Tons going on these days. Must post more often.

Spent several hours last week and this weekend working on a project for a guy I re-met at Sedona in October. He wants to produce a number of object movies of film cameras for a museum, so I did a prototype for him in my authoring software. If he gets his funding, he'll have me mass produce the end files for him, so this could lead to significant income. He's paying me some for the prototype as well.

STILL working on getting good panoramas from the San Diego trip. It's not going nearly as well as I had hoped, but I've also created a spreadsheet comparing the Panoscan to the still camera, and it weighs heavily against Panoscan -- if I can make the still camera system produce something acceptable.

Today my iBook will chug away at this task and we'll see how the latest lens settings work out -- I had to shoot a special set of calibration images for best results, and did that Thursday. Now we're awaiting results. The iBook takes some 30 minutes on each file. If I sell the Panoscan I might buy a new portable with a faster processor and more RAM to reduce that time. Processing the 44 panoramas takes a long time right now.

Over the past two weeks I've also fixed a number of bugs with the Flattops game, for which players have been grateful. Bug fixing always results in a warm feeling in one aspect, but cold in another: the bug should not have been there in the first place!

Watched a respectable six-hour mini-series called Napoleon on DVD. Did this while working on panos for the most part. One of the nicest things about a 90-inch TV screen is that one can watch the iBook screen and the TV at the same time, rather than having to shift focus from screen to screen as required by 28-inch TV. Heh.

Oh yes. We also built a projector shelf for the new beast. Instead of buying a $175 ceiling mount and dealing with running cables up through the attic and down through a hole in the ceiling, we simply hacked a small platform out of a couple pieces of wood, two short pieces of chain, and a few bits of hardware. Voila! Most of the wires run behind curtains or along inconspicuous routes so it doesn't look too bad at all.

And speaking of the new projector, the replacement for the original one arrived, and turns out to be much quieter. Something apparently wrong with the first one resulted in an annoying whining noise. The selling company took it back with no questions and even provided free shipping on the return.