About the Technology Used
for This Project

The Web pages at this site were created using a Macintosh, a text editor, and a Casio digital camera.

Macintosh

My Macintosh is a Quadra 840av circa. January 1994 (thanks Luann!). I added some more memory (32MB) and an Apple Multiple Scan 20" monitor. The great thing about creating web pages is that I could have used my MacPlus (1985) or Lisa (1983) and done pretty much the same thing. Well, maybe the graphics would be a bit harder...

BBEdit

I use BBEdit, a text editor, on the Macintosh because it has some nice text handling features and I still haven't found a web page creation tool I like and trust. There's a lot of discussion going on about web page authoring tools. I'm reminded of the programmers I worked with at Sega. There were the C programmers who wanted tools and libraries and a very rich development eenvironment Then there were the assembly programmers who just wanted to know how the hardware worked so they could optimize their code by writing right down to the machine itself. Both camps had good arguments for working the way they did. Right now, I'm still more concerned with knowing how my code works than taking advantage of the speed or ease of PageMill/HomePage or any of the authoring packages out there. But I'm not opposed to getting tools to make my life easier, I just haven't found real good ones yet.

Casio QV-10 Digital Camera

I got a Casio QV-10 about a month ago (thanks Luann!) and I love it. It's small, simple, lightwieght, flexible and fun. It holds 96 images in RAM and hooks right up to the serial port of my Macintosh. I can download the images and store them on the hard disk.

Adobe PhotoShop

I'm not a graphic artist and I've never been real interested in Photoshop. But the Casio Camera came with a Photoshop Plug in that lets me control the camera right from within Photoshop. I can downlod the images, use all the Photoshop goodies to manipulate the picture, then save it off as a gif or jpeg file. I've been using jpeg because the files are more compact. I reduce the size of the images to make them download faster, generally 200 x 150 pixels. This makes for graphics of 18-22K, not too big a download bite. The panoramic view is strictly low tech, I arranged five or six pictures across my monitor, took a screen shot and imported it into Photoshop.

Sample 200 x 100 pixel picture

This is a 200 x 100 pixel jpeg image, about 22k.

3000 Stevenson Drive

Here's a panoramic. I used the html width attribute to force the browser to display this as a 500 pixel wide image. (I know, I could have resized it in Photoshop, I learned that after I did this image)

If you haven't come across this feature yet, Netscape lets you downlod pictures right from the web page. Put your cursor over the picture, hold down the mouse button (Mac) or press the right mouse button (most PCs an UNIX) and you'll get a dialog box that lets you save the picture locally.

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