Finally, I have uploaded the pictures of my holiday in Arizona in March 2003.

To read the journal entries that explain what went on, check the appropriate section in my Livejournal Memories.

You can see all the pictures here: Arizona Holiday | Index. There are quite a few, but they’re all thumbnailed, it shouldn’t be too bad even if you’re on dialup.

Okay, I made some sushi. Here are some points to remember for next time:

• Buy some frigging chopsticks. Dipping bits of roll in soy sauce with your fingers is messy.
• Try to get hold of some wasabi. I actually tried adding horseradish to the soy sauce, since “wasabi” in restaurants is usually mostly horseradish, and it works quite well. But proper wasabi would be better.
• For the authentic experience, Kirin or Sapporo is better than Yuengling.
• My knife is actually sharp enough, I think, but

I screwed up one roll, but the other went okay.

See what you think

I now have rather a lot of rice left over though. Maybe I will make some more rolls and keep them in the fridge.

Not by me, obviously.

Richard Jackson Wildlife Photography | Photo Gallery – Antarctica

There’s not really much to say about this, except that they need a wishlist feature.

Penguin Warehouse, Inc. – Buy a Pet Penguin Today

Edit: This worked on my old site, and doesn’t now, and I’ve not updated it, so you won’t see anything.

I decided to write a simple perl script that would tell people whether the webcam was on or not. It’s called webcam_status.cgi and for the benefit of anyone who’s interested and doesn’t know much about this stuff, here’s a bit about it.

Firstly, you have to know what the webcam software does here. It captures an image from the camera every X seconds, and then uploads it to a specified location on my server. (In my case this is here.)

All this program does is check the time that the webcam image file was last updated. I usually have mine set to update every minute. The program actually checks to see whether it was updated in the last 90 seconds, to be on the safe side, since it takes a little bit of time to upload each picture. If the last picture was uploaded than 90 seconds ago it assumes the camera’s now off.

Once it’s made the decision it outputs one of two images as appropriate. It could produce text that told you whether the thing was on or off, but I designed it to produce an image so that it could be used off-server – for instance, on my livejournal. To invoke it you merely put the URL of wherever you put the program as the src tag of an image, e.g.

<img src=”http://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/ images/fridgecam/webcam_status.cgi”>

You could use this sort of program to monitor any type of file for updates, really.

• Full code