First Long Night

First Long Night ….

Just goes to prove that nothing can work perfectly all of the time… I had my first long night since the ‘Wonder’ bed was brought into the house.  Just could not shut down the brain and I had also gone to bed not feeling very well.  Hope I am not getting a cold or the stomach bug that is going around.

Yesterday was a frustrating day.  I had gotten a couple of different cameras to set up as web cameras that will stream my activities in and around the house.  I have them in the Living Room, Dining Room and Kitchen.  It allows certain friends and family to monitor me whenever they want.  This way my house can be seen so if I should not be heard from for several days, my main rooms can be seen to make sure I am OK.  I can also turn the cameras to my quilt design walls for opinions of my creations or to my sewing machine if I need to do a video assist to one of my friends having problems with a project.  I can also check into the house if I am away to see if Molly is OK or that the house is undisturbed.  Anyway, I had set up a couple of refurbished cameras over the Christmas holiday, but the program kept shutting down, so I abandoned the idea temporarily.  But I got a couple of very well reviewed Foscam IP web cams, so I tried setting them up yesterday. 

My brother, Andy, has been my techie guru throughout my life.  He and my nephews had worked very hard Christmas Eve to get things set up to broadcast my house on the web.  I am not sure why it kept shutting down, but yesterday I installed an update of some software (Blue Iris) and then began stumbling through the setup of the two new cameras.  I am very proud to say that I only had to call my brother twice.  The first one was to verify the IP numbers that he had assigned to my other cameras were the numbers I found on a piece of paper.  The last time was a question about port numbers, which had been part of my frustrations.

The first camera I played with has been reset a number of times.  Thank goodness the designers realize that there are idiots like myself who go out and attempt to do things that are likely to backfire each time we try to conquer new technology, usually with disastrous results.  The reset button restores the camera to factory defaults so we can try it again and again until we get it right.  That was me, yesterday.

Most of my problems came with not realizing where I could see the new IP addresses as I altered the settings on the camera and then finally trying to set the ports to different numbers when I really did not need to.  But I learned lots about the cameras and, while I wanted to throw them out of the window from time to time, they are now up and running and the software did not shut down overnight.  So, we will see what happens.

Now I just have to remember not to wander into the living room naked!!!