Passing by the C&O on my way to work; clips of the Georgetowner boat and Locks 3 and 4. My shadow makes a brief appearance. Previous video entry from aboard the C&O Canal Boat.
Pope Passes Penn Ave
Birthday Boy Benedict XVI is in town, on the first papal visit to the United States Washington, DC since John Paul II came in 1979. Barricades lined Pennsylvania Ave in Foggy Bottom this morning, where the Popemobile would pass after a welcome at the White House:
Myself, I haven’t seen a Pope since the last time I was Roman Catholic: World Youth Day 1995. I considered taking lunch off to try and see Benedict, but busy meeting schedules intervened, so I decided to try the next best thing: fetching images from public DC traffic webcams on the internet and turning them into a Popemobile time lapse video!
Traffic camera images courtesy Trafficland, fetched every ten seconds with wget and assembled in Windows Movie Maker. I kept wget running for a bit longer after the Pope passed because I was away from the computer, so you can see a lot of the post-Papal scene as well — police personnel congregating, crowd dissipating, barricade segments being moved around, traffic flow starting up again, that kind of thing. I decided to keep it in for those who might be interested.
(If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy SuperPope!)
Sunday Jaunt: LOC, USBG, Liaison
Amy and I were planning to go visit the newly opened LOC Experience after church on Sunday, but found that LOC is only open Monday to Saturday, so we went over to the Botanic Gardens instead. Some photos from that jaunt:
Also of note, “Holiday Inn on the Hill” seems to have become “The Liaison,” now an Affinia property. I can’t help but think “Liaison” is a somewhat dubious hotel name more worthy of Eliot Spitzer’s Mayflower exploits than of a tourist-friendly DC lodging, but hey, it is right by the Capitol; maybe the name’s more appropriate than I would think.
Metro
Metro train to Franconia/Springfield arriving at Farragut West station on the Orange and Blue lines. This was taken Sunday afternoon while we were waiting for a train on our side to take us to Capitol South. If you listen closely you can hear me say to Amy, “It’s a video, for Flickr.”
National Geographic Frogs
A few fuzzy snaps from the Frogs exhibit at the National Geographic Explorers Hall:
Memorial to Sakhi Gulestan
Back in my first days in DC, while it was still cold, I spotted an old bearded Afghan man with crutches selling wool caps outside the Dupont Circle North Metro escalator. I bought a cap from him to keep my head warm, and would buy at least one more from him later that year. The old man and his family were a fixture in that location, selling hats and scarves and umbrellas and sunglasses. I never knew their names, but as I frequently bought and lost these loose weather accessories, I was grateful for their vending stall, so conveniently located along my route to work.
His name was Sakhi Gulestan, and while he was a poor man materially, he was rich in spirit. Here’s a City Paper article on his life and death. (Note: There’s an annoying slideshow with audio narration autoplaying on load, so the first thing you’ll want to do is scroll to the bottom and turn it off so you can read.)
Caturday!
Saturday cat photos are back! As a followup to the 6120c mobile photo catch-up, here is the 6120c cat photo catch-up:
New Computer: “Flonkerton”
Late last December, my desktop PC “Fezzik” (the one of “Tiger Direct Sends Me the Wrong PC” fame) decided to very suddenly die — the victim of a fused, overworked P4 processor giving up after just two years of deficient service. I salvaged the box for parts, keeping the floppy drive, hard drive, DVD-ROM drive, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. The RAM and video card went back to my brother whence they came, and the casing, motherboard, and power supply were discarded on the “free stuff” table in the laundry room, along with the old secondhand CRT monitor — which I had picked up from that same table. Then I went about the task of getting parts for a new PC through NewEgg. The orders went thus:
- MSI MBOX K9N6SGM-V Barebones Kit (included power supply, motherboard, and native video and audio)
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz 2×512 L2 Cache dual-core CPU
- Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro fan and heatsink
- 2GB stick o’ RAM
- Acer 22″ LCD monitor
Total cost was under $500, and it was all quite easy to put together, requiring no more than two nights of casual tinkering. The fan/heatsink assembly did have a slightly troublesome latch, and the old hard drive started making alarming sounds which necessitated a trip to Staples for a new Western Digital 160GB drive, but other than that it all spun up fine.
Oh, this PC is named “Flonkerton.” We were watching an episode of The Office while I was at the “Name of your PC” part of installing Windows, and I was tired of “Princess Bride” references. As for performance, I wasn’t expecting much more than a slight bump over the speed of Fezzik, so it was quite pleasing to find that Flonkerton smoothly handles 3D environments like Second Life and Half Life 2, which Fezzik had been unable to run without crashing. More RAM, dual core CPU with bigger L2 cache, and the inbuilt NVIDIA Geforce 6150SE made much more of a difference than I had thought they would — all for relatively cheap.
