Learning more than I wanted to starting out....

So, this attempt to create a video to show how to build in SL is turning out to be quite an adventure in collateral learning. Not only did I have to learn about machinima making, and ways of tweaking the SL interface to improve the way the machinima looks, and short-cut keys for such things as camera movement and removing the user interface, but I'm also learning all about the various options for uploading and storing videos, video formats (wmv, mov, avi), the relative trade-off of size and quality, and streaming options. And, to make things even more interesting, my computer has been crashing regularly.

At first, the crashes only happened when I tried to do certain things in Windows Media Encoder--namely, access a "session setting wizard" that included video capture (as opposed to screen capture, which worked fine). And this crashed only Windows Media Encoder itself, not the whole computer. I eventually learned to avoid clicking on certain options in Windows Media Encoder to avoid these inevitable program crashes.

And, I pretty successfully used Windows Media Encoder to create a WMV video that does more or less what I want it to do, although it doesn't run especially well from http://blip.tv. Lots of hiccups and "blips"so to speak. Plus, the large version of that file (over 350 MB) was not successfully converted to Flash format, I guess because the size was too much for the converter to handle. When I used Media Encoder to convert the file to a smaller format, i lost the hiccups and blips, and got a Flash version, but the text is not legible.

I got excited when I discovered that a company called Netro Media (http://netro.ca) was offering a FREE streaming account (for people whose streaming needs were less than 500 MB per month). I quickly signed up for it, mentioning in my sign-up form that I was interested in streaming into Second Life. I received the Netro account information, and got excited about testing a stream into SL later that day. However, a few minutes later, I got a phone call from a Netro representative, informing me that the FREE streaming account was only for streaming WMV files (not Quicktime), and that I couldn't use it to stream into Second Life. When I emailed back, the representative said the company would offer me a free trial (24 hours), but that I needed to create a Quicktime file, and use a program called Wirecast 3 from http://varasoft.com to send it to Netro Media for streaming. (Quicktime Broadcaster is only available on the Mac.)

But then I found another way to inevitably crash my computer. And these crashes weren't just the program itself, but the whole computer. I downloaded and installed the trial version of Wirecast 3, but when I ran it, it brought my computer (poof) to a black screen, and reboot. This always happened at the same point: when the startup screen said "initializing video system." I downloaded the file again, and reinstalled it, just to make sure, and yep, the computer went down at the same point.

I began to suspect that maybe there was something wrong with my computer, since both Wirecast 3 and Windows Media Encoder were crashing my computer. I figured maybe there was something wrong with my a/v capture card, which is an ATI Radeon 1550. I went to the ATI site (and discovered that ATI and AMD are the same company...who knew) and downloaded the latest version of the drivers and Catalyst Control Center for my video card.

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An aside.....WHY does the "Catalyst Control Center" for ATI cards include THIS welcome screen:

What's with the cute redhead, and WHAT is with the ANGLE of this shot? I guess ATI knows who their primary market is.... :-)

Well anyway, moving on....

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While installing this ATI driver package, the system just stopped responding while installing something called the "WDM drivers." WDM, I learned, stands for "Windows Driver Model" ["is a series of drivers used to enable the capture and TV tuner features on VIVO boards" http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/346/ATI_Catalyst_6.8_x64_WDM_Package.html). I found a technical suggestion from someone who had also had their system hang up on WDM installation that you could install the card drivers and Catalyst Control Center separately, then reboot the machine, and then install just the WDM drivers. With this advice, I got the current version of the drivers installed, and working.

Unfortunately, cute redhead aside, this didn't solve any of my problems. Windows Media Encoder and Wirecast 3 were still crashing, as they had done before.

Meanwhile, since I couldn't get Wirecast 3 to work, I figured I might as well try to convert my WMV file to a Quicktime file, and then upload it to Blip.TV as a Quicktime "Fast Start" (or "progressive download") file, so at least I could show it in SL to some of my colleagues, and ask them if they thought it was worth continuing to work on this project. I tried to load the movie into Adobe Premier, figuring maybe Premier would let me export the movie in Quicktime format. However, Adobe Premier also crashed my computer, shortly after loading my WMV. (I never got to whether it could export as Quicktime.) I was getting tired of rebooting my computer.

(Another aside....not nearly as visually interesting as the Catalyst Control Center, but every time I rebooted my computer, Zone Alarm, my free Firewall, would keep reinitializing, like three or four times...I finally went into MSCONFIG and realized that "zlclient" was in the "services" tab twice; once I deleted one of those, and rebooted, I seem to have solved THAT problem.)

