This copy of the PotCam updates every five minutes, and so does this page.
Inside the building it's every 30 seconds. You are not inside the building. Lucky you.

This weekend: yes, everybody is in. Version 3.0 ships Friday, October 1, and the whole company is working Saturday and Sunday. If you're looking at this over the weekend of the 25th and there's a guy at the counter next to the pizza, that's me. It's the only time you'll see me on the PotCam. I'm usually behind it.

Tidepool Software is 45 people on the second floor of a concrete office building in Sunnyvale. We make software that watches computer networks and tells you when something's wrong with them. The coffee maker is at one end of the floor, and most of the engineers are at the other end, a long walk past the printers and around Sales. Nothing is worse than making that walk and finding an empty pot.

So in November of 1998 I pointed a camera at the pot. I'm the network and systems administrator here, which means I watch things for a living, and I'd been reading about the Trojan Room coffee pot at the Computer Lab at Cambridge University in England, which has been on the Web since 1993. A camera on a coffee pot is about the oldest idea there is on the Web. I figured it was time Sunnyvale had one.

Inside the company, the PotCam is on our internal web server, and I'm told it's the most-visited page we have, including the ones about stock options. This copy is for friends outside the firewall, and for my wife Georgia, who likes to see whether I'm really on my way home.

The picture is black and white because the camera is. See below.

These are typed on the sheet taped to the cabinet door, just to the left of the pot. (You can't read it on the PotCam. Nobody can read it in person either, apparently.)

1. Whoever takes the last cup makes the next pot. The PotCam sees you.
2. Decaf is the orange handle. Regular never goes in the orange-handled pot. You know who you are.
3. Don't leave an empty pot on the burner. It bakes, it smells, and we've cracked two carafes that way.
4. The camera is not to be turned around, covered with a sticky note, or given a mustache.

Tuesday, September 14, 1999, 10:32 a.m.

Empty pot on a hot burner, a mess on the counter, and nobody in sight. By the time somebody noticed, the bottom of the carafe was a brown crust and you could smell it at the far end of the building. The PotCam doesn't keep old pictures. Ronnie saved this one off the inside page when he saw it, but by then the guilty party was long gone. Pot never claimed. It is still on this page. It will be on this page until someone confesses.

Click either one for the full-size picture.

The Monday Line Mon., Sept. 13, 1999, 8:57 a.m. First pot of the week, still brewing, four people waiting on it. Kim's on the left with her mug, Ronnie, our QA lead, has his arms folded, and two of the server guys are arguing about something by the door. I'm not in it. I'd started the pot and gone back to my desk to watch it brew on the PotCam, which is the whole point.	Who Is This Man? Fri., March 19, 1999, 11:40 p.m. Friday night, kitchen lights off, one person at the counter in the dark with the pot on. He did not turn the burner off when he left. Monday morning the carafe was a brick. Nobody has ever owned up. If this is you, it's been six months. Just tell me.

• Camera: one of the original black-and-white Connectix QuickCams, the round gray ball kind, which I found in the junk closet next to a box of 2400-baud modems. It sits on a little shelf on the wall across the kitchen, about eight feet from the pot and a bit above head height.
• Computer: a spare 486 running Red Hat Linux 5.2, on the floor of the closet behind the kitchen wall, with the camera cable run through the wall. It has no monitor and no reason to crash, and it hasn't in 94 days.
• Software: a small Perl script I wrote. Every 30 seconds it grabs a frame from the camera, stamps the time along the bottom and copies it to our internal web server. Every tenth time, it also sends a copy here by FTP.

A color camera would be nice. I've mentioned this in two budget meetings. If anyone from finance is reading this: it's about a hundred dollars and it would improve morale.

Thomas Raley, 34. Sysadmin at Tidepool since it was twelve people in a rented office. Before that, three years running the network for a bank's back office, which is where I learned to drink bad coffee. I live in Santa Clara with Georgia and our two-year-old son, who thinks the coffee maker is where Daddy works. This month, he's not wrong.

Coffee drinkers checking in since November 1998:

Confessions, suggestions and color cameras: [email protected]

Last updated Saturday, September 25, 1999, between pots