Journal

Swing the Mood (take two)

Elisha’s grandma (the artist formerly known as My Mum) sent her a nice new swing of her very own. I put it together today and this is her testing it out.
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We though that it was too small in its “infant” guise, though, as she was swinging to and fro very sharply due to the shortness of the ropes. The swing could be converted from an infant size into something that’s supposed to last kids until they’re ten. However, the rope on the baby seat would need extending so that it would sit lower in the larger frame.

Venturing to the retail park we bought some new rope, then happened upon Graeme, Lisa and Francis on our travels, who joined us for a meal in Pizza Hut.

That done, we returned home and converted the swing to über-schwing configuration as the sky got dusky and the insects got pesky. Elisha was getting over-tired at this point and was crying on and off as various things frustrated her while we beavered away with the conversion process. When it was done she perked right up – clearly delighted with the extended swing-time.
Elisha on her new swing

The light was failing by now, which is why my PSP’s Go!Cam was struggling to capture the fun in a single shot, but I filmed some murky footage all the same to record Elisha’s first moments on her new favourite thing.

I’m sure you can imagine the unpleasant meltdown that followed when we took her off the swing to bring her in for bed, though!

Fingers crossed the weather will be good tomorrow so she can get some good use out of it. I’m going to try and hammer the pegs into the ground so that Fliss doesn’t have to stand there holding the swing the whole time, but we’ll need to figure out an ideal spot for it first. All in all a successful present. Thanks mum/grandma!

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Journal

Swing the Mood

Today I managed to get the camera accessory for my PSP a day before release, thanks to the friendly assistant at Game. Burning to use it, I took Elisha to the park on the way home and recorded her on the swings. Elisha was oblivious of the fact she was being used as a guinea pig for my filming, although she seemed very impressed when we watched the videos back when we got home.

The videos are of a good quality – especially the 30fps PSP format ones – sadly the video has been reduced to pixelated mush by YouTube, so I’ll need to think of some other way of hosting them. I put the original video of Elisha on a Swing here for download (almost 13Mb) so you can see the quality of the original.

Unfortunately photo mode isn’t quite up to replacing our broken digital camera at 1.3 megapixels, but the pictures will be good enough for sticking on the web at any rate.Keep your eyes peeled for more movies in the coming weeks as my fledgling career as a director takes shape! 😉

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Game On

Video Calls via PSP

As somebody who takes my PSP almost everywhere I go, this announcement that BT are providing software to allow PSP video calls has me quite excited.

Of course, what they don’t mention is the cost – it’ll be interesting to see what they set the tarrifs at, considering it’s VOIP after all. I reckon the pricing could make or break this kind of service, but I’ll be getting the PSP Camera when it’s released tomorrow anyway, so should the VOIP service be cost effective when it comes, I’ll be all over it.

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