video Archives - Ellis.FYI

A few words for my fellow believers

The Tim — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:50:21 +0000

I made this for Facebook but it’s an important message that I think people should hear, so I’m sharing it here as well.

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Listen to the tugboat’s stuck fog horn at Port of Everett that kept my neighborhood up all night

The Tim — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 18:53:31 +0000

Sunday night just as I was about to go to bed, I heard a strange noise coming from outside. It wasn’t too loud so I didn’t think much of it, but then I got a notification that someone had just started a thread on my neighborhood’s Nextdoor page: “Boat horn/siren 11pm?” When I got onto Nextdoor, there were two other threads that were rapidly filling up with people complaining about the noise, which was apparently really loud in parts of the neighborhood. There was speculation that maybe it was coming from a train, or maybe a boat at the Port or the Navy base.

So of course, instead of going to bed I decided to hop in my car and go try to find the source of the noise and get it on video:

It turns out the noise was coming from a tugboat with a stuck horn, as first reported that night by My Everett News:

Annoying horn blasting @PortofEverett is from broken horn on a tug boat. Workers trying to fix.

— MyEverettNews.com (@MyEverettNews) June 26, 2017

The tugboat horn did not stop until around 3:30 AM, keeping many people awake for most of the night. In the follow-up story the next day on My Everett News, they included a photo of the offending boat, which you can actually see in my video starting at around 1:25:

Tugboat with stuck horn at Port of Everett (click to enlarge)

A lot of people must have been disappointed that they missed out on the sound of the horn, because my video turned out to be fairly popular. It was featured on a handful of local news sites, radio reports, and even the national Fox News site:

Everett Herald: Tugboat horn blares for 4 hours; dogs howl, and so do humans
KOMO News: Port of Everett: Oops, sorry for the blaring tug boat horn all night
Fox News: Boat’s horn blares for hours overnight at Washington port
Warm 106.9: Everett Tugboat Mishap – What’s Trending
- Follow-up: Tugboat Tim
Seattle’s Wolf 100.7: Port of Everett Apologizes for All Night Tug Boat Horn

So I guess I’m officially a video journalist now.

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Best Protein Shake Ever

The Tim — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 04:41:13 +0000

I had to post this excerpt from the Malcolm in The Middle episode “Malcolm Holds His Tongue” (Season 4, Episode 7) for my buddy Phil.

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Best protein shake ever.

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The 100 Peeps Challenge: “How can something so simple be so delicious?”

The Tim — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 04:56:20 +0000

Time to share another of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite television shows of all time, Malcolm in the Middle, in which Francis takes on the 100 Peeps challenge (okay technically they’re referred to as “candy quacks,” but they’re obviously a reference to Peeps).

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I won’t ruin the ending for you. If you want to see how the 100 Peeps challenge turned out for Francis, you can check out the full episode on Netflix (Season 2, Episode 1).

Guess who has obtained over 200 Peeps and thrown down a 100 Peeps challenge to his friends?

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Some Kinda Big News Guy or Something

The Tim — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 20:04:56 +0000

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.

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YouTube Doesn’t Care About Original Indie Content

The Tim — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:54:39 +0000

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.

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

The Tim — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:29:44 +0000

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.

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I guess I’m a famous videographer now?

The Tim — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:24:02 +0000

So, a few weeks ago I shot this video:

I posted it on Seattle Bubble, it got a few thousand views, and we all had some laughs. I didn’t think much more about it.

…until a week or so later, when the video started to spread.

First it appeared on Fark, then on White Trash Repairs, then on Reddit. Total number of views on YouTube shot up to over 20,000! Wow!

At some point, some jerkface decided to steal it and upload their crappy stolen copy to the popular video site Break.com, where it proceeded to get over 300,000 views!

Then someone else stole it from Break and uploaded it to their own YouTube account, where a few more sites found it, including Jim the Realtor’s blog and Sports Illustrated. Fortunately both YouTube and Break were responsive and helpful. YouTube took down the other copies on their site, and Break transferred the copy on there to my account.

A few days later, someone at Gawker (a very popular blog) found it and posted it on their site, after which it was re-posted on their sister tech blog Gizmodo. Another Reddit user found it and posted it there again, this time making it to the front page.

Meanwhile, the video also made its way on a few other popular sites, including Geekologie and even a German site called Brainblog. Nice!

As of this writing, between YouTube and Break my video has been viewed over 850,000 times! Yesterday at this time it was at about 750,000, so if this pace keeps up, my video will be viewed by over a million viewers by this time next week!

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I want one of these so hard.

The Tim — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:43:28 +0000

The Aptera 2e. The all-electric car that futurists from the ’60s dreamed of. I want one.

[Edit: The video I had here originally disappeared, so here are some others.]

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