So I looked around on the 'net for something that would convert a WMV to a Quicktime file. If you have a Mac, and have Quicktime Pro, you can get a plug-in to convert from WMV to Quicktime, but I don't have a Mac. (For the record, I have a Gateway 840GM, which has proved totally reliable and a workhorse for the last 18 months, until this latest series of crashes.) I eventually found a program called E O Video (catchy name), from http://www.eo-video.com that professes to be able to convert WMV files to Quicktime files. But, LO AND BEHOLD, when I tried to load the WMV file into E O Video, IT CRASHED MY COMPUTER!!!! This, despite having upgraded the drivers for my ATI card.

(BTW, I was able to run E O Video on my work desktop, which is a four-year old Dell, but it was still in the early stages of PASS 2 when I finished teaching last night, so I just left it running.)

I was beginning to think that I should give up on the SL video experiment, and just prepare for my upcoming ELVEN workshop (http://elveninstitute.org/workshops.html) in a more traditional manner (using screenshots, as I did for teaching SL snapshots). However, I am the type of person (if you haven't figure that out already!) that can't relax if I can't figure out what's going wrong with a technical process. I literally can't sleep when I can't get a new piece of hardware or software to work effectively on my computer. And here, I had at least FOUR programs crashing with some predictability: Windows Media Encoder, Adobe Premier, Wirecast 3, and E O Video. There had to be a systematic problem that would solve all of these problems. So, I did a little more poking around.

I went to the Gateway web site to see if there was a diagnostic tool that I could run. Nope. I went to the ATI site to see if there was a diagnostic tool I could run. Nope. I searched for "ati driver problem" and "Windows Media Encoder crash" and "a/v capture troubleshooting." FINALLY, while reading a techical forum about ati 1550 troubleshooting, I ran across someone who had switched from using an nVidia card to an ATI card, and ran into problems with the nVidia drivers still being installed on the system after the cards had been switched. I vaguely recalled recently seeing an nVidia applet on my system's control panel. Yep, there it was! I wondered if maybe the problem was that my system was experiencing a conflict between the vestigal nVidia drivers and the ATI card. (I switched from the Gateway's Intel on-board video to an nVidia-based Verto GeForce 7900GS back in January of 2007 when I couldn't run SL very well with the on-board video; three months later, that card burned up, so I bought the ATI card.)

(As another aside, PNY gave me a TOTAL RUNAROUND on getting an "RMA" for getting a replacement Verto GeForce 7900GS card, which is STILL sitting here on my desk, soon to go out of warranty......I'm still seething at PNY for THAT slap in the face....)

So I searched Google for "nVidia removal" and found the suggestion from someone that "If you are still having problems you might try Driver Cleaner http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/ . Just follow instructions in the readme file." So I went to that URL, and it returned "page not found". So I searched Google for "Driver Cleaner," and found http://www.drivercleaner.net and saw that it was $9.95. Not a bad price, but "free" even better. I wondered if I could just remove the nVidia drivers from my system using the Control Panel and "Add/Remove Programs...." So I tried that, and it worked!!!! I rebooted the machine and, Voila! no nVidia applet in the Control Panel. And, was it my imagination, or....was the system working more quickly...with more responsive video....??? It seemed as if a sludginess I hadn't noticed before was listed. So......

I held my breath, fired up E O Video, loaded in my WMV file and......it played the video, unlike the last time! Then, I set E O Video to work converting the file into MPEG 1 (which I assume is an MOV file...), and it's chugging along quite merrily doing that conversion as we speak!!!


So, I am quite tempted to fire up Windows Media Encoder and Wirecast 3 to see if those programs will run okay now, but I don't want to crash my computer in the middle of this E O Video conversion (which will probably take another hour), so I think I'll go do something else for a while (maybe something non-computer related, like make dinner), and come back later to test those out and, if everything goes well, to upload my new Quicktime version of "Dewey Builds A Couch" to Blip.TV and try to view it from within SL. Wish me luck!!!

(/me waves at everyone, including the Catalyst Control Center redhead, looking at me over her shoulder as I walk away....)

Dewey's Couch, much smaller format

Guess what: there is a trade-off in video between SIZE and QUALITY! This is the same video as in my previous post, but converted to a 320 x 240 (standard web video) format. You can see that it plays much more smoothly (and fits in the space on this blog). The file size is 1/10th of what it was before. Great!

