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The Tim
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Tim

Just some guy.

Some Kinda Big News Guy or Something

Thanks to my weird real estate fetish, I’ve been in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television more times than I can even remember. Even so, I’ve never had a week quite like this one.

Tuesday: Quoted in a Bloomberg / BusinessWeek story:

Agents encountered multiple bids on about half of offers in Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Oregon this year through March 15, said Tim Ellis, real estate analyst for online brokerage Redfin. In the San Francisco area, Redfin agents reported that three of four offers involved competition, he said.

Tuesday: Appeared live on Q13 5:00 News:

Wednesday: Appeared on separate Bloomberg radio and separate KOMO radio news briefs (which unfortunately I was unable to record).

Wednesday: Appeared in a KING 5 story.

Thursday: Appeared in a KOMO 4 story.

Friday: Appeared on the nationally-syndicated NPR program Marketplace Money

Throughout the Seattle area, the number of homes for sale is down more than 30 percent from a year ago. In some parts of San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Diego, the shortage is even more pronounced.

Tim Ellis: Inventory is just dropping like a rock. I think that’s really the big story.

Tim Ellis is a real estate analyst with the property firm Redfin. He says housing inventory always picks up after the holidays. But in many markets in the U.S., inventory has dropped for the last two months. Why is this happening? Ellis calls it a hangover from the housing bubble.

Ellis: You know, the traditional, kind of, buy a home and then hold it for a while and then sell it, that cycle on average lasts about 7 years. Well, when you think about where were seven years ago, that was kind of right at the peak, is was right at the height of the boom, so the people who bought seven years ago might be today’s sellers in a normal market, they can’t afford to sell.

Seven media appearances in one week, spanning print, radio, and television. Doubt I’ll manage to beat that without committing a major crime or something.

YouTube Doesn’t Care About Original Indie Content

Yesterday I uploaded the video below to YouTube. It’s just a simple amateur recording I shot of the Fountains of Bellagio last week while I was in Las Vegas.

Shortly after it finished uploading to YouTube, I received the following email:

Dear TheTimSeattle,

Your video, Fountains of Bellagio: The Pink Panther Theme, may have content that is owned or licensed by EMI Music Publishing.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
– The YouTube Team

Yup, despite all the booms and ooohs and aaahs distorting the music, YouTube nearly instantly recognized The Pink Panther Theme song playing in my video, and felt the need to send me a nasty-gram warning me about the usage of “third party content” in my video. At least this one didn’t get totally blocked like the one-minute video I uploaded a year or two ago of the contents of a Woot Bag of Crap with massively distorted audio of “The Final Countdown” playing in the background.

Okay, fine. Whatever. I get that the big publishing companies want to “protect” their “intellectual property,” and it’s easy for YouTube to automatically detect things like this and take action.

What I don’t get is why when someone uploads an exact copy one of my videos that’s on YouTube, YouTube does absolutely nothing. I shot the video below of a crazy electrical installation about a year ago.

After I uploaded it to YouTube and posted it to Seattle Bubble, it took off, rapidly racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Shortly after it became popular on YouTube, some user downloaded it and uploaded it to Break.com as their own. Then, other users started uploading copies to YouTube.

Did I learn about this via an automated message from YouTube about my video’s copyright being violated? Nope. I only found out because friends pointed out that my video was embedded on various websites, and when I clicked through to YouTube from those sites I discovered that my video had been uploaded by another user.

To its credit, YouTube does react quickly when you use their Copyright Infringement Notification form to report this sort of abuse, usually taking down the offending video the same day. However, it’s still quite annoying that I’ve had to personally hunt down copies of my video that have been uploaded by other users (seven other users, so far) and manually fill out that form, despite the fact that YouTube obviously has technology capable of automatically detecting things like this.

It’s also worth mentioning that when you fill out YouTube’s Copyright Infringement Notification form, there’s a field where they ask for the address of original YouTube video that the offending video is violating the copyright of. And yet, when they do take down the offending video, they don’t bother providing a link to the original content anywhere on the page. Instead, you just get a generic page that looks like this:

They can put links in the video space. Why wouldn’t they put a link to the original content on the removed video when a user like myself explicitly tells them where the original content is?

If YouTube really wants users to upload original content, why wouldn’t they use their existing tools to provide better copyright protection for independent original content, instead of intentionally turning a blind eye to infringement that they are easily capable of automatically detecting?

I can only conclude that YouTube doesn’t care about original indie content.

Appreciating Cheap Tech Toys

Picked up this desktop fan from Target for $5 this week. Five dollars.

Seriously, how can such incredible devices be available for just five dollars? Just a decade or two ago something like this would have been either impossible or unimaginably expensive.

Truly we live in an amazing time.

Epic Commute: Tim’s November 22, 2010 Snow Trek

Exactly one year ago today, on November 22nd, 2010, Seattle was hit by a relatively major (for the Seattle area) winter storm. Here are a few headlines from the day before, the day of, and the day after:

This is my story of that day.

Since it was snowing lightly throughout the day, I kept a fairly close eye on the traffic situation online, doing my part to contribute to the above-mentioned record web visits to WSDOT’s traffic website. Things were getting a bit hairy-looking as the day wound down, with I-5 north showing as stop-and-go, but the express lanes (which my bus usually took on the route home) still looking okay. At 4:30 PM, I decided to leave work.

I headed down to the bus stop at 6th and Union. A couple buses came by, but they were both completely packed to the gills. I started walking up the line to try to get on a bus earlier so as to maybe get a seat.

At 5:11 PM, I finally got on a bus at 3rd and Madison.

At 6:00 PM, the bus had traveled a grand total of three quarters of a mile. Speed on the bus: 0.9mph. Average human walking speed: 3.1mph. I got off the bus at 7th and Olive to try my luck on foot, since a quick calculation showed that with a little over 12 miles to go, at the speed we had been traveling at so far it would take over 13 hours to get home on the bus, versus just 4 hours on foot. While on the bus, I learned that the reason the express lanes looked okay online was that they were open to southbound traffic instead of northbound traffic like they are during every other evening commute. See the story above about that colossal fiasco.

After a quick stop at REI to buy a hat, I headed off at about 6:15 PM. When I got to the I-5 off ramp that my bus would usually take, there were no cars coming off the freeway. None. I later learned that this was because the freeway was completely blocked just south of the off ramp. I don’t know when it was eventually cleared.

I covered 8 miles in two hours to a friend’s house in Lake City, where I stopped for a 45-minute break to get some tea and dry socks.

At 9:00 PM, I headed out to take the four and a half mile walk the rest of the way home.

The whole time I was walking along Bothell / Lake City Way (SR-522), I saw so few cars drive by that I could count them all on two hands. I finally arrived home at 10:25 PM, just over four hours after getting off the bus. Who knows how long it would have taken me had I stayed on that bus.

The next few days I was pretty sore.

“He was playing music… while I… did stuff.”

I’d like to take a brief moment to share one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite television shows of all time, Malcolm in the Middle.

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Thanks to the idiotic complexity of music licensing, only Season 1 of Malcolm in the Middle ever made it to DVD. If Fox released the rest of the series I’d buy it today, but instead they seem to prefer that their fans pirate the show online. Whatever.