Lights, Action, Camera!

The crew from our alarm company has packed up and gone. They spent all day here installing the new internal video surveillance system mentioned in the last Blog entry. It will now protect my home and my home office during the hours when my front door is left open so that clients can enter.

I'd first thought to defend the private areas of my home from intrusion by installing wireless web cameras that I could put in myself. However, a bit of research showed such cameras to be prone to failure, and they can slow down your wireless network to a crawl.

So we decided to have a professional system installed. There are six cameras, each capable of night vision so they can't be defeated by turning off the lights. They are hard-wired and run to a "watermarking" digital video recorder in a locked area that holds up to 60 days of footage.

In addition, the most recent video is uploaded to a secure web site where it is saved even if the video recorder malfunctions or is damaged.

One camera is in my waiting area. The others are in marked "private" areas of my home such as my bedroom.

When the door chimes to let me know someone has entered, I can click on a tab in my web browser and see who it is. If it's not someone I expect, I can excuse myself from a client session and go deal with it.

If someone enters a private area of the building where they shouldn't, I will hear a chime and the intrusion is recorded on video. I will instantly see the video on my computer screen and can go put a stop to the intrusion.

I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the reality that we live in a world where this level of security is necessary. But as we do, I decided to put in a system that would be more than enough to keep my home safe.

So far clients have responded to the cameras positively. I think everyone realizes I had to do something. Lindsay and I are getting used to the fact that from now on we're always on "Candid Camera" and we're starting to make jokes about it. That's probably a good sign.

We've also gotten a chance to observe the "secret life of cats" when we watch the video recording. We'd not known that two of our female cats spend as much time stalking each other as they obviously do. We'd not realized this because they stop the moment they think we're watching ("Oh Hi. We're both just sitting here").

Yes, a system like this is obviously expensive. On the other hand, one can't put a price on being able to feel secure again. We feel secure again.