I have no idea what “decoded” is supposed to mean. If you needed a lot of help breaking down the messages in the speech, perhaps a federal ballot is a bit dangerous of a weapon in your hands. And strictly speaking, in data terms, it was encoded and compressed, but now I’m just being nitpicky. The point is, out of something like 115 choice snippets of interviews, two got chosen and the rest of us are losers in the game of life. About 13 other interviews (if three instances of giving one’s name and age count) were provided by the “real” reporters from Denver, while political expert WaPo reporter Chris Cillizza (who thinks I live in my parents’ basement^*) got four 15-second clips to explain complex politics to the yout’s.

Anyway, rather than let all this footage rot in the trash, here’s what I got (including some of the famous Qik footage mentioned below), with apologies to my interviewees for the trouble.

(Quicktime format)

* Technically I don’t, but apparently that’s the best place for me to dissertate, sadly enough.

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So before I go to bed I thought I’d re-post this old video. If you’ve been under a rock and want to know a little bit more about Joe Biden without subjecting yourself to the overly earnest pretense of cable news punditry, here’s a highlights reel from South Carolina stumps I put together last Spring. It oughta give you some sense of salient policy points and general demeanor.

(Quicktime)

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If you were robbed, mugged, or otherwise assaulted or injured in the downtown Atlanta area between 6:45 and 8:00pm on Friday, we bicyclists do apologize for your lack of police protection. You see, we were busy occupying about a dozen motorcycle cops and several police cruisers with our monthly bike ride.

Two months ago when I filed my Choose or Lose story on Critical Mass, I made a specific point to mention that our local police force was actually rather cooperative with us cyclists compared to other cities. I had seen numerous videos before of uncomfortably hostile encounters between cops and Massers in San Francisco (the city of origin), Chicago, and New York, and I had had numerous conversations with Atlanta riders about how nice our local PD was to us. In the downtown area, where police were frequently out on the street directing traffic for tourist destinations, conference attendees, and sports fans, they often stopped cross traffic long enough to get the whole Mass through (and, blessedly, out of their way).

That warm and fuzzy relationship is apparently over. Last month, reporter Stacy Shelton wrote up Critical Mass in the AJC, and apparently someone at City Hall knows how to read. Whoever this literate person is wasn’t about to tolerate any civil disobedience in their fair city, and they ordered the police force into action. Here you go, in video form:

MP4 video enclosure

Before we had even gotten past Centennial Olympic Park — maybe half a mile from our starting point downtown — we were intercepted. A phalanx of motorcycle cops was poised on the sidewalk, ready to disrupt the ride. Apparently, only one of them had any cojones, because only a single cyclist was pulled over and ticketed for running a red light. The rest of them must have been too busy oogling the cleavage on wheels or something.

Once we had ridden past, the blood returned to their heads and they managed to figure out where we were going. We saw a few of our law enforcement friends again in Midtown, but things were pretty hunky dory until we crossed over into Virginia Highland and headed south toward Little Five Points. As we approached North Avenue heading south on Highland, the phalanx reappeared out of nowhere, cutting the Mass in half at Manuel’s Tavern and giving pursuit to the front half, which went another quarter of a mile before turning east on Freedom Parkway. By the time the rest of us caught up, the bikes were dismounting the pavement and running up the grass onto the pedestrian path along the Parkway; the motorcycle phalanx and a few cruisers had stationed themselves along the roadway leading up to Moreland.

And then they stood there. (See video.) Some of the braver and/or more confrontational cyclists kept on riding down Freedom Parkway while the rest of us rode in parallel on the walkway, watching (and in several cases, filming). The cops just stood there on their bikes, glaring, like it was some kind of staring contest (or perhaps a who’s-got-the-bigger-wang testosto-fest). They didn’t leap into action as we began to spill back onto Moreland heading south, but perhaps that’s because we came to a stop and in many cases signaled our turns. Or maybe we were in West Side Story, who knows.

Another motorcycle cop was waiting for us a quarter mile later in Little Five Points, as if expecting orders from his Parkway brethren on which one to pull over and ticket. We stopped at the light and then turned right/west into the residential neighborhood to get out of their sight. A much thinner, slower, more fragmented Mass headed down Sinclair for Inman Park.

