A Successful Failure

Well, boy howdy if I didn’t actually make good on the idea I had in the wake of yesterday’s tagging of our mailbox to set up a covert “Scumbag Cam.” Indeed, I stationed the truck curbside in front of the house and with the aid of an old laptop and an equally old USB webcam partnered with some motion-detection-enabled software I was able to assemble a whole image bank dutifully snapped and stored until the batteries gave out about four hours later.

The trouble is as I expected, the images are craptacular in all their grainy, muddled low-resolution glory, making every silhouetted passer-by look ominous. Or back-lit. Or blurry. Or all of the above, like this spooky being captured after 9 p.m. and shortly before the lapper’s power source said toodles:

That I was able to put together something of a solution on such short notice makes this a success. That its results weren’t anything great makes it a failure, but I certainly had no high-definition delusions going in. Just wanted to start somewhere. And no, we didn’t get tagged during the surveillance, nor anytime during the ensuing night or following morning.
P.S. I cobbled together a shrunken, time-lapse movie of the images, viewable from here.