Welcome to MammothCam!
Extreme Makeover: Mammoth Edition
MammothCam News....
== The Second Dig: Is it a go? -- Yes!
The second dig is slow to get started, but as of Wednesday afternoon
(8/24/05), we have confirmed with Mark Goodwin (Berkeley) and
Al Gurevich (Santa Clara Valley Water District) that the dig is
scheduled to resume next Thursday (Sept 1, 2005) for a couple of
days. We'll keep the camera up and running until then (in case
that date gets pulled forward, we learned our lesson when we pulled
the camera too soon last time!)
In the meantime, we're adding some pictures and changing up the
photo section, we're adding to the Kids section and working on
the movies some more (still don't have a clean method of
converting images to video, just a really steep learning curve there...)
Feedback welcome, as always...
== MammothCam Contributors Albums
One of the visitors to the site (Austin P) was gracious enough to give us
a few of his excellent pictures of the discovery of what could be a
second mammoth. We set up a special user album
to showcase his pictures (including the happiest dog in the world, Dot,
as covered by local press.)
Feedback welcome, as always...
== But wait, that's not all! (More bones found)
An observant MammothCammer (Hi Susan!) let us know Saturday (8/13) that new
bones may have been discovered at the site. Monday morning, we received
confirmation from the Water District and Mark Goodman that indeed, the fun wasn't over yet
and we're invited back for MammothCam II: The Next Degeneration....
We're beginning the preparations to return the equipment to the site and
will post updates here. Stay tuned!
9:44 AM, 8/15 - Current estimates are the dig will resume Thursday or Friday of
this week, at least a few more bones were found, possibly ribs per Mark
Goodwin. We're working to restore the camera uploads later today or tomorrow.
6:00 PM, 8/17 - Mammothcam is back online and uplaoding from the site.
The signal is worse than ever but we'll supplement with daily image uploads
once the excavation begins.
== MammothCam Albums update
The album code has been updated to make navigation a little easier.
Also, by default, albums will only show daylight hours (5AM - 10 PM)
Feedback welcome, as always...
== MammothCam Taken down from site :-(
With a bemused and heavy heart, we took down the the MammothCam from the
site this evening (Thursday, August 11, 2005) For a system thrown together
in a week, it performed well. The heat shielding for the camera worked
well (and did double duty -- next week's topic: Birds' perverse aiming
skills in flight)
== MammothCam Movies!?
We have enough images to make some short movies. The beginning of
that exercise may be found off the album page.
Feedback welcome, as always...
== Daily Digs!
The webcam has been reconfigured to increase the frequency of the
snapshots, meaning we'll have more pictures of the action throughout
the day. In addition, the daily albums have been added and are being
updated throughout the day, so you can go back and see how the day's
progressing. Eventually, we'll gather up all of the images into an
animation (excavating is fun, but really fast
excavation is even better! Stay tuned!
== Webcam Update Frequency...
As many of you may have noticed, the update frequency of the webcam
can/should be better. The field site equipment relies on a cellular
link for uploading to the main web site and the signal strength tends
to vary wildly. We're working through some of the issues as best we can
and in the meantime, will continue to do a nightly full-image set upload
(See "Albums" below) as well as periodic daily updates.
If anyone knows of magic to help boost/maintain a stable PPP link under
SuSE Linux 9.3 via a Sony Ericsson GC83,
The MammothCam Support Geek
wants to hear from you!
Update as of 8/3/5: The link has improved with the
changing of MTU and MRU on the PPP link. It is far from stable but
at least the throughput/connect time is staying high. We've also
started to bulk upload the images from the camera on a daily (or,
if we're having a quick lunch, more often) basis. We've also
increased the frequency of the image captures, once every three
minutes or so. The uplink stands no chance of keeping up but
the daily uploads should provide for some interesting animations.
More of this blather can be found on the new
technobabble page.
== Albums!
We've added an album link to the navigation bar that
will take you to a daily photo album section. As the webcam continues to
capture the day's activities, we'll store them in the album section on
a nightly basis (That way, we archive them and let you see any images
you may have missed during the day.)
Eventually, we'll combine them into (probably huge) animations much
like the "animated radar" you see during the evening news/weather sites
(or, if you are old enough, on reel-to-reel movies during class...)
== Guestbooks and Feedback!
We've added a guestbook link to the navigation bar that
will let you share your thoughts and stories with other visitors (MammothCammers?)
We're always looking for feedback, comments and suggestions, so feel free
to let us know how we're doing.
[ Ed note: This was especially helpful on the second day of the
dig when many of you politely noted we hadn't put up useful things
like directions and maps -- oops! That has been fixed, btw. ]
|
MammothCam Home
-- Comment
-- Merchandise
-- About Us
-- Technobabble
MammothCam.com
© 2005 -- All Right Reserved, The MammothCam Project Team
Total MammothCam.com hits:
3,112,310
