“in the sight of… this company” and the Webcam

Posted on October 15, 2011 by otinokyad

[This was originally posted on August 21, 2011, but had to be "reconstructed" following the crash of a MySQL server at my Web hosting service.]

After my post last summer about storm watching in Tofino, BC, I found two Webcams that show a real-time view of the Pacific Ocean along the west coast of Vancouver Island. One of these is closely centered on the Amphitrite Lighthouse near Ucluelet (about 40 km south of Tofino).

The other shows the beach on Cox Bay in front of the Long Beach Lodge Resort just south of Tofino. This one was appealing enough that I linked to it through B.B., a simple Webcam viewer that runs under Mac OS X. So now, whenever I feel like it, I can sit in front of my iMac screen and watch a high-res, if slightly staccato, Pacific surf. Relaxation, fantasy, beauty, escape, inspiration — any and all, depending on the weather, the surf, my mood, the time of day.

Combine this image stream with Apple’s screen capture tool (Grab) and you get wonderful examples like this from last month:

I have saved shots of sunrise, sunset, clouds (as above), sun, and fog. Of course, what I’m really waiting for is the upcoming storm season to see what never materialized in my visit a few years ago. In the mean time, I occasionally open up B.B. just to see what the day is like a continent away. When I did that this afternoon, there was the not uncommon overcast sky, modest waves, surfers, walkers, dogs… and an odd-but-purposeful arrangement of… what? They looked like white buckets, until I got past the mystery element and realized what their real size was likely to be.

In fact, they were chairs in five rows of four each, duplicated on either side of an aisle defined with four aligned pieces of driftwood. At the ocean end of the aisle, was an arch draped with some kind of flowing fabric, and just beyond that a small table covered with a white cloth. Unless I missed my guess, there was going to be a wedding!

A little before the hour, people were in and around the chairs, and at 1:00 PM sharp local time the bridal party began to appear in successive stills: the minister/judge, the best man and groomsmen, the maid of honor and bridesmaids, then the bride and her father. I called my wife to watch with me as it unfolded.

Because of the refresh rate (roughly 25 seconds), we could only infer some of the steps you would expect, for example, the minister/judge turned to the maid of honor for the rings(s), but did he also turn to the best man? Even at the distance of the camera, however, there was no doubt about the you-may-kiss-the-bride moment, the subsequent signing and witnessing at the little table farther toward the water, and finally everyone going inside the Lodge for the reception. (In the interest of full disclosure, the image of the empty chairs was captured afterwards.)

All of which raises some interesting questions, in no particular order: Was there music from a portable system or a loudspeaker on the roof of the Lodge? Or was the sound of the waves the perfect and intended soundtrack? What did the surfers and other passersby think? Or is this such a common event in Tofino that it was just part of the backdrop? In that sense, were we also merely passersby? Or did someone else, somewhere in the world, also happen to be watching? Were the bride and groom even aware of the Webcam and that their witnessing “company” could potentially have numbered in the tens or hundreds or more? Or were they not only aware, but had they also invited absent family and friends to watch? At the most general level, what will the bride and groom think and feel if they ever read this blog post?

These questions are a digital-era reminder of this excerpt from a wonderful piece written about 15 years ago by Cullen Murphy, then Managing Editor of The Atlantic Monthly:

Anyone who has been associated with the planning of a wedding has at some point been struck by the contrasting world views of the couple at its core and the professionals on its periphery. For the couple, the wedding is a putatively once-in-a-lifetime event, the happy if unpredictable culmination of parallel chains of causality over the millennia. For the florists, the photographers, the caterers, the clerics, the bakers, and the musicians, the wedding is just a day on the job — no different, really, from thousands of other days…. It is at once disconcerting and reassuring to realize that situations of unique personal moment are to a large degree also matters of routine — that surrounding every existential exclamation point is a group of competent professionals to whom the occasion is merely a comma.


And finally, what about that act of watching? It didn’t feel voyeuristic but rather opportunistic. Admittedly somewhat more intime than watching vehicles on the Golden Gate Bridge or ships in the Gatun Locks of the Panama Canal. But really, in the end, just one small drop from the digital fire hose of words, images, and sounds available to us online at every instant of the day and night. Whether we signify it as a mere , or an existential !.

Addendum #1: Vicarious (non-)storm watching

Addendum #2: Riders of the Last Spark

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Maybe not “Soooo big!” But still counting on bitly

Posted on October 15, 2011 by otinokyad

[This was originally posted on August 13, 2011, but had to be "reconstructed" following the crash of a MySQL server at my Web hosting service.]

About this time last summer, I wrote three back-to-back posts about the URL-shortening service bit.ly, now routinely re-directed — how ironic! — to bitly.com and self-referenced as simply “bitly.” The posts were entitled “Soooo big!” Counting on bit.ly and were focused on estimating when bitly might run out of unique URLs:

● Part I calculated that the available 62 characters (26 upper- and 26 lower-case letters, plus 10 digits), taken six-at-a-time with repetition allowed, yielded a pool of 62^6 = 56,800,235,584 unique hash strings available for assignment in URLs.

