So now I have a functioning webcam, after almost two days of messing about with software. Really, it shouldn’t be this hard, but often it is. The trouble with having an open architecture is that you are at the mercy of whatever crap third party developers produce, and nothing ever works with anything else.

The reason I needed a webcam is not because I wanted to be living in the future and have a video phone, but because Kevin needs to pack up and/or throw away a bunch of my stuff and we need to collaborate to make sure that the right things go to the right places. He got a webcam for $20 on Sunday and it worked straight out of the box. I ended up spending £20, had to take that back because it didn’t work, and ended up with something from Creative that had a nightmare software installation process. It kept hanging trying to install the user guide – how hard can it be to copy a PDF? And once installed it did a version check and downloaded new copies of everything and ran the install again. Now, at last, everything seems to work. And I need to earn some money by cutting some code.