Adding Video to My Life

Woke up at 3:00 AM with a sore throat and a general feeling of malaise, so it's probable I have definitely quite possibly caught strep. Either that or I am such a hypochondriac that the moment my daughter was diagnosed, I caught it, too.

Can't make it to a couple of important meetings today (I feel well enough to go, but in the interest of public health--I do work for a School of Nursing--I will stay home) but this got me thinking about how it might be possible to use Skype to attend those meetings from here at home. Naturally I would want a video feed. I have a laptop at the office with a webcam that would work at that end, but what for here? The only cameras we have connect via Firewire, not the USB port that Skype expects. A little Googling put me on the download page for Splitcam, a free app that does indeed solve the problem...except that there is about a one second time lag in my video--and that's on my end, before it ever goes across the wires! So it would work, but the whole thing would look clunky, and that's the opposite of what I was trying to demonstrate.

So now it's either back to bed or back to struggling to make CSS do what I command (or rather, make myself do what CSS demands). Life as a would-be Internet hipster, at the moment, is more of a should-be than an is-be.