We didn’t get far. The Freedom Parkway boys found us again at Austin and Elizabeth, and they did a pretty good job of clusterfracking the intersection of Highland and Elizabeth up themselves in an effort to make sure we all observed the stop sign.

Here’s the thing: when you have 400 cyclists out at one time all deciding to take the same route, it’s really in your best interest to let them all pass at once, sacrificing a red light or two if you must, rather than demanding we all stop and look left, right, and left again. Instead of almost a half a mile of solid bikes on the road, you’ll have three miles of two abreast. You want really that?

We made it several more blocks down Highland before the motorbikes raced ahead of us and basically formed a roadblock at Highland and Randolph. So we stopped — losing a number of us to Johnny’s Pizza — and turned left/south on Samson. By the time I caught up with what was left of the Mass at Samson and Irwin, there were a handful of cops there making sure we came to a complete stop and looked both ways before crossing.

The group finally built up some momentum again on Edgewood, but not as much momentum as a dozen or so police officers who just realized how much fun it is stalking and hassling bicyclists. A couple of their motorbikes came whipping past us again and managed to get to the front of the group in time to pull another cyclist over to ticket him for a traffic violation. The rest of the hundred and change cyclists left erupted into whoops and applause as these two brave officers were reinforced by one, two, three, four more motorcycle cops in order to enforce the law on this dangerous commuter-terrorist. A couple of police cruisers pulled up behind and alongside us, so that when the light — keeping us frozen in law abiding stillness while red — turned green, they could use their fancy loudspeakers and bark, “Move along! Move along!” And as it turned yellow again a couple of siren-whoops reminded the eager to stop at the broad white line.

I don’t know if the cops pursued what was left of the Mass all the way back downtown; I turned back at that point to get a beer with friends who had peeled off in Cabbagetown, not wanting their first Critical Mass to result in legal action. But this was definitely a strategic prerogative from on high. In all of my rides with the group, I have never seen such prominent police interference, and in all of my life in Atlanta, I have never seen such police organization, never seen so many cops in one place at one time with such well-timed serendipity. They were all out there just to pursue us and hassle at opportunity. They were reasserting the city’s power after Shelton’s article had made so public how intolerably open-minded they had been to people who actually wanted to do something about our oil addiction. Boy oh boy, did those big mens with their bikes and guns show us.

So, yeah, sorry if you actually needed a cop while we were out riding bikes. They were too busy keeping you safe from the Monkeywrench Gang.

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The ISEF08 winners have been announced, and the recipients of the grand prize scholarships are these fine young ladies (left to right, below): Natalie Omattage of Cleveland, MS; Yi-Han Su of Taipei, Taiwan (I’m politically incorrect like that); and Sana Raoof of Muttontown, NY. While they were being put through the wringer for publicity photos, I asked them to do one more silly pose. Eat this, “Math is Hard” Barbie!

Oh, to be eighteen again!

Some mobile video from the N95:

Click To Play

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But I did drop in Sunday and Monday to check out the setup and meet some of the contestants, of whom there are thousands, it seems. I think the PR agency told me something in the neighborhood of 1,500 exhibits, many of which are partner or team efforts. They’re from all over the flippin’ globe; yesterday I watched some Minnesotans exchange pins with some Saudis.

It’s open to the public on Thursday, the 15th, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in building B of the Georgia World Congress Center and it’s free, so you really have no excuse. Well, maybe you do, but if you aren’t doing anything, I highly recommend you satisfy your inner nerd and check it out. (The students will be on hand to explain their stuff from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) Here’s a preview:

Other versions: High quality (VGA); QVGA streaming Quicktime; mobile QCIF

Stay tuned for the next episode: meet some of the contestants in the final hours of setup.

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The adapter is not something you can buy directly; the resident scientist from Reuters told us at the Journalism3G conference that they had to cobble up their own makeshift connection. But if journalists can do it, hell, anyone can do it! [Correction: According to @mojosd it was Nokia Labs who cobbled it up for Reuters.]

Like I said, there’s already one serious video about this out there, but Bloggerguy leaves out a couple details and gets one critical (but easily correctable, for the persistent) point wrong. Still, we knew it had to be possible, as vlogger Steve Garfield showed that the N95 video recording was definitely taking the audio from the headset mic, but that only gets you so far. N95 user Bitflung also demonstrated the bluetooth connection as a viable alternative, though the quality of bluetooth audio is pretty low.

