Part of what makes it nonsense is the fact that it really doesn't take so many people to dial up a video. You usually just click something. A single person sitting alone and in silence, however, would be horrible television. Much worse than some city's runaway budget after hiring all those people to do what the official could have done with a mouse.
The other part is the nonsense that's more in my lane: taking video from over there and showing it over here. That understanding led to an obsessive itch that flared up a while back:
I wanted to get a picture of myself from an actual traffic camera.
Step One: Find some traffic cameras.
Indiana's DOT has those. When you're zipping along the interstate and you see a CCTV dome, you may wonder if, six months from now, some FBI person will come along and zoom in on you and then exclaim, "Facial-rec confirms it. Let's get that bastard! Dammit!" Nope.
Step Two: Get some pictures.
The "nope" above is due to the fact that video is huge. First you have to move it, then you have to store it. Also, 99.999% of it is guaranteed to be completely uninteresting. INDOT tackles this puzzle by:
- only taking snapshots with the cameras (they snap a picture every few seconds)
- only storing a few minutes worth of snapshots
- aforementioned snapshots are also a bit wee (640x480px)
This, in turn, created a bit of a puzzle for me. I'll only get snapped while I'm on the interstate, and then will only have minutes before it's gone. Also, since the images are lacking in the pixel-depth that storytellers keep selling (zoom in, dammit!), I'll need to find a way to confirm that what I have is what I want.
Step Three: Collect.
Without going into too much depth about just how stupid I'm willing to be, I was able to remotely trigger a dump of the INDOT cache on a machine back in the office while recording GPS/environment data on my phone. And so:
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| This is me. |
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| And this is my photographer. |
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