Except that now, you cannot read the text on the screen, making it much less valuable as a tool for training people how to manipulate the Edit panel in Second Life.

Click to Play

I think I need to go back to the drawing board. Probably, I will need to use the SL native video recorder (which will save in Quicktime "mov" format, I believe). The only thing is, how to record the audio? Maybe I need to be speaking (using SL voice) while filming?

Back soon with a report!

Dewey Builds a Couch, Version 1.0

As I said in my previous post, I'm learning how to create videos to help teach teacher and others how to use Second Life.

The latest version is much more complete than the previous one. For one thing, there is a narration. For another, I've solved the problem of having instant messages and group notices intrude on the video. For a third, the clarity and resolution is much better.

I created this version using Windows Media Encoder, which allowed me to record the audio at the same time as I recorded the video.

I got some help from my SL friend Entropy Kuhn, who has very few SL friends and no SL groups. By using his account to do the filming, we were uninterrupted. Plus, he was able to do the building, while I focused on narrating. :-)

Windows Media Encoder creates WMV files. I uploaded the 350MB WMV file to http://blip.tv, which automatically converted the file to the Flash format, which is how it is embedded here.

(UPDATE: Hmmmm, it appears the conversion into FLA format is still "pending", so it's embedded here as WMV, and it isn't running very quickly. Plus, it's too big for the column on the blog. So still have some work to do. LATER UPDATE: The video definitely is too big not only for the column on the blog page, but to be played at anything approaching real-time rate.)

I'm currently using EO Video (evaluation version) to convert this into a Quicktime file, so I can play it in Second Life. I'll let you know how that goes.....

Click to Play

Dewey Jung builds a couch, Beta version

I am experimenting with using machinima (machine...cinema; basically, videos made in virtual environments such as Second Life) to teach teachers and others how to use Second Life more effectively.

On Saturday, I attended a workshop led by HVX Silverstar on SL machinima. It was extremely helpful! Go to this link if you want lots of information and tips for beginning to make SL machinima. Thanks, HVX!!

This is an early draft of a video I'm going to make to use for a workshop on February 2, 2008 at ELVEN. See http://elveninstitute.org/workshops.html for more details on the workshop, or to register.

I created this video by capturing the Second Life window with Windows Media Encoder, then uploaded the result to http://blip.tv. Unfortunately, this is in WMV format, and so can't be streamed in SL. Next I'm going to use SL's own "native" video capture tool, and clean up the interface a bit.

Click to Play

Dewey Jung builds a couch.

Can you play a non-streamed QuickTime movie in Second LIfe?

It is "common knowledge" that to play a QuickTime movie in Second Life (SL), you need to host the movie on a streaming server. If you merely put the QuickTime file on a regular web server, it is widely believed, you can view it on a web page, but not in SL.

(Note, since the SL client doesn't really handle videos itself, but relies on the QuickTime player installed on the user's machine, you can't watch OTHER types of videos--such as *.wmv or *.swf files, in SL.)

For example, in a very useful tutorial by Torley Linden on converting YouTube movies for use in SL, Torley writes:

Now here's where things get a bit more difficult: you'll need a hosting server to upload to. I use Dreamhost and FTP it, but if that sounds tricky, look into uploading to another online video service like Blip.tv, which will retain your original file and can be directly linked to.

Even SL's official information doesn't make it entirely clear whether a streaming server is required. In the SL Knowledge Base, for example, it says "The movie must exist as an active URL link on a hosting web server" and then later gives a list of resources for "Hosting Solutions" that are all about streaming servers. (https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=4434; this link won't work unless you are already logged into the SL web site with a valid SL account.) Does "hosting web server" mean the same thing as "web server," or does it mean "streaming web server"?

In any case, I wasn't sure I believed the "common knowledge," since I had viewed some "mov" files from the American Memory collection (and I didn't think those were streamed), and so in the first draft of a chapter I'm writing about the Affordances of Second Life for PreK-12 Education, I wrote:

Any Quicktime-compatible video on a web server can be shown in SL, again using the Freeview, simply by putting the URL of the video into the menu of the Freeview.

One of the book's editors (who certainly knows more than I do about the technical aspects of Second Life, but who shall remain nameless here), inserted the word "streaming" before the phrase "web server." I, being the skeptic I am and the general "know-it-all" that I pretend to be, wrote to her:

Are you sure quicktime movies have to be one a “streaming” web server for them to play in SL? I think any quicktime will play; you just have to wait for the load if it isn’t a streaming server. But I am not absolutely sure.

