I was surfing the web on November 10 early early in the morning (US eastern time) trying to find updates regarding the BERSIH rally. I am so used to the relentless media coverage of big events in the US….updates every few minutes, aerial view, ground view, journalists at ground zero…it was frustrating to not see, read or hear anything. Local media couldn’t cover the event, Malaysian bloggers were either out joining the rally, or they were in faced with the same local media blackout, foreign media’s coverage was not extensive or fast enough. I wanted to see what was happening and in some ways be part of it.

Finally, I met Victor online and he pointed me to KL City Hall Urban Transportation Department’s website. They have live traffic cams all over the city. After trial and error searching through the different camera views, we finally found one that focused on Jalan Damansara/Jalan Tun Sambathan with a view of Istana Negara. At first, there wasn’t anything much to see, then slowly the still images showed people arriving at the Istana. Then the camera started zooming in (I guess the people at the Dept manning the camera and the website also wanted to see what was happening). It was great watching it all live. After watching the still images for a while, I realized that most people would not have the chance to see the rally from this view. I tried to download the pictures but that didn’t work. So I used my high tech equipments to do the lowest tech thing – I used my digital camera to take pictures of the still images on my macbook screen and uploaded the pictures to the macbook and uploaded again to Flickr. Meanwhile Victor also emailed me some still images that he captured in a more techy way. Go here to view these still images.

Bersih.
Free and fair elections.
What’s wrong with wanting that?