Bicycling In The Rain

I stopped under a bridge to get this video of the trail. About eight more miles at this point.

Night Crossing

A bridge on the W&OD trail, about 9:30 PM Friday.

Late Nite Biking

On the trail at night.

Not Gonna Set The Alarm Clock

I have tomorrow off.

My second day off in three months.

My first Saturday off in eight years.

Windows

Washing our windows Saturday afternoon, the day before the big show.

Early This Morning

Standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue at 3:27 this morning.

The Big Storm

I packed a suitcase Friday afternoon and got one of the last trains into town. Snow had been falling since before noon and 6" was on the ground at that point.

It snowed all night and all day Saturday.

On the left is our HQ and on the right is the Mayflower Hotel, where I spent Friday night. At the end of the street is the National Geographic building.

Lots of trees were bent to the ground like this.

You can't see the snow falling in many of these shots...

...unless the flash is turned on.

The ENG truck was covered.

This is K Street at Farragut Square.

The Godiva Chocolate store on Connecticut Avenue was closed! Now this is serious!

Late Saturday afternoon the snow was really piling up.

Very little traffic on Connecticut Ave. Saturday afternoon.

There's always one guy...

They put us up Saturday night at the Hotel Monaco.

Sunday morning at 3:00 AM. The snow had stopped falling.

It looked like everything was coated with whipped cream or meringue. Walking the four blocks to work was not difficult, but navigating was a challenge because the landscape had been changed by the snow; it was strictly "navigation by street signs" because all of the familiar little landmarks that we typically use to get around were covered with snow.

The Big Snow Storm

I trudged from home to work Saturday morning as the flakes swirled. At 7:00 AM there was 6-8" on the ground. The Metro was still running.

Saturday morning.

Saturday afternoon.

Knowing that we would not be able to drive to work Sunday morning, the company put us up in a hotel two blocks away, so we could walk to work.


Nice place, full of leggy supermodels and Eurotrash.

And so, at 3:15 the next morning, we walked to work. It was still snowing.

Wind-blown show had formed drifts.

No bike tours today!

Check out the headline:


A little bigger:


But I did find this interesting plaque near 7th and F Streets:


Meanwhile, up on U Street, I was missing all the fun:

h/t Roberta X.

UPDATE on the snowball fight: WaPo covers it.

During Washington's record-breaking snowstorm on Saturday, a massive snowball fight was taking place at the corner of 14th and U streets that had grown men and women laughing and hurling fresh-fallen snow at one another in the middle of the street. Good-natured, wintertime fun, according to participants.

Then a D.C. police officer happened by, and the event -- filmed by amateurs and a local television station -- suddenly became more serious.

Videos and photos show a D.C. police detective unholstering his gun (and admitting to it) during a confrontation with a group of snowball fighters. The video is making the rounds on the Internet and national TV stations. The detective, who authorities have not identified, on one such video says: "Yes I did," apparently referring to the fact that he drew his gun, "because I got hit with snowballs."

Long Day

Started work yesterday at 3 PM and worked 'til 11 PM. We wanted to record an interview with the Sec. of State who was in Singapore, 12 hours ahead of us. She was about to board a plane and would be unavailable for a day. So we recorded a "phoner": we have a camera at her end and one at our end and the interview takes place over a telephone line - neither of them can see the other. We couldn't get a satellite link. So after recording the interview from 10:30 PM to 11 PM, the whole crew (about 20 people) rushed to our hotel rooms for 3-4 hours of sleep. Then back at work at 4 AM to receive the feed of the Singapore video and sync it up on the Avid and make it look like a real interview. Our guy, George S., sits in the studio and the Sec. appears on a plasma screen (chromakey) which we see from a camera looking over his shoulder. The interview ran too long so I had to cut it down two minutes for time - it ran about 13 minutes for air. And this editing involved making some tight audio edits - a pleasure with 720p because I can trim to 1/60th of a second instead of 1/30th of a second with NTSC - and adding some over-the-shoulder shots to hide the edits. It worked out well and the director, exec. producer and tech. director were very impressed. After the show, we (the tape director that I work with and I) got some unusually effusive praise: "You guys are awesome!" "You guys are fantastic!" "You guys are rock stars!" We finally got released about 11:30 AM Sunday.

Totally worth the loss of sleep. Although, in truth, I have edited harder projects under worse time pressure for more difficult producers. So it was easy to say, "Aw, shucks! 'Tweren't nuthin'."

One good day at work can make the rest of the week a pleasure.

If People Only Knew....

... how true this was!

It's Twelve

Twelve degrees Fahrenheit. That's about -11 Celsius, I think.
I wish I was the kind of person who called in sick when I wasn't really sick.

The Newseum

I got a chance to wander around this museum early this morning.

It offers a wonderful view down Pennsylvania Ave. to the Capitol:

Here's a press vehicle from Bosnia. This thing is heavily armored against small arms and shrapnel, and it just barely made it back:

But the most amazing thing in the museum is the remains of the antenna mast from the World Trade Center:

This is over two stories tall. Photos of the original installation show a TV transmitting antenna called a "bat-wing", and you can just see the shackles that held the "bat-wing" elements to the mast in these photos:

This is the view from the floor above. The trapezoid-like shape within the square base is the access hatch:

There are dozens of newspaper headlines from all over the world, including this one. I can't read Cyrillic letters, but I think it says "Armageddon":

There is some other stuff that's pretty sobering: a photographer actually ran into the buildings to cover the story. They have his cameras in a display case; they're pretty messed up but there were some images salvaged from his digital camera. All that they could find of him was his wedding ring.

Bloggers aren't ignored. Are they covered by the First Amendment, this display asks:

Robert Rauschenberg

He died Monday. I am working on a piece about the exhibit at the National Gallery. Caramba!

Fun At Work

I’m editing an interview in a museum. The walls and floors are very “live” and so there is a lot of echo on the subject’s voice. This echo makes audio editing very difficult, because even when the edit is perfect, it is still audible, since the echo suddenly disappears.

So to get around this I ran my Avid timeline through a digital audio mixer with the “echo” or “reverb” set to “large hall”. I adjusted the mixer to mix out all of the original audio from the output, so that the only thing coming out of the mixer was the echo; not the voice plus echo, just the echo.

I recorded this on a digital tape with matching timecode. Then I captured this tape back into the Avid. I edited a little bit of echo (like 18-27 db down) at the end of each of the audio edits and like magic, it sounds perfectly natural.

I’ve been editing for, what, 29 years now, and this is the first time I’ve used this technique.

I don’t think that Avid Media Composer even HAS “echo” or “reverb” in its Audio toolbox. At least I couldn’t find it.