She immediately wrote back,

That's a great question. Why not try to access one that is just sitting on a website and not streamed?

So I did. I happen to have a QuickTime movie on my web server. I use it to teach some aspects of video to my Technology in Education students, including how to put a QuickTime movie into Flash. Here's the video:

(It just so happens that I am a somewhat closeted fan of Britney Spears. While I could take some time now to explain WHY I am a fan, and why my fan-ness has perhaps faded in recent months, that isn't really the point of this blog post.)

For those of you who don't want to take the time to watch the video, let me just say, it's a Pepsi commercial that Britney made and that was shown originally during the Academy Awards in 2001. Britney is beautiful, of course (this was way before her current troubles), and this video doesn't ignore that fact. What's really interesting, however, is that this ad was actually the lead-in to another ad, aired during the same Academy Awards show, that contained the same footage, with interspersed cut-aways with various slack-jawed viewers (including some Coke employees and even Bob Dole (!) and his dog. You can see the other video here and read a critical review of the pair of videos here. Not to say, again, that is the point of this blog post.

What IS the point (reminding myself not to be so slack-jawed) is whether you need a streaming server to play a video in SL. So, following my editor's sensible suggestion, I tried it in SL.

I use a tool known as the "Freeview", an image and video viewer created by Crystalshard Foo, a designer in Second Life, and widely available free of charge in SL. The Freeview will show any SL texture (either by dragging it from your inventory onto the screen, or by dragging a group of textures onto the "Contents" tab of the Edit panel; this allows a series of images to be displayed automatically in a series or loop, or to advance when the Freeview is touched). It will also play QuickTime movies, either from a list available at http://slguide.com or by entering a URL (with a "/1 " prefix) into the chat bar.

(An aside: I spent a little time trying to locate an easy way to obtain a Freeview from the web, and failed. There is a very similar, perhaps more up-to-date, product, available, known as the SLGuide Player. More information about that player, and a link to a place where you can get one, is available here: http://www.slguide.com/help/.)

So, I logged into SL, rezzed a Freeview on my land, Touched it and chose "Set URL," copied the URL of my Britney Pepsi video, typed "/1 " and then pasted "http://craigcunningham.com/nlu/cah/Britney%20Spears%20Pepsi.mpg" into the chat bar, and then Touched the Freeview again, and chose Play from the menu. After a few seconds, lo and behold, it played!!



In the meantime, my editor had consulted an even-more-technically-minded friend and wrote to me:

Now, that [videos had to be on a streaming server] was true in 2006 and early 2007. The product changes so often that I have learned not to be sure of anything. It is quite possible that it no longer requires streaming. **** is online right now and she streams..I'll ask her.... She says you have to have a streaming server.

Well, I thought, maybe not. I wrote back:

Nope. Doesn't have to be streamed. This URL isn't streamed: http://craigcunningham.com/nlu/cah/Britney%20Spears%20Pepsi.mpg. And it works on my Freeview. It's a little choppy, because it has to wait for segments to download.

She immediately wrote:

Ahh so the lack of streaming means choppy video... now the question is, do you recommend it?

Well, THAT is a really good question. I noticed that when I played the video again, it was less choppy. I figure there must be some sort of caching going on, either on my local computer, or within SL.

But, would I recommend this way of showing videos in educational settings? Since many teachers don't have easy access to a streaming server, and there are LOTs of useful QuickTime movies available (on American Memory, for example, where you can find lots of historical videos, such as this one showing Hopi Indians dancing for Theodore Roosevelt:

there's no sound in this one--, by the way) that I would think the ability to show a video in SL without a streaming server would be quite useful to teachers. However, soon my editor wrote to me:

Yes, your method works fine for one user. When you have several users, some will not see the content without a streaming server. Here is how to set it up: http://www.mediacollege.com/video/streaming/overview.html And this is from a discussion with **** **** who runs our audio streaming server for SL:

This is what I read on it when I was trying to set up a video server. You can get the client to do a progressive download to a temp file, from a web page, but it'll do that buffering thing you were talking about. Unless he has an unusually large bandwidth pipe, you can't get more than one or two working that way. For actual "streaming" you need a stream server, in order to display to 5 - 10 - 50 however many clients, depending on available bandwidth.

