DC Timelapse – Passing Storm

2008-06-04.

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

2008-06-02.

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

2008-06-02.

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!

2008-05-31.

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.

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

2008-05-30.

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):

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.

Memorial Day 2008

2008-05-28.

Amy and I spent most of Memorial Day relaxing at home, though we did go out for a few hours to grab a sushi lunch at Mary Surratt’s boarding house (AKA Wok and Roll), browse the Reynolds Center, and walk around the Haupt Garden.

The Fortune

I don’t normally have a high degree of trust for Asian “fusion” type restaurants like Wok and Roll, whose identity and menu hover between Chinese and Japanese without fully committing to either, but the quality of their food of either genre is unquestionably good, and their salmon sushi has an amazingly perfect oily, melty, squishy feel which sends shudders of pleasure through my frame, so I make exception for this particular establishment. The Chinese end of their repertoire also means that the sushi dinner is followed by fortune cookies, something the itamae at a pure Japanese bar would probably skip on providing with the check. Amy’s particular fortune this day was accompanied by a joyful/ominous Chinese word lesson on the flip side of the strip:

For the record, this fortune remains currently unfulfilled.

Best of SAAM Comments

Stuffed with sushi and fortune cookies, we headed for the Reynolds Center to look at Hip Hop Portraits, plus other more mainstream classical works in the SAAM. One particularly entertaining highlight of the trip was an open “Visitors’ Comments” notebook in one gallery, many of whose pages provided some small amusement:

Castle Garden

From there we traipsed down 6th Street past the Navy Memorial and National Archives, through the Museum of Natural History’s outdoor Butterfly Habitat Garden, across the Mall, around the Castle, and into the Haupt Garden, where I tested my macro skills on flowers and fountains:

Bird and Squirrel

We close now with two rather blurry animal videos: a bird (possibly a lark) making noises in a tree, and a nervous squirrel with a nut in its mouth.

Quite a relaxing day, with surprisingly minimal people-traffic around spots normally congested with tourists. See more in the DC Weekends May 2008 photoset.

Trees, Crane, Sky

2008-05-28.

Walking through Rose Park. Across the Parkway, one of many metal monsters of urban progress thrusts its frame into the sky.

(Trees, Crane, Sky uploaded by brownpau.)

Phoenix on Mars

2008-05-27.

Phoenix, NASA/JPL’s new Mars polar lander, has successfully touched down in the Martian north polar region. This landing was more of a nail-biter than usual, given that the last polar lander mission was lost during descent in 1999; but Phoenix (rising from the ashes of the Mars Polar Lander mission, I guess) performed wonderfully, going through its seven minutes of terror in a near-flawless EDL, coming to rest smoothly and safely on a flat, almost perfectly-level Martian plain.

I was watching the event live simultaneously on NASA TV and in Second Life, and was as excited as everyone else at JPL to see the first photos come in:

Just as amazing is this photo from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which captures Phoenix during descent, hanging from its parachute — a historic first for unmanned spacecraft-to-spacecraft interplanetary photography. The fact that Phoenix landed at all is reason enough for celebration; these additional tech perks — a parachute photo and a flawless descent — must make the mission engineers and scientists positively giddy with Martian delight.

And this is just the start. Over the next ninety Martian days, Phoenix will begin digging into the soil to search for water ice, signs of organic compounds, and possibly life — or its remnants. Congratulations and continued wishes of good luck to the JPL crew — and of course, don’t forget the rovers, still running after four [Earth] years on the Martian surface.

Additional links:

Baltimore Aquarium

2008-05-26.

Amy and I took a train up to Baltimore on Saturday to drop off a painting for 15×15, so while we were in town we took a few hours to drop by the Aquarium. I had unfortunately forgotten my camera, so I was limited to my phone, but it sufficed for photos and lots of video too:

Full set from the Baltimore Aquarium here. I haven’t been back to Baltimore for years, and I do miss seeing all you old friends from there, so expect me to visit more often.

Caturday!

2008-05-24.

Well, while we’re talking about time lapses, here’s one of Pandora lazing around her scratching rug, recorded with my SD1000’s time lapse video feature — a frame taken every two seconds over a span of about 15 minutes. You’ll see me drop in occasionally to give her catnip and Feline Greenies.

(I’m posting this late and back-dating it to Saturday. Sorry. I forgot yesterday because we were out.)

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