Both was satisfying and productive, it was nevertheless a drain on my energy.

I’ve got the Jitters

Most of Sunday was split between fidgety work on Dramatis Personae and Jitter programming. I used Jitter to write a small web cam application that takes input from my camcorder and periodically uploads a still image to this page.

But there is so much more that Jitter can do. I’m finding that some things are very very easy, and others which I’d expect to be simple are quite difficult. For example, it was trivial to add text to the video image, but it was quite complex to then capture that composite image to disc. Fascinating work, and quite enjoyable.