The.Chimp.Cam.Faq

As opposed to answering the same questions over and over again for the only two people who have ever emailed me about the cam (#1 A sex cam? No, see below, #2 You Suck! thanks), I'll present the info below, loosely based on similar faqs I have seen for cams...

(updated July 2nd, 2000, "additions" in darker blue...)

Just the FAQs.

Who the hell are you (both)?

Who, me? Why I am the monkey-boy, who else? And, she is the cinnimon-girl / monkey-girl. But, in real life, it's just "david" and "cheri" although I have been known to answer to "yo, monkey-boy" in the street sometimes...the easiest way to do this is to simply list the stats...

Anything else? Email will get you an answer usually. Or, pose the question to cinnimon-girl

When the heck are you on this thing?

Oh, whenever we feel like it really. Evenings are a good time to catch us there, unless we have decided to be non lazy and haul the cam into the monkey office or outside somewhere wild. Weekends are all over the map, and, some days, heaven forbid, We may not even turn the cam on... A lot of the time, one will find some attempt at "artsy" picture in place of a live image, sometimes we just feel that way!

Who else shows up?

Cats. FIVE of them as a matter of fact. But, they are shy, so you'll have to be quick to catch one of them...they are best viewed here

Why do we do this?

Cuz we are geeks and we have geek toys and it's kinda fun most of the time. In reality, last summer (1997 now...) a friend of mine put up a cam, and had such fun with it that I decided to join her. For most of 97 it ran down at the offices where I work, but various things made me decide that I usually leave it at home. The biggest reason is that night is "recreational computer time", so more fun is had in the evenings. And, I meet neat people. And, cinnimon-girl loves to play around with it as well, much more so than me lately...;-)

Do you both get BUCK NEKKID here?

No, not on purpose. We may not being wearing all that much, cuz the apartment we are in is usually around 22+ degree celsius. Not by our design, we have the heaters right off, so we suspect we are surrounded by old ladies with thin blood or something...maybe the whole building is this warm...So, the shirt may be off. Woo hoo! Ok, its an entirely new house arrangement now, where the heat is actually controllable.

Do you get THE WILD THING here?

No, not on purpose. Actually, not at all. Ok, we lie

Can I send you both things?

Like, why the heck would you want to do that? Not that we don't like presents mind you. If you DO feel so inclined, email me and we'll get you contact info. Much in the spirit of the last two questions, no, I will not model lingerie, mens, womens or otherwise. Cheri might, if you ask nicely. ;-) However, I am partial to kites, guitars, porsches, tropical islands, dark beer, coffee, electronic gadgets, computers and red heads. Knock yourself out I say...

How does it work?

Well, it's pretty straight forward. We have a Sony camcorder, that plugs into an ATI All In Wonder Pro TV Tuner/Capture card on my main home system, and, then coupled with WebCam32, snaps a pic every 30 seconds or so and then transfers it to the monkey-boy web site. As for the page design, it's a heavily javascript based creation of mine, somewhat linked into the other "themes" of the site. The look of the cam page changes every once in a while as I get bored with it. The code for the remote came from some cam page that I can not recall right now, but a couple of places on can go to find out more about how to do this are listed below for your bemusement :

The Nose's HomeCAMS

Various webcam page templates

What did you make this ugly site with?

Harumph. Various tools are in my toolkit/bag of tricks. I use Homesite 2.5 for site editing. Homesite makes a nice compromise between using something as stripped down as Notepad or VI (UNIX editor) and something as horribly bloated as Front Page or Claris Home Page. It has a nice ability to group pages of work as projects, which, when you have some 8 different sites on the go at any one time, it makes it easy to keep it all organized, and, by simply opening a project, voila, and entire site is open for work. Also has a search and replace across multiple pages and projects, making some changes trivial. And, finally, it has most of the usual HTML tags on various toolbars, but, the only one I use with regularity is the table generator, otherwise I pretty much code by hand, the OLD FASHIONED WAY! I may make a move to Macromedia's DreamWeaver at some point, at least for some stuff, 'cuz it has some flashy tricks built right in, IE, the javascript mouseovers that I use to death, are handled nicely. Oh, and on that note, kudos to Lance Arthur of GlassDog fame for finally getting mouseover code straight in my head. he has excellent tutorials on all manner of web site stuff that you should read if you have designs on doing ugly pages like this one.

Adobe Photoshop is next on line on the "used tools". Once one tricks it up with a few nice plugins, such as Alien Skin's "Eyecandy" and DSB's "Sweet-Flux", all manner of stuff is possible, but, in order to really get the most out of these plugins, a reasonably deep knowledge of Photoshop on it's own helps muchly. Typically, art starts out as a whomping big PSD file, making good use of layers for changing stuff later on, should the urge strike. I generally use JPGs, cuz they catch the shading and shadow stuff that I like to abuse better than GIFs do, but anything that is a mouseover is usually done as a 216 color GIF to keep the size and color balance consistent across browsers.

After treatment in Photoshop, it's usually off to Paint Shop Pro for sizing and palette matters, simply because I like how they are dealt with in that package over Photoshop. It's quick and it's cheap, and now that it is supporting plug ins, I may use it for image creation too.

And, for really gory details, I use CuteFTP to transfer stuff onto a Linux server running Apache...

-[ copyright david hathaway/visual kinetics 1997/1998 ]-