The night the parking place stood still

I went to the 10PM Saturday showing of the colorized version of The Day the Earth Stood Still at the Senator Theatre, figuring parking would be easy, the crowd would be eccentric and the midnight moonlight after the end would be eerie.

The tiny photomosaic of 4 shots started as 4 different angles, taken from my cell phone camera, at 9:30 PM, e.g.:

bash-3.2$ jhead 1213082136.jpg
Nonfatal Error : '1213082136.jpg' Illegal value pointer for tag 9286
File name : 1213082136.jpg
File size : 344089 bytes
File date : 2008:12:14 06:38:24
Camera make : SAMSUNG Electronics
Camera model : Anycall SCH-i760
Date/Time : 2008:12:14 02:36:03
Resolution : 1280 x 960
Flash used : No
Focal length : 1.0mm
CCD width : 12996.92mm
Aperture : f/3.2
Focus dist. : 2.86m
ISO equiv. : 200
Exposure bias: 0.86
Exposure : shutter priority (semi-auto)
Comment : File written by Adobe Photoshop 5.0

The camera phone knows it was 2:36 AM GMT, but seems to think I'm in California. Ah well. The photomosaic was done with jpegtopnm, pnmscale and:

$ pnmindex -black -across 2 1213*pnm >1213-index.pnm

I then used XPaint with autocrop to save the JPG above. As a result, 4x350KB JPG shots condensed to a 10KB image.

I had enough room to squeeze into a spot between 2 meters, other than the car that was parked between 3 parking meters, in other words, halfway into 2 spots. I circled the block briefly, through a gas station, in order to get this brightly lit spot.

It must be society that is to blame, for planting parking meters at astronomical distances apart.

Oh, and the movie? Here's my 1AM (2008-12-14T05:24:15+00:00) tweet:

You'll enjoy the colorized The Day the Earth Stood Still more if you realize Keanu Reeves is playing Al Gore, not an alien.

Thanks Netflix, for having the 1951 version on Instant Watch.