It's Kita!

Kita is a kind of orange-white-brown kitten with an amazingly long tail (his tail is as long as the rest of him!) and big feet. He came to me as a stray; a friend of a friend's friend was leaving the area and she had been taking care of this little baby kitten and needed to find it a good home. I met her and my friends in a bar; several beers later I had a new kitten... Here he is:

Picking a name was a problem; you know how annoyed cats get if you start calling them something they don't like (but then, do cats hear ANYTHING you say to them?) Eventually I started calling him "New Kitty". That degenerated into "Nikita". Which turned into "Kita" for short. It works for both of us, so that's cool.

Rufus was Not Happy (tm) to have a new roommate at first. As soon as I brought Kita in Rufus started hissing; I had to be quite stern with him (yeah, right.) Kita on the other hand had a blast playing with Rufus' toys. Eventually Rufus got the idea that he wasn't scaring anyone, so he walked over to Kita, stuck his face into Kita's face, sniffed, and walked off. They've been buddies (that is, they constantly fight [well, when Rufus isn't eating or sleeping.]) ever since.

This photo was taken using a cheap fixed focus CCD camera attached to my MS-DOG machine via an Intel video capture board. Kita really wasn't interested in having his picture taken, so I had to hold him and try to get him to look at the camera. Since the camera wasn't on the floor, he wasn't interested; this is the ONLY frame I got with him looking anywhere near the camera. Bummer.

The approach was to run the Video for Windoze capture program, then use the playback tool to grab a still using the edit menu copy command (the edit menu is greyed out in the capture program so you can't cut and past.) I then launched LView and pasted the still into the frame. LView can then save the frame in any number of forms; in this case I used JPEG.

BTW, I don't recommend you buy Intel products - my experience has been that their "support staff" suck. In the case of the video card I wanted to write a driver for one of my Unix machines. After getting shoved around among a group of rather surly "support" people I was told that it was "policy" that they only supported Windoze. I explained that I wasn't asking for them to support it; that all I wanted was board level programming information. The "technical staff" member I talked to didn't understand the difference between board level and Windoze video API programming. Finally it told me they didn't have board level programming information. The last "person" told me that if I had a problem with that it'd have the product manager call. I gave them my number. I'm sure you can guess the result... Maybe some day Intel will get a clue...