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.
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):
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
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
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
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
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!
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.)
Owning the Clouds – Update
Update: An apology from 23/6, inaction from Google.
Update: Good news! I have uploaded my cloud time lapses to Vimeo. To emphasize the authenticity of the footage, I have uploaded the uncut version, with camera jostles and stretches of relatively empty sky that were edited out of the version more popularly distributed as various parodies out on the web.
Timelapse Clouds Compilation from brownpau on Vimeo.
My copyright woes with Google Video and 23/6 got attention from BoingBoing and Enturbulation Forums. Thanks to Cory for the link, and thank you all for your support and understanding in these trying times. A few updates are in order:
First off, the site is behaving weirdly because of intermittent permissions issues on comments and Movable Type dumping core and filling up disk space. A disk space allocation upgrade appears to have fixed the problems.
Google’s video-copyright notifier emailed to say the video was up, and some people have informed me they can see it now, but I still get a “video unavailable” page and a blank embed. This might be an upstream caching problem on my end, or it could be load-balancing sync lag on Google’s side. Either way, I hope the video starts working for everyone soon so that more Messages from Anonymous to Various Entities may be produced from the source material. (I would host it locally if I knew my bandwidth wouldn’t get hosed.)
I must also reiterate that I didn’t make the “A Message to Scientology from Anonymous” video; I simply did a bunch of silent webcam time lapses back in ’06, uploaded them, and pretty much forgot about them. When I saw that the videos had later gotten popular via derivative voiceover works, I was pleased and amused, and made no effort to claim infringement. In that stead, while I can claim copyright for the clip, I’m happy to let it go since the sharing is its own reward. When this is all done and my authorship is settled, I will explicitly release the video into the public domain.
One commenter has admonished me for not going through the official dispute procedure. I did go through the preliminary pre-dispute portion of the process last night, asking for identification of the user claiming my infringement, to which Google responded that the video would be allowed to stay up with 236.com’s permission. Only later did they suddenly disable my video without warning. Now I’m unclear as to whether this was a copyright-flagging bug which will be resolved — as Google’s video-copyright notifier does assert that the video should be back up — or if 23/6 actually decided to enforce an infringement claim after all. In any case, were I to file an official dispute now, it would have to be reviewed by at least one person there at Google, and it’s the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend. Might as well wait till Tuesday.
At least one person has asked, in true /b/ fashion, to see proof of my authorship of the video by requesting that I capture the same scene again with me somewhere in the shot, plus screen name on a sign. Unfortunately I no longer live in the apartment with that view anymore, but this old photo, shot from the same window but in a different direction, has a building in the background that should look familiar to anyone acquainted with the video in question.
Many of you have asked if there’s anything you can do to help, and a few have mentioned DDOSes. No, and no. As the saying goes, Anonymous is not my personal army — in this case, even when the service is willingly offered. On my end this is really just about a buggy or mistaken infringement claim on a free two minute movie, and the problem for me should be cleared up by next week. But thank you, Anonymous; I love you so much more for your eagerness to come to a fellow’s aid.
Aside from my petty concern, what’s more important in the grander scheme is that Google acknowledge that its current automated copyright-protection scheme is imperfect and burdensome to amateur producers, especially when it flags as infringing an individual’s video that was (1) posted a good year and a half before the corporate claimant’s derivative video was ever uploaded; and (2) released to the internet in good faith that others would respect its free nature without aggressively claiming ownership of the work, overriding the hapless original producer’s authorship. Improvement is obviously still needed, not only to protect producers’ and distributors’ copyright, but also to protect the will of authors who wish to share free original content with the community.
More from BoingBoing, Enturbulation, and for once I’m rooting for the YouTube commenters.
Oh, and one last thing: what do you see here?