Well, I am having a quiet time on the blog posting front at the moment. Will probably pick up the pen on Friday night or Saturday morning. In the meantime my cat Sootie would like to share a thought with you.

This afternoon about 1.00PM the skies opened up and we experienced a hail storm. They are not that unusual in our region. The storm passed and there was a lull. Then there were a few claps of thunder and a second hail storm began. This was quite an intense storm.

Sootie went outside to investigate despite his initial fright with the thunder claps. He took cover under the barbecue but when the storm was finishing he decided it was all too much and raced back inside. Shao Ping and I took a few photographs and some movies on the Casio digital camera. I took a screen shot of the weather radar. The storm came up from the south.

How did I create this post and the gallery? The digital photographs in the gallery were taken with a Nikon D70 and a Casio digital camera. The video was taken with the Casio digital camera as well. I resized the digital photographs to a width of 650 pixels using Adobe Photoshop Elements. I auto corrected the colour and levels of each image. Finally each was saved using the Save for web… option in Elements. This option gives the user a great deal of control over the quality and file size of the image. I created the gallery using the Create Web Photo Gallery… command in Photoshop Elements. I converted one of the supplied templates to one that matches my web site. A little clunky but it works.

The combined file size of the two original video files was 67mb. I opened each in Quicktime Pro, added one to the other via a copy/paste and saved the combined file using the Broadband Medium setting. The size of the output file is 2.1mb.

The screen shot of the weather radar was named and saved using Sharpshooter. The image above is a collage of four of the gallery images. I created a blank Photoshop Elements file with dimensions of 400 x 266 pixels. Resized four of the gallery images to 200 x 133 pixels and dragged each onto the blank photoshop file canvas. Then saved it using the Save for web… command. I uploaded the files to my host using Cyberduck. The blog post was created using WordPress. All of this was done on an Apple MacBook Pro 15″.

Like many other cats Sootie loves the adventure and sheer excitement of a brown paper bag. He has been playing with such a bag during the last few days and I thought why not make a hole in the bottom of the bag and obtain a different perspective of Sootie as he plays with the bag. The first video is simply Sootie chewing the handles. The second and third video reveal a carnivore in full flight.

Tonight my cat Sootie did something quite remarkable! I was in one part of the house near the bedrooms and Sootie came in looking alarmed and frightened. He miaowed loudly and was looking down the hallway. I thought that perhaps there was a burglar in the house and I gingerly went to investigate. When I reached the living room at the other end of our home there was smoke gathering around the ceiling! There was a fire! I looked for the seat of the blaze but could not find any. There was just smoke thinly accumulating near the ceiling. Perhaps a “down” light in the ceiling had shorted.

I called my neighbour Dale. He switched off the power. He had a look in the roof but found nothing. We went back to the living room and came to the conclusion that the TV had shorted based on the smell of the smoke. We restored power and the TV is indeed dead. Perhaps it had made a loud noise when it shorted. Anyway, Sootie is a legend and perhaps he saved the day!

Our smoke alarm is further away, nearer the bedrooms. I think the smoke would have eventually set it off if I had not opened the windows and the door. Sootie was uneasy for quite a while afterwards. He hid in our bed during the drama.

Well, even Sootie has a blog now. He has made two entries so far and you can subscribe to his blog with this link.