October 21, 2005

The CeilingCam is dead - Rest Peace In. The new PoolCam is now fully functional, including snapshot archival. I may enhance it a bit more in the coming weeks - the new system is quite a bit more flexible than the old one.

October 19, 2005

The PoolCam is back with a vengeance, and it's bigger and better than ever (in my humble opinion.) I've added an option that allows the raw picture to be viewed as well - it is quite large, so it doesn't auto-refresh.

October 18, 2005

PoolCam rehabilitation is in progress. I'm leaving the CeilingCam running for now, too. I still have to get the captions working, but you can see that the quality of the PoolCam has improved. That is the silver lining of this sordid episode.

October 17, 2005

The PoolCam is toast again. I am pretty sure that the problem is that more people are getting wireless gadgets, and the interference is limiting the effective transmission distance for the wireless camera I use to less than the distance I need. For now, enjoy a lovely picture of the ceiling in the computer room, where the signal is strong enough to overcome the interference. I have a much nicer PoolCam in the wings - I just have to write some code to put the pictures on the site.

October 10, 2005

Here is some more site related news. The guestbook and the PoolCam are now switched over to the new server box. The guestbook is functional once again (actually, it has been working for about a week after I fixed a foolish mistake I had made about six months ago, but now it is switched over to the new machine.) The PoolCam is now more dynamic - a fresh image is pulled from the camera each refresh. And finally, the old rants archive has been better organized. There are 358 old rants to peruse.

September 28, 2005

The pool guys (the new ones) came to close the pool today. They only did half the job, though - the garden side of the cover was not staked down. I was pretty annoyed with them - but then I found out I had forgotten to put the stakes out (along with pretty much all of the winter equipment.) So shame on me. They will come by on Friday and finish the job.

All in all it wasn't a banner year for the pool. I think I was in a total of twice this summer, although at least that beats some other years where I didn't go in at all. Next year, though, I hope to stay on top of it a little better.

In other news, my reworking of the web site continues apace. The hitcounter in the lower left corner is totally new code, not that you'd notice it. But it will look very slightly better on multicolored backgrounds, as long as you are not using Internet Explorer. (IE is hopeless when it comes to transparency, I'm afraid.) And it loads a lot faster now, too. I'm getting close on fixing the guestbook as well.

September 25, 2005

Ah, quite possibly the last critter of the season. I found this somewhat decomposed mouse sitting atop the pile of leaves that had collected in the northern skimmer. This pool has gone from green to blue and now back to green, I'm afraid. However, the point is essentially moot, as the pool is supposed to be closed this week (by brand spanking new pool company, I might add. After this year's filter woes, I decided to shake things up a bit.)

Over the winter I hope to streamline this site a bit, and to add a new higher resolution PoolCam. I am switching over to a faster server box, and I also hope to get the guestbook message entry mechanism running again shortly. (I had to change it a while back after spambots started hitting it, and I broke it in the process. But that stopped the spambots, so I guess it wasn't a total loss.)

September 7, 2005

Lately the pool is just plain nasty. Very very nasty. I don't really know what is wrong now, although I suspect the pump is getting ready to give up. Anyway, the pump sounded like it was running, the pressure was quite high in the filter (30 psi), but nothing was coming out of the jets. So we backwashed the filter yet again, and that seemed to help. The renewed suction pulled this little mouse out of wherever he had been hiding and into the northern skimmer basket. We threw in all of the remaining shock and set the filter to run for 13 hours a day now. I hope the water will be clean again by the time we close the pool.

August 29, 2005

I got out to the pool today to check what type of heater I had for a curious friend, and I decided to sweep up some of the algae while I was out there. (By the way, the heater is a propane fueled Teledyne Laars Series One.) But first, of course, I had to exhume the frog fatalities. There were two frogs (to the left and center above) that were sort of floating with their hind legs resting on the bottom of the shallow end of the pool. I scooped those out with the net, photographed them, and then sent them on their merry way into the woods to become food for other critters. Then I found the last victim (on the right above) poking out at me in the southern skimmer (the one near the deep end.) He didn't get the catapult treatment - just a simple bucket brigade toss into the trees.

I swept up the pool a bit then, and it seems to be coming clean pretty easily. It wasn't that hot today, but it was damn humid. Of course, I was stupidly wearing jeans at the time, since I really hadn't expected to be out sweeping the pool. Oh well.

On a technical note: The time and date on the PoolCam camera has been drifting horribly for at least a few months, sometimes off by several hours. My home network's time server has been failing. I switched a different machine into the master timekeeper role, so I think that will stop the drift.

