Mystery Solved

Since first reading my friend Waltarrrr’s tweet on Tuesday that he found Alan Deane in my more than 2-year-old timelapse video of my Bike To Work Day 2009 ride, I’ve been wanting to figure out how that needle-in-a-haystack discovery came about. He revealed a bit of the mechanics when KPCC’s Sharon McNary (who I talked to about Alan for a piece she was putting together for the station about Deane) asked him via Twitter how he came to connect with the vid.

He responded that he’d been searching for news about Deane and it led him to Streetsblog LA. So I did a search there for “Alan Deane” but came up empty, and tweeted back to him “but that then begs the question how Streetsblog found it,” to which he replied that he found Alan’s name in the comments.

So I went back to Streetsblog LA and this time looked for posts about Bike To Work Day 2009, which turned up this overview post of activities from that year and included my video. Sure enough, there in the comments was this (click it for a slight enlargement):

So there it is. Rather amazingly it was Deane done did it. Basically Alan identifying himself (and my since-corrected misspelling of his name) is what ultimately led to the connection.