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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
To Catch a Pooper

The surveillance equipment is set.

"Equipment" being a $20 WebCam from Radio Shack and some duct tape.

So here's the setup. This is the view from the front of my apartment.



As you can see, the poop area is very close to my front door. Fortunately, my window is right above said poop area.

After work, I stopped at Radio Shack to purchase a cheapy webcam that is compatible with Windows Vista (bleh). The guy at Radio Shack said, "I hope you catch the Nasty Pooper."

Here's the magnificent surveillance device:


So I came home and got to work hooking that bad boy up. The crap software that came with the camera didn't have any sort of motion capture feature, so I had to download some software on a trial basis. The trial lasts for 15 days. I figure, if I don't catch this guy in the act by then, I'm just going to post a passive aggressive sign in the ground.

Here's the deal. I tried setting up the webcam outside the window, but that wasn't really possible without being totally obvious that there's a webcam hanging out my window. Plus, it's raining, and I didn't want to waste 20 bucks that quickly.

So it's duct taped to the inside of the window, pointing straight down at the flower bed. There might be some glare issues, but it works good enough.

I did some test runs going outside and waving at the camera, and it seemed to work. So wish me luck everyone.

We'll see how well my ghetto surveillance equipment works.