Here’s how the setup looks like on my half of the desk (the other unseen half being Amy’s space for her MacBook and printer):
Two things I wish you to notice:
- I have no desktop wallpaper; just a solid gray background. This prevents visual distraction and color bias when designing.
- The tower is off to the right; the monitor sits atop a VHS and a DVD player. We no longer have a TV. I will explain my entertainment setup further in a future post.
For your downloading pleasure and for my future reference when putting together a new PC, a list of the applications I have installed so far:
- The usual range of browsers: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Lynx.
- Pidgin and Skype, and that’s it for messaging. Pidgin handles multiple protocols pretty well, and I use its GTalk functionality for Twitter.
- Gmail Icon Notifier to set a browser alias to Gmail as the default email app, and Google’s official notifier for system tray new mail checking.
- ConTEXT, free programmer’s editor for code and text editing.
- Photoshop 6, one of the few non-free apps on this machine, standard for graphic design use. This is a legal copy with a legit license, purchased cheap from a local business which closed shop. “CS3?” Piffle! I’ve never needed anything in Photoshop past v6.
- Filezilla and WinSCP for GUI-based FTP and SFTP, though I usually just go to the command line for quick single file transfers.
- PuTTY (and its accompanying binaries) for command line SSH/SFTP needs.
- VisionGS (free Personal Edition) for webcam still image uploads on a schedule. I’ve tried other webcam apps and I always come back to VisionGS for its feature set and relatively clean user interface.
- iTunes and Quicktime for music and .MOV playback.
- VLC Media Player for playback of video formats other than those native to Quicktime and Windows Media Player.
- Joost for some small quantity of TV-like entertainment, though all we’ve done with it so far is watch Home Movies.
- BOINC/SETI@home, which uses spare CPU cycles for distributed computing tasks assisting the search for aliens.
- RSS Saver, a simple screen saver which zooms through text from RSS feeds.
- ScrHots for simple screensaver hot corners.
- Tugzip for ZIP and other compression needs.
- Steam, which so far I’ve just used to dabble in some retro multiplayer action in the original Half Life. At some point when I have time (haha yeah right) I’ll get the Orange Box and get my butt kicked at Team Fortress 2.
- Second Life. Thanks to “Dwight Shelford” and Law and Order:SVU’s Another Youniverse for getting me back into this. Help me.
- Of course I will throw Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Python, and SVN into this at some point.
Anything else you think I should install?
Flickr Video
First Flickr video, shot with the 6120c:
I got first wind of Flickr’s impending launch of video from TechCrunch’s Twitter stream and puppet show announcement (followed by more puppet buzz from Flickr themselves). Matt confirmed to me that he had indeed been in on the private beta, shortly before Flickr announced it officially.
When I first heard the rumors of an upcoming Flickr video feature last year, I had mixed feelings: would it be yet another service to choose from an ever-widening field of web video offerings? My own videos were already scattered across YouTube and Google Video, defeating my own neat-freak desire to consolidate content in one spot. (This is why it was something of a relief to me when Google acquired YouTube.) But moreover, I dreaded the Youtubization of the Flickr community.
The manner in which Flickr has launched video content has quelled my fears; they have combined video into the photostream such that it smoothly integrates with the photo management interface. Videos are subject to a 90 second time limit, and are uploaded, titled, captioned, and tagged in much the same way that photos are. The expectation is that these will be “moving pictures”; individual clips of subjects, minimally edited, rather than full narrative productions or interminable talking heads. (Not that such videos are disallowed from the site or impossible to squeeze into 90 seconds.)
In conclusion, me likey.
More from Yodel Anecdotal, Wired, Dave’s Download, Paul Stamatiou, and Metafilter. Also, DCist has started a video group, in which I got FIRST POST!!!
Nokia 6120c Photos
Here’s a bunch of photos from the 6120c to show the phone’s camera quality. I forgot to mention that the camera has a feature called “Panorama mode” — this lets you take one photo, shift the view, take another, and if they line up the camera app will stitch the two along an overlap, as with these two quick panoramas I got of the Ateneo de Manila campus:
And now, a huge photo dump from after I got back to DC. This is me catching up on the mobile content I’ve been neglecting to push here from Flickr. (Oh, and that first panorama is stitched with desktop software, as it consisted of more than two shots, and the fog over the river was throwing off the phone’s own image overlap detection.)
