Buddy encounters a squirrel, and two new toys

At Richmond Park last Sunday, Buddy had an encounter with the beggar squirrels that inhabit the restaurant area. They've learned to lose a little fear in exchange for tasty treats. Buddy was enchanted with the quarter-tame critters.



My photos came out not so good, most of them. I need to improve on the whole action shot thing. But I pulled them together with a little lame video clip and voila 84 seconds of something not quite so bad.

I used two new things (new to me) to do this.

1. Picasa 3. I'm a big fan of Picasa photo editing software. It's not the best, but it's quick and easy to use - there's no faster cropping I've found and everything feels pretty intuitive. This latest version has a few new tricks, like retouching and lets you pull a movie together (as above) pretty quickly. It's still kinda crashy though and even though it seemed like I could upload directly to YouTube, I couldn't get that to work and had to upload from the YouTube interface.

2. YouTube now has soundtrack! You can "swap audio" from a list of tunes. I don't know if it's copyright free or what the deal is, but presumably that's YouTube's lookout. I added the soundtrack you can hear above. The list isn't huge and I couldn't quite time transitions as I might have liked. But hey, it removes the frisson of fear that some record company's solicitor might pop a demand for £1500 for violating their intellectual property rights.

Update: oops, I failed to mention the most important thing about Picasa - it's free.
Further update: my old pal is back online and blogging and says it's talk like a pirate day which is NOT an invitation for me to talk about copyright violations and internet piracy - which is what I did, totally unintentionally.