So, once and for all, here’s your recipe, as I did it:

• The 1/8″ jack A/V cable that came with your N95
• Female-to-female phono plug connector
  
• 1/8″ phone plug to phono jack adapter (note that the “S” on either side of the jack indicates it’s looking for a stereo input)
  
• A self-powered — this is vital — external mic that terminates in a 1/8″ stereo plug. If your mic doesn’t have its own AA, AAA, or button-cell battery, the N95 isn’t going to hear it. **

The last item is the important part, because trying to connect a mono mic with a mono plug (note that some mono shotgun mics still have stereo plugs) won’t work. It has to look like this:

If you’ve got a lavalier or shotgun mic that terminates in a mono plug like this (note the single black band instead of two),

then you’re going to need an additional adapter to convert your mono jack into a stereo jack like this one, or you can replace the 1/8″ stereo jack to phono male plug adapter with this one which goes directly from 1/8″ mono female to phono male. Better yet, you could grab this dual 1/8″ mono female jack to 1/8″ male stereo plug and connect two mono lav mics to your getup. Go nuts.

You should end up with a layout like this:

Note that you use the yellow plug on the A/V cable, not the red one that Bloggerguy said in his video. If your phone asks you what you just plugged into it, select “Headset;” if that’s not an option, you screwed something up. In headset mode, the red & white cables represent the stereo output sound that normally goes to your earbuds, and the phone uses the yellow channel, normally for video output, as the microphone input.

I put it all together and demo several different microphones (stereo cardioid, mono shotgun, and lavalier) in this stunning Pulitzer-worthy video, which I’ll embed using Viddler so you can add your own comments:

Here’s the Quicktime file for podcast purposes.

For those of you inclined to interview serial entrepreneurs at loud VC cocktail receptions, you’ll want to skip to the comment I added at the 6:15 mark, where I demo the noise-cutting advantage of all this claptrap.

And if you’re in a real pinch to cut through the noise but you haven’t brought all this A/V gear, I’ve got another video for you that shows that obnoxious bluetooth headset is good for something after all.

**Update: MojoSD raised a point in her post that I hadn’t thought to test: a dynamic mic, like my cheapo AudioTechnica ATR20, ought to work as well even without battery power because it doesn’t require any power from the port (which the N95 doesn’t provide). I just tested that theory, and there’s a catch: if you plug a dynamic mic into the cable, and then plug the cable into the N95, you get “Accessory not supported.” I don’t know why. But, if you plug the cable into the phone first without the microphone attached, you will get the choice to select “Headset” and then you can plug the dynamic mic into the cord/adapters and record successfully from then on. However, the audio has a bit of a buzz to it, so I’d still highly recommend going with a powered mic of some kind.

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Personally, I think it’s about time we started paying what gas is worth — or more accurately, what gas costs us in the long run. We’ve got a pollution problem, an energy problem, a war-in-sucky-deserts-for-crap-reasons problem, and a national obesity problem. How hard is it to put two and two together to make get-on-a-bike-ya-softy?

Click for video.

For the record, filming while biking is not a simple task. Thanks to Rachael of SoPo Bike Collective for giving me a sound bite, so it looks like I actually did my job.

Digg the video.

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You can access archived recordings and chat with me live at my Qik page.

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As I watched the continuing “disaster porn,” as one local blogger put it, on the TV, Twitter filled another gap and alerted me to the distinct lack of coverage of the neighborhood where the destruction began. “No [mainstream media] in Vine City yet. It’s bad there I hear,” reported local new media adventurer Grayson Daughters. Weather services determined that the tornado first touched down in Vine City, just west of downtown, before moving east across the city and into Cabbagetown.

Newly armed with my own personal Nokia N95 — the pocket-sized powerhouse that enabled our Choose or Lose coverage of Super Tuesday — I headed west. And sure enough, I was the only relatively journalistic-looking person there by lunchtime.

…

So perhaps Vine City just wasn’t as interesting as Cabbagetown for on-the-scene news standups because there wasn’t much of interest there to be destroyed, unless it happened to be your home that lost its roof or found a tree laying across it.

Read the rest…

Video source / embed

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