I love this place! Weird Stuff Warehouse has been in
business for quite a while in various locations around here. They
buy and resell all kinds of funky surplus electronic stuff. If
you're anything like me, budget an extra hour or so for looking
around after you get your picture taken.
Here's how people generally work webcams:
The first thing to do is to team up with a friend who can be at a
computer looking at the Weird Stuff Warehouse web site at
http://www.weirdstuff.com in a browser.
For the webcam image follow the link "WeirdCam -
Sunnyvale" near the bottom of the page.
It will be easier if both of you take a look at the site and the
webcam page ahead of time to see what the area looks like where you
need to stand. The camera is always running, but when the location
is closed and the lights are off you won't see anything.
Next, go to the posted coordinates. They are about as close to
the camera itself as you can get and still have your GPS receiver
get a signal. The camera is right on the other side of the
wall.
Now go inside. The web page lists the hours when the location is
open. Most recently the hours were 9:30am to 6:00pm Monday through
Saturday and 11:00am to 5:00pm Sunday.
Stand where the camera gets a recognizable picture of you. It's
not far from the front door and the camera is not hard to see.
You'll probably want to talk with your friend by phone to get
confirmation that they see you in the picture. The camera displays
a new image about once a minute so you may have to wait a bit for
your friend to tell you you're in the picture.
Here are some suggested guidelines for a picture that shows it's
a picture of you the geocacher, not just some random screen
shot:
-Be in the foreground of the picture as in the sample pictures
below. You'll be too tiny to see well if you're much further
away.
-Face the camera and look straight at it. That alone will
distinguish you from people who are just looking at all the
Stuff.
-Make some distinctive gesture, which will most likely be holding a
cell phone to your ear as in the sample pictures. Or if you like
you could hold up your GPSr or wave to the camera.
When the web page is showing a good image of you, your friend
should save a copy of it. In most Windows web browsers, that's one
of the options from a right-click on the image. You may like to
practice this ahead of time.
Have your friend get the saved image file to you somehow, maybe
as an e-mail attachment. Log your cache visit, then upload the
image file as an addition to your log.
Look, all the above are simply suggestions of likely ways to get
this to work. If you happen to have a web enabled PDA that you can
use to capture the webcam image by yourself without a friend's
help, or creative ideas about posing in a recognizable way, go for
it. Have fun. This is about having fun.
Incidentally, when I went for the sample pictures on a Saturday
morning there were a number of people around me including the store
personnel and nobody paid a bit of attention to me posing and
talking, so feel free. In fact, they know about the cache and will
point out the cam if you ask. Nice folks.