My First Webcam

Moving into the technology era, I finally got a webcam today. Now I can show my ass to my online MSN buddies with the best of ‘em.

Well, I don’t know if I’ll be doing just that – maybe – depends on my mood ROTFL.

Technology has moved us forward in many ways, even our language has changed. We understand what ROTFL (Rolling On The Floor Laughing) means, just as we do what WEG (Wicked Evil Grin) or :) means.

Blogs allow us to share our inner most thoughts to the world, chat rooms allow us to virtually meet new people, and webcams allow us to share our smiles and tears with our instant message friends.

I like my new webcam – the Logitech Quickcam Deluxe. It even has something called “Intelligent Face Tracking” which I’m guessing means no matter how much I roll around in my chair, my face will always remain in the video frame.

Cool!
I wonder how that would work if I pointed the webcam out the window and shot down at the city below – what would it track?

People? Cars? Clouds?

Maybe I’ll be able to catch solar eclipses, meteor showers, and shooting stars? It would be cool to use this new gadget for security too – focus it at my home and watch a live feed from anywhere there is an internet connection.

WOW!

Technology is tres cool.

The only thing I didn’t like was the setup of this new webcam. I had to run the software twice to get it to work properly and it still needed a push from me. I had to grab the drivers off the internet, despite having a disc from Logitech that came with the camera.

Still, it is a pretty cool camera – video is clear at 640 by 480 pixels, and it can do still images at 1.3MB pixels – so it is one of the higher end cameras. Even has a built in microphone, which I am still trying to figure out.

Windows doesn’t recognize the microphone in the camera – just the camera.

But that could just be Bill Gates ROTFL at me for not buying one of his company’s Microsoft MSN Live Webcams.
I was shopping around and saw the Logitech, the MSN, even the BENQ webcams. All looked fairly impressive, but with Microsoft’s MSN webcam offering the same features as this Logitech one, but at almost double the price, I decided to go with the Logitech camera.

Microsoft is way too powerful anyway – they run 89 percent of all the computers on Earth. That’s a pretty scary factoid when you consider everything is computerized these days.

My first computer mouse was a Logitech three-button mouse. I remember it well, on the IBM PCjr. Remember those wonderful computers? Back in the day, they ran at a whopping 4.77 MHz – these days computers run 400 times as fast!

Still, in those early days of the computer era, we didn’t have webcams, chat rooms, blogs, or chat room lingo. We did this the old fashioned way – if you wanted a picture of the person you sent a message to on the computer, you’d take a picture with your 35mm camera, get it developed and letter mail it to them!

Technology has come a long way – indeed.