(I’ll pass these tips along to me when I travel back in time.)

1. When viewing, advance photos by pressing the space bar. This advances through all the photos in the scene, so you won’t miss anything. Note: you will need to click your mouse into the scene before the space bar will work.

2. Also when viewing, it takes a few seconds for each photo to load in and sharpen. If the photos look too blurry, you are probably skipping around too fast.

3. To create a good scene, take many photos, and photos from different angles. These photos were originally intended for a panorama, so I only took a few, and they are all from the same angle. This isn’t ideal for photosynth. The more photos that photosynth has, the better it is at stitching them together. The best scenes have over a hundered photos, and the photos are from all sorts of angles. (update: also check out the Photosynth Guide)

4. To embed the photosynth in a WordPress blog, wrap the embed code that photosynth give you in the tags <object width=”400″ height=”300″>…</object>

There was something else in the woods.

Since I wasn’t looking for trouble, I only snapped a couple of photos, and took off without getting any closer.

The next day, while there was still plenty of light out, I convinced Nikki to come visit the spot with me - I told her that there was this beautiful ghost white cat living in the woods - I left out how scary it was.

When we got to the spot, we found a path into the woods directly behind the spot where the cat was sitting the night before.  Nikki and I slowly entered the woods and found several small plywood shelters that were only half a meter high, a few cat bowls, but no cats.

As we stood there, a man’s voice came from behind us “Are there people down there?”.  Nikki, who wasn’t scared stiff, quickly responded “Yes, we are looking for the cats?”.  “Cats?”, he said, “You know people live back there.  Ever since they closed down that shelter, the homeless have no where to go, so they’ve been living in the woods.”

Nikki and I looked around and wondered “Could it be, could people actually live here?”  Nobody would be able to fit in one of those little shelters, but maybe that’s only where they rest their heads.

We left the area pretty quickly at that point.  The man that called to us explained that there is one group living in the woods behind the McDonalds at Pantops; there is another group living where we were standing.

We wished the man a good evening, and started on our walk home.  Nikki and I wondered what we could do to help those people (and cats).

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