soft shells and sarang burung in Gotham

[15_the_circle]

[OT from cottage renovations]

spent the day in New York.  it works pretty well: out on the early (06:20) train to Union Station, connect to Amtrak for a ride up the northeast corridor, and reverse the steps at the end of the day.  a couple of the connections can be a bit tight, and getting back home at 01:05 the following morning makes for a long day, but it's worth it for a day and early evening in the Big Apple with no nights away from the Grove. 

and, if you're on the upper West side and have a hankering for Malaysian food, Penang (240 Columbus Avenue, corner of 71st Street) absolutely, positively rocks.  212 769 8889.

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happened to glance at the cat cam on returning and saw that in my absence the place had gone quite literally to the dogs.  large ones. 

(click through this thumbnail for higher resolution image)

sheesh.  look the other way for a few hours and there's no telling what will happen around here. 

time to turn in now; anything else will have to wait. 

Comments

[collpepper.livejournal.com]

Let me get this straight, these people just walked up in your yard with their dogs and were checking out your porch? I want a kitty cam....

[peach-salsa.livejournal.com]

Maybe there's a sign on the porch that says, "Look into the lens and do something funny."

[15-the-circle.livejournal.com]

>
> Maybe there's a sign on the porch that says,
> "Look into the lens and do something funny."
> 

shortly after the porch cam became operational, a neighbour decided to make use of it allow her out-of-Town parents a chance to see their grandchildren online and in near real time.  she wheeled the double-wide stroller into its field of view and called them on her mobile 'phone, trying to talk them through the steps of pointing a browser to the camera's URL (http://www.pacerfarm.org/cam.htm) so they could look at the twins.  for whatever reason that turned out to be more of a challenge than she and they could deal with, but the side effect was that later that day when I came home I was mystified to find some rather odd images in the webcam cache.  it works on motion detection; at any recent time the most recent image is online and the previous few are visible on the machine that minds the camera.  as new ones come along the old ones get overwritten, so if nobody happens to be looking at the web page the image is lost. 

[15-the-circle.livejournal.com]

the concept of "my [front] yard" is a bit loose; the porch actually overhangs the front of the parcel onto Town property (see entry for 3 June (http://www.pacerfarm.org/~15_the_circle/2006/06/03)).  the grassy area behind the trespassers visitors is my street, such as it is (it's not on any published or online maps, though, so I am not in the habit of calling taxicabs or sending out for pizza) and is marked "walk way only"; vehicular access is to the rear of the cottage via a disconnected part of Pine Avenue which for convenience we refer to as if it were part of Grove Road.  the dogs were in compliance with Town and County leash ordinances so I really don't have any legitimate complaint, it's just that by custom the Circle is feline territory, not canine. 

a cat cam is easy to set up and operate; just get a junky USB webcam (a used one would be even cheaper on eBay) and hook it up to a computer.  the best webcam software around is a $10 shareware app called conquer cam, available from www.conquercam.com (http://www.conquercam.com).  we actually have four of them running in the Grove, three on the Circle and another a few blocks away.  for a combined page featuring all of them see www.pacerfarm.org/gsn.htm (http://www.pacerfarm.org/gsn.htm). 

the one accommodation I made for it is that during last year's rebuilding of the front wall I had the carpenters construct a small window for it looking onto the porch at cat height, next to their door.  see entry for 14 July 2005 (http://www.livejournal.com/~15_the_circle/2005/07/14) et seq.