The restaurant space next door has finally reopened! Pizza and hotdogs so far. But at least they're open late...

I got a new toy: I bought a servo-mounted video camera. I'd been looking for the right one of these for a long time now, and finally found one that seemed reasonable, though it was way more expensive than it should have been...

Separated at birth?

It's a Panasonic WV-NS324 dome security camera, and it looks a lot like R2D2. The nice thing about this camera is that it has a normal video output (so it works with our video switcher and webcasts) but it also has a web server built in. All control of the camera's motion is via web pages running on the camera itself (this is cool, because the fact that it's controlled through HTML forms means it's moderately easy to script.) It also can spit out JPEGs over the net, though I doubt I'll end up using that part.

The most annoying thing so far is that the joystick-like control on the built-in web page doesn't work with Mozilla or Safari. Their HTML is coded for MSIE and for Netscape 4 (with layers) but neither Mozilla nor Safari support that, so it's hard to position the camera manually.

Once I figure out the right way to use this thing, it'll be able to take the place of, like, half of our existing fixed-position cameras. We'll be able to have mutliple different presets on the stage, for example, so that when bands are on, there will be a wider variety of close-ups and wide shots.