The Homeless Man with a Golden Voice

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Over the last two days, this video has went viral across the internet. Doral Chenoweth, a videographer for the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio recorded a homeless man at the intersection of I-71 & Hudson St. in Columbus, Ohio who has a voice made for radio. Watch the video below.

That video was posted on January 3. It is now January 5 and at the time of this writing that video has just over 4 million views. It has gone viral. All of the late night talk shows are talking about him. The NBC, CBS, and ABC news are covering him. Reddit has gone nuts, as they are want to do, going all do-good vigilante on him. Finally, this morning, he was on a Ohio morning talk radio show where he was given a job offer by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Recording is below.

He was also interviewed by the CBS Early Show this morning.

CNN's news coverage:

Web Analytics For The Past Year

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I've decided to publish my past year's statistics for public consumption. Note that my site doesn't get a ton of traffic. A few things I took note of:

  1. February was my biggest month of traffic until the end of September/October. We had two Blizzards in February which I blogged and photographed extensively. Capital Weather Gang here in DC linked to me several times which brought in a ton (for me) of traffic . September/October was when I launched HowToUseAnEscalatorInDC.com & HowToUseMetro.com.
  2. I get a metric shitton of robots hits whether from search engine crawlers or spambot scrapers. Google is #1. Spammers are #2. Yahoo is #3. Baidu is #4. Bing is #5.
  3. Chrome has almost caught up to Firefox.
  4. If you are one of the 19% who browse my website using IE6, please stop. Get off the Internet. You do not deserve to own a computer.
  5. Safari beats both IE7 and 8.
  6. More people use iPhones than Linux (haha).
  7. Nintendo Wii? Who was that? Someone I know, no doubt.
  8. OSX is almost up to 30%.

Amateur Explorer Explores Underground New York City

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They don't build cities like they used to—which is, to say, by simply backfilling and constructing on top of older architecture, leaving behind a layered time machine just ripe for adventure. The idea that some very old cities, like Rome, are three stories taller than they originally were—that the ground you walk on today is not really, precisely, the ground at all—is still completely mind-blowing to me.

That's why I love stories like this one from NPR, where professional explorer Erling Kagge accompanies amateur adventurer Steve Duncan on a 25-mile journey through the sewers of New York City. It's no Golden Palace of Nero, but there are some little historical thrills.

Notes from the Vimeo video page:

For updates and more adventures follow me on twitter twitter.com/​andrewwonder

This is a film I made after some adventures underground with Steve Duncan (undercity.org) last summer. We also have a teaser video which you can watch on my vimeo page (vimeo.com/​5752275).

For more information about the video and our other adventures please contact Andrew Wonder (Director/Cinematographer) at andrewwonder@mac.com.

Steve and I just completed another underground expedition with Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge (en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Erling_Kagge). It was featured in a three page article on the front page of the NY Times metro section and was written by Alan Feuer (nytimes.com/​2011/​01/​02/​nyregion/​02underground.html). We were also covered by NPR's Jacki Lyden whose report will be aired on 1/2/11 and posted on NPR's site (npr.org/​2011/​01/​02/​132482428/​into-the-tunnels-exploring-the-underside-of-nyc).

Shot on a canon 5d mkii with canon 24 f/1.4 (version 1) with the zacuto rapid fire, Zoom H4N and a sennheiser g2 wireless lav. The zacuto was really great at being there when I needed it but also staying out of the way.

My Year In Cities 2010

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I'm three days late in posting this but before I forget, I wanted to get this out.

The following list is of the cities in which I've spent one or more nights in each place. Cities marked with an asterisk were visited multiple times or on non-consecutive days. I've also ordered the non-asterisked cities in order of visitation.

Alexandria, VA*
Wirtz, VA*
Lafayette, IN*
Dulles, VA
Austin, TX
Emerald Isle, NC
San Francisco, CA
Las Vegas, NV
Chicago, IL

I increased my city count from 5 to 9 this past year.