● Part II presented data from compete.com on unique visitors per month (the only data then available) and laid out the analytics and assumptions from which I calculated that with the upward growth in traffic which bitly was then experiencing, it would be 278 months (a bit more than 23 years) from initiation of the service in July 2008 until exhaustion — roughly 2030. In keeping with the casual nature of all this, I used a simple polynomial model, even though the likely long-term pattern might have been better simulated with a sigmoid.

● Part III offered some suggestions for postponing this day of reckoning. For example, bitly could adopt 7-character strings, although that would implicitly reduce the size of a Tweet even further; or issue strings in other character sets — Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, math symbols, even Dingbats; or see if Estonia would be amenable to hosting hu.ee, dew.ee, and lou.ee; or just wait until nearer 2030 for the inevitable introduction of the iLobe implant with content pushed over VerizoNeural.

During the subsequent year, I didn’t think any more about the URL-exhaustion problem, although I used bitly a couple of dozen times to create links for my own tweets or emails. Today I decided to look again at bitly’s unique-visitors data on compete.com, which shows end-of-month counts spanning the past year, currently June 2010 through June 2011. That turned out to be a perfect dovetail with the previous data for May 2009 through May 2010. This fortuitous timing also produced a big surprise, however — traffic has been generally downhill since May 2010, which was bitly’s only month in excess of 10 million unique visitors.

Here is the expanded version of the graph; for comparison, the original is in Part II or separately here.

So what to make of this? There are four modest upticks in traffic during the past year, but the overall trend is definitely down. There was also a downturn evident in the original, from November to December 2009. It’s tempting to think that this early modest change was related to introduction of URL shorteners by Facebook and Google in mid-December. Subsequently, I found reports of, for example, Facebook blocking bitly posts in July 2010 and December 2010. All such reports were related to spam and malware problems at the original sites to which bitly was redirecting users, not anti-competititve practices. My interest is not in detailed reasons for bitly’s traffic, however, so I made no attempt to find one-to-one stories to explain each downturn (June, October, and December 2010, March and June 2011).

My takeaway is that there are fundamental factors outside of anything I originally considered and that they may (or may not) have already mitigated the URL-exhaustion problem. The good news for bitly’s business model is that the bitly Pro for Enterprise white-label service seems to have taken off. I use it on The New York Times at least once a week to send a story link via the bitly-powered site nyti.ms, and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other corporate users. The only thing that was not clear to me is whether the 6-character paths or hash strings are held in common by bitly and bitly Pro for Enterprise. If the latter has a completely separate pool, then the apparent drop in traffic is actually a diversion to other bitlyverses, and the 2030 reckoning will recede. But a simple test with Bruce Feiler’s story, ‘Our Plugged-in Summer’, from yesterday, strongly suggests that it is all just one big pot, as you can try for yourself with these respective links: nyti.ms and bit.ly. Not surprisingly, the same string, “pfUOj2,” appended to bitly’s j.mp domain also takes you to Seiler’s story.

These identical results imply substantial “leakage” of traffic in the past year. In fact, a straight-line projection with the last 14 data points shows a drop of more than 200,000 unique visitors per month over that period, for a net drop of 2-3 million and almost 5 million if you take the extremes! It’s hard to see where that is being made up. The bitly.com domain has only picked up 500,000 visitors, most of that in the past month; and the big-name Enterprise sites that I checked on compete.com for June 2011 are smaller: yhoo.it (~300,000), nyti.ms (~150,000), amzn.to (~80,000), n.pr (~31,000), and pep.si (~12,000). Those six together will account for a little more than 1 million of the shortfall. Perhaps there are enough other Enterprise sites to balance the other millions; or perhaps the compete.com data are just too imprecise for this kind of analysis; or perhaps we’re all just Tweeting far fewer shortened URLs, though I doubt it. But any way you count it, it appears that the reckoning of greater concern is not the exhaustion of bitly’s pool of unique URLs, but rather of bitly’s longevity, with that extrapolated line zeroing-out in less than three years.

UPDATED August 15, 2011: Even if my words aren’t read, my face is red….

Imagine my surprise this morning when I used twitter.com to announce this post (instead of bitly.com, as I generally do), only to see that the shortened URL was linked from t.co instead of bit.ly. My mental hiatus for the past year (see above) was not only from thinking about exhaustion of bitly’s pool of unique hash strings. I also stopped paying attention to what Twitter was doing, in particular introducing its own shortener!!! Excuse me while I post something at duh.me.

