I handed her the picture and said, "now we don't have to wonder when you're here!" The look on her face went from amused to confused to concerned as she realized the picture was of her and her cart, taken from a few floors up on one of the surrounding buildings.
She relaxed as I explained it to her, but you could tell there was still a part of her evaluating if she should call the cops.
Donna operates a grill cart, licensed to operate from the corner across from the Village Gate Square Mall (274 North Goodman). Each weekday, from about 10:30am to 2:30pm, she saves area workers, students, and random others from the boring lunches they brought from home.
The problem is that she isn't always there. Snow keeps her away in winter, rain and high winds keep her away other times of the year. People who don't work in one of the buildings surrounding her corner have to take a potentially disappointing walk just to discover she's not there.
My solution to this vexing problem was to start a page on RocWiki for Donna. Then, the first person who noticed Donna wasn't there would simply annotate the page. Those interested could view the page or subscribe to the RSS feed for RocWiki and be warned when she wasn't there. Simple, but a company that has offices overlooking Donna's corner did something even better. They set up a webcam aimed on Donna. Thanks OS-Cubed!
It might seem excessive to dedicate a camera to alert Donna's loyal customers if she's there. Do the math, and you'll see that 88% of any typical week, that camera is aimed at non-Donna things.
But even that can be interesting. Last year for Toxic Rochester, I compiled 24 hours of images from two area webcams. The original idea was to capture images from all local webcams for 24 hours, but many area webcams are simply unreliable. So I settled for two.
This year, I did the same thing with the webcam aimed at Donna's corner, resulting in the video "24@274" (available in either QuickTime or Windows Media formats). It's part of my fascination with watching things change over compressed timescales. Hey, it's not "Koyaanisqatsi" or "A Zed & Two Noughts," but I'm working on it.
Comments (1)
That is way cool John. I've added links to this page and to the movies on the Webcam page. Good choice of music.
Posted by Lee | April 9, 2006 9:21 PM
Posted on April 9, 2006 21:21