If you want to have something mildly educational going while you do your work (or whatever you’re doing at the moment) then might I recommend that you go to the Te Papa website and watch the webcasts of the “Squid Autopsy” that was supposed to have started at 9am this morning.

Unfortunately, even after 3 days the squid is still mostly frozen in the core, so they’re not yet able to do the autopsy. However, there are some fantastic images appearing already. The Colossal Squid Blog has some great still shots of it as they thaw it out. Probably the most amazing would be the 10-15cm (thats 100-150mm hehe) lens of the eye itself. And thats just what they see from the outside. They haven’t even gotten the bundle opened up enough to see it fully yet.

The webcast (get on camera 4 if you can, that stream has the sound) keeps zooming in on parts of the squid as it floats in the saline solution to slowly defrost. Who ever is working the camera seems to have a fixation with the mouth and beak. Every time someone exposes the beak a little, they zoom right in close. Now if only they’d do that for the eye.

The webcast is getting hammered and overloaded. I don’t know what they’re using to stream it, but its streaming as a WMP9 cast, so I figure its Windows. But if you disconnect, expect to spend a long time trying to reconnect to the streams.

WOOT!!! Just saw the eye!

Anyway, it shouldn’t matter what you’re using to view the stream. I find the image is clearer and has fewer dropped packets when I’m using VLC to view it. The stream is about 350kb/s with sound, or about 330kb/s without.

Warning : Lots of people in the room, so the noise is substantial. Even worse, its mostly Kiwi accents.