August 27, 2005

Well, the pool filter is finally fixed, so I guess there is a reason for me to check the skimmers again. As it happens, the one frog fatality was not in one of the skimmers at all, but was just floating along the surface in the shallow end. The part that had been above water was kind of baked looking. There were a few other live frogs in the pool, and even a live one in the basket close to the pump that must have gotten sucked in just before we happened to be putting chlorine in the diffuser. I rescued him, and dumped him unceremoniously into the woods. He'll probably just jump back into the pool again.

August 12, 2005

Ah, a final push to get the pool into shape for the Kuzeja pool party this weekend had me out sweeping the pool on a hot Friday morning. I found this little froggy in the northern (shallow end) skimmer. I've also come to the conclusion that something is seriously wrong with the pool filter. Earlier this year I thought I had the wrong amount of D.E. in it, but now I think either the filter was never put together correctly this Spring or that the pool place damaged the filter grids when they acid washed them in the fall. (Last fall was the first time I had them acid washed - maybe I should have left well enough alone.)

August 7, 2005

Ok, the massive amount of shock in the pool has a) cleared up the water somewhat - at least it is not green any more, and b) claimed another two victims, this time of the mouse variety. The water is still pretty cloudy, but another round of expensive chemicals ought to fix that.

Both of these mice were recovered from the southern skimmer (which just seems to have more draw lately.) You can see part of the first mouse in the second mouse's picture.

August 5, 2005

Another day, another three frogs. I can't say that I really blame them - the pool is so nice and green. What self-respecting frog wouldn't want a swim? Anyway, we're at wit's end, so we brought a sample of the pool water to get analyzed. Turns out we need to shock it like crazy. We put an insane amount of shock in - 10 gallons. Now we'll let the filter run for a few days while we're out at a whale watch.

Oh, for the record, the first two frogs were in the southern skimmer (yes, that second blob of stuff was a frog before I picked the basket up.) And the last frog was just floating in the center of the pool in that stiff-legged, dead frog kind of way. We persuaded him to the edge of the pool with the brush.

August 1, 2005

A banner day for dead stuff! I looked out the window near the PoolCam while I was talking on the phone, and I saw quite a few suspicious looking floating things. At lunch I went out to check, and sure enough, the mouse and the lower two frogs above were drifting around in the shallow end. I scooped them up and gave them the photo treatment, and then it was catapult time as I shot all three of them into the woods with one mighty toss. I must say, I was rather satisfying to catapult things for a change - most of the recent dead have been in the skimmers.

Speaking of skimmers, that's where I found the upper two frogs above. The upper left one pictured I had seen on the weekend, but I didn't get around to photographing him until today. As you can see, that is just a little too long to wait. You can still see his flippers though if you look really hard. I wouldn't recommend it. That was in the southern skimmer. The northern skimmer contained the substantially more substantial frog on the right in the upper row. In a spasm of creativity, I decided to try making anaglyphs of the mouse and the frogs. So dig out your old 3-D glasses, red lens to the left, and take a look at the beauties to either side. Mmmm, so real you can almost touch them. Just thank goodness you can't smell them - it has been pretty warm lately, and my little friends tend to ripen quickly in the heat.

July 27, 2005

Jeebus, it is HOT outside. Not, like, Saudi Arabia hot, but pretty darn hot for New England. Anyway, I found these two frogs huddled close to each other in the southern skimmer. There was a giant June bug in there too, obviously with a bad sense of timing. I thought there might be a few mice at the bottom of the pool as well, but they turned out to be leaves. Soon enough, I am sure. Damn, it is so hot I might even want to leave my air conditioned comfort and actually get in the pool.... Nah.

July 10, 2005

Found this little guy in the northern skimmer. I'm pretty sure it is a mouse, so that is what I am counting it as. The nose looks sort of shrew-like to me though. Why have so many of the critters been ambiguous this year? Maybe my astute animal identification skills are just out of practice. Yeah, that's the ticket.

July 4, 2005

July 2, 2005

Found a very unambiguous mouse in the shallow end skimmer. (On closer inspection of the pictures, maybe it was a shrew - so I guess it was not so unambiguous after all. But it wasn't a chipmunk.) He had a little snail buddy (still alive) - I don't tend to see snails very often, so I took some pictures.

June 19, 2005

June 8, 2005

The pool guys came nice and early this morning and opened the pool for business. Now I just need to whip that bad boy into shape.

June 1, 2005

The pool opening date is set for next Wednesday (June 8.) The excitement is palpable.

January 11, 2005

Better late than never - site updated for the new year. Let the fatalities commence!