Upon some further searching for useful information on this topic, I found this Electric Sheep blog by Chris Carella: http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/chris/?p=206. Chris's post makes things very clear: if a QuickTime video has been saved with the "Fast Start" option, it downloads to a client "progressively," starting with a portion of the video has downloaded. No streaming is required. However, the thing about progressive downloads is that each person viewing the video in SL sees it differently, depending on when they first clicked the "play" button in the SL window. Streaming servers allow multiple users to experience a video at the same time. Chris recommends this link from Apple that explains the differences.

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UPDATE: Here is another useful URL about streaming video and SL: http://land-answers.wiki.zoho.com/Streaming-Video-in-Second-Life.html

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So, the answer is, "YES," you can play a non-streamed QuickTime movie in Second Life. But if you want a group of people to see the video at the same time, or to have more than a couple of people watch it at once, you'll want to put it on a streaming server.

You certainly want to to do EVERYTHING in your power to share your favorite videos. Even if your favorite pop stars have had a bad few months.

Do fruit flies like coffee? Or, Technology in daily life: a short story

So the last couple of months, our kitchen has been plagued by fruit flies.

The infestation started in late summer, no doubt originally attracted through our screens by the bananas that my wife routinely allows to turn brown before turning them into banana bread, which is in turn rapidly devoured by our kids.

....turns into....

Fruit flies love browning bananas too. The females lay their eggs on overripe fruit; the eggs hatch in 24 to 30 hours, the larvae feed on the fruit, for five or six days, then pupate, then emerge as adults who, within 48 hours are copulating with other fruit flies to produce more eggs, etc. The whole cycle takes about 8 to 15 days "depending on the temperature" (source).

So really there are only a few ways to get rid of a fruit fly infestation. You can (a) remove all of their food, (b) lower the temperature so the adults can't survive, (c) reduce their sex drive, or (d) kill all of the adults.

So, of course, we tried (a) first. The nearly-rotten bananas were removed to a ziploc bag in the feezer. The fruit flies moved to hovering around the aloe-vera-containing soap by the sink. The soap container went into the refrigerator. Oddly, the flies began hanging out near the coffee grinder. (Fruit flies seem to really like coffee!) The coffee grinder got cleaned and put away. Still, fruit flies everywhere.

So we thought about option (b). Normally, fruit flies disappear from the out-of-doors when autumn's frost comes. So, theoretically, we could induce frost in our apartment, and get rid of the flies. (But see this article, which clearly indicates that 100% mortality requires either many repeated frosts, or it has to be below -5°C). After considering the collateral damage that might occur in our apartment (including possible frozen pipes and stressed-out people), we decided option (b) wouldn't work for us.

Option (c) is simply not possible.....fruit flies LOVE sex nearly as much as they love rotting bananas. So that one was out too.

So option (d) remained. My daughter decided that she could eliminate the fruit fly infestation single-handedly by chasing each of the adults down and (well, double-handedly) suddenly crushing them skillfully between her clapping hands. For weeks, she practiced this martial art on the poor flies, scattering carcasses around the kitchen and, eventually, getting very good at it and coming to the conclusion that the flies are "incredibly stupid" and can be easily killed. However, the fruit flies don't NEED to be smart...they have something incredibly more valuable in the scheme of things: prolificacy! The fruit flies endured, seeming to relish the opportunity to match my daughter's increasingly deadly (and increasingly regularly-heard) clapping by simply having more sex and producing more new fruit flies.

So we needed a more efficient way to kill the adults. My daughter had to go to school, after all, and occasionally leave the kitchen to sleep or use the bathroom. We needed a killer with not only determination but "staying" power.

We asked everyone we know if they knew how to end a fruit fly infestation. The option of "bombing" our kitchen with insecticide was appealing for its likely quick effectiveness, but we didn't like the idea of covering all the stuff in our kitchen with poison. My wife and daughter made a trap by laying a bit of rotting banana in a plastic container, the lid nearby ready to trap the flies...but they were too random to all alight at once on the bait. One friend suggested a "natural" fruit fly insecticide ("you can probably find it on the internet"), but we couldn't locate what she was talking about.

Finally, intrigued by the surprising affinity our (we were getting a little possessive of our little colony) fruit flies had for the coffee grinder, I spent a little time trying to find out if fruit flies eat coffee. Naturally, being a bit of a computer geek, I used Google. I typed "fruit flies coffee" into the search bar, and began browsing the hits.

While I never actually answered that question (do they like coffee? Anyone know?), I found this blog post on the "coffee monologues" blog that suggested a more efficient trap for fruit flies than our open plastic container.

