Metro Rearview

I’ve always wanted to get this video, and I finally got my chance last week, sitting at the back of a Red Line train on our way home from church: the view out the rear window of a Metro train going from Gallery Place/Chinatown to Judiciary Square on the Red Line. (The Speed Racer tunnel ad is not visible at this angle.)

Mobile Catchup

Some cameraphone photos from the past couple of weeks that have gone to Flickr but not to here:

New York Post Hillary Home Alone cover Sushi Robot

Funny Van 1 Funny Van 2

What's Wrong With This Sign? C&O Turtle

Union Station Metro Pan

First row, left: New York Post headline depicting Hillary Clinton as Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone,” shortly before the suspension of her campaign.

First row, right: Sushi Robot at Harbour Cafe, Washington Harbour, Georgetown.

Second row: Funny decals on a van, satirizing the life of a contractor.

Third row, left: What’s wrong with this sign before a sidewalk closed for construction on K Street?

Third row, right: Lazy turtle munches on floating mulberries in the C&O Canal.

Bottom, across: Quick mobile panorama of Union Station Metro, with Glenmont-bound train arriving at right.

Anniversary and Texture

Barong Up Close RRS_1970

Amy and I had our one-year wedding anniversary last week. We’re enjoying married life in DC greatly, and I thank the Lord for my wife literally every single day. Low-key introverts that we are, our anniversary celebration was a quiet, garlic-filled Sunday lunch of tapas and paella at Jaleo, followed by the purchase of a spanking new yellow DYSON from Russell.

On a related note, Russell pointed me to Smashing Magazine’s textures contest last month, so I figured, why not send in one of my favorite macro texture shots: my wedding barong. It didn’t win the grand prize (a DSLR camera), but it did get a mention in the contest results, which is fittingly awesome for our anniversary.

DC Timelapse – Passing Storm

DC Time Lapse - Passing Storm

Timelapse of the heavy storms that passed over DC this afternoon. The rain and wind/cloud change come very, very suddenly, then taper off while giving way to an unsettled stratocumulus layer.

Fetched every five seconds from the same weather news cam as was used for this earlier webcam timelapse. The frame rate might feel a bit jerky because the server dropped out occasionally, so sometimes there’s a time jump as it wasn’t always five-second intervals.

Update: I’ve replaced this with a new, smoother video which I fetched from the same webcam later in the evening, with more rain, and an added music track, “qwer” by 31d1. Watch for the bolt of lightning around -0:24!

Flowers in Breeze

Flowers bend with the breeze at the National Garden and Bartholdy Park on a gray, windy Sunday afternoon. Music is the 13th Century old English Nou goth sonne under wod from Lenten is Come, by Briddes Roune. (CD purchased from Magnatune. Though I do not subscribe to certain underlying aspects of the song’s theology, I do like how it sounds, and how it was exactly as long as the video.)

Rack and Tea

For your viewing pleasure, two recently recorded time lapse home videos of a domestic nature. At left, I assemble a new clothing rack after the old wall rack broke, fell off its hooks, and dumped clothes, hangers, and closet storage accessories all over the room. (Hence the mess.) At right, an Adagio display tea (Red Bloom) in a glass teapot, which goes from tiny tea ball to blossoming infusion flower when immersed in hot water.

Caturday!

Today’s Saturday cat photo series is a bunch of close up macros of Pandora’s face, and a noir-ish dramatic black and white shot.

IMG_2535.JPG IMG_2546.JPG IMG_2555.JPG IMG_2557.JPG IMG_2556.JPG

IMG_2518.JPG

Update: Greetings, DC Blogs readers! If you liked these photos of my cat, there are more of her on Flickr.

Owning the Clouds – Apology, Withdrawal

Followup to Owning The Clouds and the update: I got an email from Sarah Bernard of 23/6, apologizing for the inadvertent pulling of my video due to Google/YouTube’s content identification. I forgive you, 23/6!

Dear Paulo,

I’m Sarah Bernard, President of 23/6. Please know that we certainly did not intend for our posting the video, “A Message to Rudy from Anonymous,” on YouTube to result in your work being blocked; it appears that blocking was an inadvertent result of YouTube’s content identification program. When we learned that your work was blocked, we worked with YouTube to remedy the situation as quickly as we could.

I’m sorry to hear about the unintended effect. It wasn’t intentional on our part.

Best,

Sarah Bernard

Meanwhile, the cloud timelapse video has been unavailable to me for more than a week at this point. Despite two emails from Google Video saying that the video is back up, they still have not restored the original cloud video page — at least, not for any IP address I check it from. (Interestingly enough, a bunch of international users have commented to say that they can see it.) I tried emailing one more time to ask if there was a problem, and got the following form response: (Note the addressee name. I’m not Alex.)

Hi Alex,

We’re always working to provide comprehensive online assistance, and we believe that the answer to your question can be found within the following help center link: [link]

If you have additional questions, we recommend that you review the Google Video Help Center at http://video.google.com/support/ for our most up-to-date information. You might also try our Google Video Help Group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Video-Help

Finally, if you’re still having trouble finding an answer to your question, you can respond to this email. Please keep in mind, though, that we’ll only be able to respond to your note if we can provide information that isn’t currently available in the online resources above.

We appreciate your taking the time to write to us.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Sigh. I’ve done this by email, on my weblog, and on Google Groups, and still I get an “unavailable” error screen, despite the video status showing as “Live” on my video uploads admin page (inset in image below):

Screenshot of error page with inset of admin video status

This is EPIC FAIL on a massive level that I would never have expected from Google. After more than a week of my content being unavailable due to a botched automated infringement takedown, they continue to ignore a simple request to restore a two minute video, then respond with the wrong form letter.

Since I can no longer trust Google Video to keep my content up, protect my rights against erroneous infringement claims, respect my authorship, or even provide automated support addressed to the correct user, I’m now in the process of removing all my videos from Google Video and YouTube. My stuff will instead be uploaded to Flickr and Vimeo, and all corresponding embeds on my site will change as well.