It didn’t take long to discover what everyone else interested in social media already knew — Twitter had introduced its own link service in June 2010, precisely coincident with the downturn over which I spilled so much ink above:
● from the Twitter blog: Links and Twitter: Length Shouldn’t Matter
● from Fast Company: Twitter Introduces Bit.ly-Baiting URL Shortener, T.co
● from Mashable: Twitter to Change Links and How They Are Displayed
So back to the spreadsheet to wrap up the numerical loose ends.

Above is a smoothed graph of the past 14 months of unique-visitors data (again from compete.com) for bit.ly, bitly.com, t.co, and the sum of all three. The missing millions are accounted for, or close enough.

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The Present Monument IV: Performance

Posted on July 31, 2011 by otinokyad

What is performance but our best rebuttal to mortality? — George Sheehan

after 'Grian' by Julie Speidel

Monuments give a voice to time. Some speak of inspiration and perspiration, of a momentary vision followed by an interval — days, years, or in nature even eons — of skillful construction and consummate craftsmanship. These monuments speak to us as seemingly finished products, and we visit them in expectation of re-living something known and perhaps even well-understood. No matter that it is the first visit or the thirty-first, we still hear the clarity of Lao-tzu as he declares that he has “just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion”; the inventiveness of Alexander Borodin in juxtaposing the exotic and the lyrical in his B minor symphony; and the serenity of Maya Lin in the dark slash of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial into The Mall in Washington.

In the best designs, the artistry and the message are closely tied together, but they are not identical. The medium may be the message, but both are distinct from the moving strokes of a pen or brush in the artist’s hand. Some monuments speak largely of such actions. Their voices are inspired, but they resonate with spontaneity, opportunism, improvisation, and play. We visit these monuments knowing that they are works in progress, knowing that we will hear their voices, but not knowing what they will say, because our moments of listening will be precisely coincident with their moments of creation. This is going to the theater as much to see how Patrick Stewart will create Prospero that night as for the words from Shakespeare that he will speak. It is appreciating Sonja Blomdahl’s art as much for her physical manipulation of molten glass as for the beauty of the cooled forms on her studio shelf. It is being pleased at a soccer game as much for my daughter’s sudden, impossible horizontal propulsion of her body across the goal as for the final score of the game.

Links between the staid and the spontaneous are forged by our memories. We tend to think of this first as looking backward and forward on our individual strands of time, as remembering and anticipating. Very often we recognize that our strands are closely entwined with those of others and therefore that a feature — some “bump” or “hollow” — in an adjacent strand makes an impression in our own. But the truly spontaneous, the surprising, by its very nature seems to come from somewhere else. If time is the gathered fabric of our collective lives, it is as though a wind blows through this fabric, rippling it and allowing adjacent folds occasionally to touch. In these “moments,” as they appear to us, the expected and the unexpected are joined, we learn and grow, and we face life and death.

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The Present Monument III: Perspective

Posted on July 29, 2011 by otinokyad

Time as succession, past and to come, . . . eternity itself, exists in present thought, is contained in the fleeting passage of the moment, so far as that passage compels the direct intuition of a thinking being. — G.L.S. Shackle

after 'Forres' by Julie Speidel

Monuments and moments are aimed at the future, launched like projectiles filled with the past. Monuments evoke a presence — a feeling of awe or admiration or mystery, a recognition of accomplishment or courage or love. Of course, no one unveils a plaque commemorating a great event yet to unfold; no country issues a postage stamp honoring a leader not yet chosen. So monuments are invariably rooted in someone or something noteworthy that has gone before. We may re-visit (or otherwise re-live) monuments in our futures, but to the extent we even think about it, their futures seem static as they idly await the next tour bus.

It is easy to imagine a monument passing through time like a pointer moving along a numbered line — reaching out to us from the negative past, threading through the zero of now, and moving beyond us to the positive future. On the surface it is simple to apply this picture to our lives: we arrive in the present carrying our past, an aggregation of memories from each successive moment that we have experienced, primed to help us deal with the future. But imagining that with each successive moment our bubble of experience grows as it moves along a time line is like studying a python’s digestion by measuring changes in the bulge of a swallowed pig. The action is not easily seen in some external frame of reference; it’s on the inside. There’s nothing wrong with observing the python, but things are probably more interesting from the pig’s perspective.

At each instant we sit in the bubble of the present, sharing it with the latest tick of the clock. We look back on life as a well-defined, if not necessarily well-liked, path leading to this instant. But we look ahead as though standing on a precipice, a jumping-off point: the range of things that could happen next and after that and again after that — the space of possibilities — is at least vast, perhaps infinite. What path will we follow through that space? As far as we know, what sets us apart from python and pig, and for that matter from plaque and postage stamp, is the very fact that we can ask the question. And what gives us our only element of control over the answer is choice. Rokelle Lerner said it succinctly and beautifully: “Choices are not isolated events on the periphery of my life. Choices are my life.” Perhaps using the perspective of the numbered line for past-present-future is not only simple but profound. Perhaps the mathematical name for the zero-point of now says it best: “origin.”

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