I emailed this link to my wife and daughter, hoping they might take the suggestion and build a better fly trap.

But I still wanted to know if fruit flies like coffee. Maybe eating coffee grinds increases their sex drive, I thought. So I looked further down on the hit list and found this intriguing title:

Recently, I noticed small fruit flies around my coffee maker. Why?!?

I figured THAT page would answer my question for sure. So I went to the page (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071029094130AAoSWbJ; yes, I'm not above using BOTH Google and Yahoo in one fact-finding mission), but alas, no answer to the fruit fly/coffee maker connection! However, there was the "best answer - chosen by voters" -- "a good clean kitchen is the best defense against these guys!" Duh! But that hadn't worked for us (maybe we aren't "clean" enough???!?). I needed a better answer!

About to give up my search, I just happened to notice that below the "best answer - chosen by voters" was a section labeled "Other Answers." So I scrolled down, and the second answer, posted by Fair_Fun, was a piece of user-contributed text that is worth its weight in gold. (I love you, Fair_Fun!!!)

I don't know why they would be around the coffee pot or how to keep them from coming back BUT,

it started, much to my chagrin (I STILL don't know why the fruit flies were hanging out near the coffee grinder), then continued:

to get red of fruit flies , take a small glass (I use a shot glass) and fill half way with apple cider Vinegar and 2 drops of dishwashing liquid and mix well. You will find those flies drawn to the cup and gone forever.

Hmmmm, I thought....an intriguing idea. Clearly the fruit flies (these might have been "vinegar fruit flies"...vinegar is, after all, one of the products of rotting [fermenting] fruit... and apple cider vinegar would probably attract them. But why the "2 drops of dishwashing liquid" and exactly HOW would they be "gone forever"?!?

Well, I emailed this new answer to the wife and daughter, and spent the rest of the day thinking about this "solution," and realized that the dishwashing liquid had one of two possible purposes. It could be the "poison" that would kill the little buggers or......perhaps more perniciously, maybe the soap would reduce the surface tension on the vinegar, and when the fruit flies landed on the vinegar, expecting to take a sip of the luscious liquid and fly off again, they would SINK, unable to extract themselves, and would DROWN, never to buzz around our coffee grinder again!!!

By the time I got home, I was ready. We didn't have any apple cider vinegar at home, unfortunately, but my wife was stopping at the grocery store the next day, and I quickly added this to her list. When she got home the next day, I anxiously found the bottle....

....(Hmmmm, I thought, how ironic, using "organic" vinegar to attract fruit flies in order to KILL them!!!), found my daughter to help and observe, and we filled a shot glass about 2/3 full of vinegar, added a couple of drops of dishwashing soap, and placed the shot glass above the sink. Immediately we noticed a few fruit flies hovering around the shot glass. Immediately after THAT, we noticed the pungent smell ourselves, which we would be living with for the next few days. A courageous fly landed on the edge of the shot glass, we waited, off he flew again, startled by our hovering presence....so we left, down the hall, to let the concoction do its thang.

In a few minutes, I went back to the kitchen, and noticed one fruit fly frantically struggling to free itself from the surface of the liquid. I thought, awww, poor fruit fly, what a way to go, then maliciously rubbed my hands together at the thought of the whole colony following in his pitiable path. A few hours later, we found about 10 fruit fly carcasses at the bottom of the glass. The next day, about 30. The next day, one lone fruit fly hovered near the coffee maker, 45 or so of his colleagues nearly covering the bottom of the shot glass.

The next day, I didn't think about fruit flies, for the first time in months, although I did continue to notice the strong smell of vinegar near the kitchen sink. The next day, I didn't even notice that. Finally, the day after that, I realized I wasn't thinking about fruit flies any more...the obsession gone, along with the pesky creatures themselves.

The experiment had worked! The entire fruit fly colony, floating languidly at the bottom of our vinegar-dish soap solution, unable to propogate, unable to buzz annoyingly across our fields of view, gone, we hope, until next spring, when they might return, if my wife insists on letting those bananas rot, and if we don't decide to put little glasses of vinegar and soap solution all over the house.

Which, I wonder, is worse...the constant smell of vinegar in the kitchen, or those persistent little flies, carrying out their natural duties in the friendly confines of our kitchen?

As I write this final sentence.....

....across my field of view....

...flying from the plants in the window of my home office....

....ARRRGHHH!!! It's a fruit fly!!!!

Where IS that bottle of vinegar?