"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - S. Holmes

The above, applied by my lovely assistant Shelley this morning to the Panoscan system, proved the method to ending a couple of hours of frustration on my part.

See, it was like this...

Last night we got the Panoscan to do a preview and even a scan in the office. This morning, however, I moved it into the dining room in order to begin learning its ins and outs.

But it wouldn't work! Lots of error messages about the computer not being able to talk to the camera, and what-not. Inconsistent messages and no pattern -- a trouble-shooter's worst nightmare. What could have make it not work -- no settings were changed? Nothing had changed.

Well... moving the system back to the office was Shelley's idea, and behold! it worked again. Because the one thing that had changed was its location. It turns out that the electrical outlets in the dining room were not giving the camera enough power! Can you believe it? We even tried two outlets (although they are apparently on the same circuit).

We moved the camera back into the dining room and plugged it in with a long extension cord. Troublespot proved. For some reason the electrical outlets in the dining room ain't workin' real well. Interesting way to find out.

So the rest of the day I spent shooting panos with various settings, figuring out optimal settings, automating processes, and the like.

Here's a sample LOW RESOLUTION pano of our patio (1.2 mb) for your enjoyment. Keep in mind this one's only low res. I'll get some nice, high-res ones posted in a couple of days, after the additional RAM arrives to let this little computer deal with the 450-megabyte files they form.

If you've any comments or questions about the pano, ask away. It took about two minutes to scan, a couple more minutes to process. Look ma, no seems and full spherical!

Woo!