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I’m in another exotic locale again, this time in Santo Domingo, the capitol city of the Dominican Republic. I’m here working for Howcast, helping them to live stream a townhall that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is conducting on the eve of the Fifth Summit of the Americas. The Townhall takes place here on Friday and you can submit questions to Clinton in advance. The live stream will have two feeds, one in English and the other translated in Spanish, both will be viewable on the State Department’s townhall.america.gov landing page. I know, I didn’t know there was an america.gov site either! I think it needs a bit more google juice. Maybe this event will help with that. Follow me on Twitter to catch the inside goodness as it happens.

UPDATE: The archive of the the Town Hall is now online:

On a recent trip to LA, my Virgin America flight took off from SFO and did a nice, slow loop around the city on a beautiful clear day. Always ready with the Lumix, I grabbed some HD video of the scenery.

Flying around San Francisco from ekai on Vimeo.

Back in December I was lucky enough to be in Vienna, Austria for the 10th annual incarnation of Roboexotica, the conference for cocktail robots. I shot copious amounts of video of the various booze bots in action and Boing Boing has just published a nicely edited, whirlwind tour of the mayhem from my footage.

Last week, I popped by a party for the launch of Timothy Leary‘s digital video archive on Archive.org. Leary, who passed away in 1996, had always wanted to be immortal in “cyberspace”. Now with an extensive video archive available to anyone with an Internet connection and an ongoing project by his estate to digitize all his physical assets, he’s close to achieving that goal.

San Francisco’s historical tripper elite were in attendance including John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Brewster Kahle as well as a long time friend and collaborator of Leary’s from Harvard, Ralph Metzner. Here’s some more photos I took from the party:

Do check out the video archive, there’s tons of fun stuff to be distracted by.

The world watched as regime change finally came to America. I watched from the crowded & cold west front lawn of the US Capitol as Barack Obama was sworn in as our 44th President. People say this is a once in a lifetime event. I think they’re right and very glad to have been there.

Another moment that many people won’t soon forget is when George Bush flew away from the Capitol on a helicopter for his final flight back to Texas, which you can see on this video I shot:

More of my photos are here.

I’m in the DC area hanging out with family through the holidays and for the upcoming historic Obama inauguration. As I was cruising through DC on a rainy Wednesday I came across stopped traffic and knew immediately that it was the Presidential motorcade. If you’ve ever spent any time in DC, you’ll know this is fairly routine. What wasn’t routine was the number of presidents that might have been in those reinforced black limos. This was right after a luncheon Bush was hosting with all the past and future living presidents. Also, Todd over at Telstar Logistics points out the motorcade Wikipedia entry that describes exactly all the vehicles that make up the Presidential motorcade, as can been in this video.